THE

CLASSICAL
TRADITION
GREEK AND ROMAN INFLUENCES
ON WESTERN LITERATURE
BY
GILBERT HIGHET
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
PRINTED IN GREAT BtiTAIN
Helen, thy beaut^f'is to me
Like those Nicean barks ofyore,
That.gently, o'er ^ perfumed sea,
The weary, vMyworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam.
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face.
Thy Nfliad airs- have brought me home
To the-giory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.

PREFACE
This book is an outline of the chief ways in which Greek and
Latin influence has moulded the literatures of western Europe
and America*
The Greeks invented nearly all the literary patterns which we
use : tragedy and comedy, epic and romance, and many more. In
the course of their two thousand years of writing they worked out
innumerable themessome as light as Drink to me only with thine
eyes, others as powerful as a brave mans journey through hell.
Th^se themes and patterns they passed on to the Romans, who
developed them and added much of their own.
When the^ Roman ^enipire fell civilization was nearly ruined.
Literature and the arts became refugees, hiding in outlying areas
or under the protection of the church. Few Europeans could read
during the Dark Ages. Fewer still could write books. But those
who could read and write did so with the help of the international
Latin language, by blending Christian material with Greek and
Roman thoughts.
New languages formed themselves, slowly, slowly. The first
which has left a large and mature literature of its own is Anglo-
Saxon, or Old English. After it came French; then Italian; and
then the other European languages. When authors started to
write in each of these new media, they told the stories and sang
the songs which their own people knew. But they turned to Rome
and Greece for guidance in strong or graceful expression, for
interesting stories less well known, for trenchant ideas.
As these languages matured they constantly turned to the
Greeks and Romans for further education and help. They enlarged
their vocabulary by incorporating Greek and Roman words, as we
are still doing : for instance, television. They copied and adapted
the highly developed Greco-Roman devices of style. They learned
famous stories, like the murder of Caesar or the doom of Oedipus.
They found out the real powers of dramatic poetry, and realized
what tragedy and comedy meant. Their authors modelled themselves
on Greek and Roman :writers. Nations found inspiration
for great political movements (such as the French Revolution)
in Greece and Rome.
This process of education bjrimitating Greco-Roman literature,
emulating its achievements, and adapting its themes and patterns,
has been going on ever since our modern languages were formed.
It has a continuous, though very chequered, history from about
A.D. 700 to 1949. No single book (?ould give a complete description
of the process. As far as I know, there is not even an outline of it
in existence. This work is an endeavour to provide such an outline.
There are a number of books which treat separate phases of this
process. They discuss classical influence on the writers of one
particular country, or in one particular period ; or they describe the
changing fortunes of one classical author in modern times, showing
how the Middle Ages neglected him, how he was rediscovered in
the Renaissance and much admired, how he fell out of favour in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,^and*how he re-emerged,
to inspire a new group of authors, in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. These works are extremely useful, and I am much
indebted to their authors.
It would be an enormous, a Sisyphean, task to compile a bibliography
of the whole subject. At least a volume as large as this
would be needed. However, I have mentioned in the notes a
considerable number of books which I have found useful ; and I
have added a short bibliography of the most recent general surveys
of various sections of the subject. From these it should be easy to
branch off and follow any particular channel which seems interesting.
A great deal of the territory is still quite unexplored.
All book-titles and all quotations are given in English, unless
some special reason intervenes. All translations (unless otherwise
noted) are mine; the original text and the references will be found
in the notes. In a book dealing with several different languages, I
felt it might be distracting to have German phrases jostling French
,^nd Italian jostling Spanish.
Many of my friends and colleagues have been kind enough to
read and criticize various sections of this book, and marfy others
have drawn my attention to points which I had overlooked. I
should like, in return for their salufafy criticisms and constructive
suggestions, to express my warm gratitiwje to the following : Cyril
Bailey; Jean-Albert Bede; Margarete Bieber; Dino Bigongiari;
Wilhelm Braun; Oscar Campbell* James Clifford; D. .M. Davin;
PREFACE IX
Elliot V. K. Dobbie ; Charles Everett ; Otis Fellows ; Donald Frame
;
Horace Friess; W. M. Frohock; Moses Hadas; Alfred Harbage;
Henry Hatfield; Werner Jaeger; Ernst Kapp; J. A. Krout; Roger
Loomis; Arnaldo Momigliano*; Frank Morley; Marjorie Hope
Nicolson; Justin OBrien; Denys Page; R. H. Phelps; Austin
Poole; Colin Roberts; Inez |Scott Ryberg; Arthur Schiller;
Kenneth Sisam; Herbert Smith; Norman Torrey; LaRue Van
Hook; James Wardrop; T. J. Wertenbaker; and Ernest Hunter
Wright.
I am also grateful to a number of my pupils who have been so
good as to make suggestions^in particular Isabel Gaebelein and
Wiliam Turner Levy. I have further to thank the members of the
staff of Columbia University Library, especially the following,
whose expert bibliograpjiical knowledge has saved me many hours
of searching: Constance Winchell, Jean Macalister, Charles Claar,
Jane Davies, Alice Day, Karl Easton, Olive Johnson, Carl Reed,
Lucy Reynolds, and Margaret Webb. And I must express my
thanks to the Librarian and the staff of St. Andrews University
Library, who gave me the traditional Scots hospitality.
One other debt, the greatest of all, is acknowledged in the
dedication.
G. H.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1
SHOULD like to express my tKanks to the authors, firms, and
representatives who have been kind enough to grant me permission
to print quotations fronj the following works, in which
they hold the copyright:
George Allen and Unwin Ltd., London, from Lord RusselFs A History
of Western Philosophy;
Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., New York, from The Art of History
y
by
J. B. Black;
Artemis-Verlag, Zurich, from Carl Spittelers Olympischer Fruhling;
The Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston, from E. J. Simmonss Heo Tolstoy
;
C. H. Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich, fisom Oswald Spenglers
Der Untergang des Ahendlandes;
Cambridge University Press, from E. M. Butlers The Tyranny of Greece
over Germany; A. S. F. Gows A E, Housman: a Sketch; A. E. Housmans
Introductory Lecture of 1892 and his preface to his edition of
Juvenal; J. E. Sandyss A History of Classical Scholarship; and A. A.
Tilleys The Literature of the French Renaissance;
Jonathan Cape, Ltd., London, from A. E. Housmans A Shropshire Lad;
Chatto and Windus, London, from Lytton Stracheys Books and
Characters
;
The Clarendon Press, Oxford, from W. J. Sedgefields King Alfred*
s
Version of the Consolation of Boethius
;
Columbia University Press, New York, from D. J. Grouts A Short
History of Opera; S. A. Larrabees English Bards and Grecian Mc^hles;
E. E. Neffs The Poetry of History; and G. N. Shusters The English
Odefrom Milton to Keats;
J. M. Dent & Sons, London, from the Everymans Library editions of
Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and R. K. Ingrams
translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle;
Dieterichsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Wiesbaden, from W. Rehms
Griechentum und Goethezeit (Das Erhe der AlteUy 2nd series, no. 26)
;
E. P. Dutton Sc Co. Inc., New York, from the Everymans Library editions
of Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and R. K.
Ingrams translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ;
Editions Bernard Grasset, Paris, from Jean Cocteaus La Machine
infernale and Jean Giraudouxs iSlectre and La Guerre de Troie n*aura
pas lieu;
The Encylopaedia Britannica, Chicago, from J. B, Burys article Roman
Empire, Later and D. F. Toveys artitle Gluck;
Faber Sc Faber, Ltd., London, from T.* S. Eliots poems and S. Gilberts
James Joyce*
s
Ulysses*
;
Henry Frowde, London, from JE^ J. Dents The Baroque Opera, in The
Musical Antiquary fox IdXi, igio;
Gallimard, Paris, from Andr6 Gides CEdipe and Paul Valerys Poesies ;
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., from D. Bushs Mythology
and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Harvard Studies in
English 1 8);
Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc., New York, from Lytton Stracheys Books
and Characters;
William Heinemann Ltd., London, from E. Gosses Father and Son;
Henry Holt & Co. Inc., New York, from A. E. Housmans A Shropshire
Lad and R. K. Roots Classical Mythology in Shakespeare ;
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, from S. Gilberts James Joyce's
Ulysses'
;
Librairie Ancienne et fiditions Honors Champion, Paris, from E. Farals
Les Arts podtiques du XII^ et XIIF sihcle (Biblioth^que de Ificole des
Hautes fitudes, sciences historiques et philologiques, fasc. 238);
Librairie Armand Colin, Paris, from the Histoire de la langue et de la
littcratum frangaise, edited by L. Petit de Julleville
;
LibrairiH^ Hachette, Paris, from A. Meillets Esquisse d'une histoire de la
langue latine^2ind H. Taipes Histoire de la litterature anglaise;
Little, Brown & Co., Boston, from E. J. Simmonss Leo Tolstoy;
Longmans, Green & Co., Ltd., London, from G. P. Goochs History and
Historians in the Nineteenth Century ;
K. S. P. McDowall, Esq., for the quotation from E. F. Bensons As We
Were, published by Longmans, Green & Co.
;
Macmillan & Co. Ltd., London, from C. M. Bowras The Heritage of
Symbolism; J. W. Cunliffes The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan
Tragedy; and M. Belloc Lowndess Where Love and Friendship Dwelt;
The Macmillan Company, New York, from C. M. Bowras The Heritage
of Symbolism
;
R. Garnetts and E. Gosses English Literature, an Illustrated
Record; A. S. F. Gows A. E. Housman: A Sketch; and A. E.
Housmans Introductory Lecture (1892);
Methuen & Co. Ltd., London, from J. B. Blacks The Art of History;
John Murray, London, from Lady Gregorys Gods and Fighting Men;
New directions, Norfolk, Conn., from H. Levins James Joyce and from
the poems of Ezra Pound;
Nouvelle Revue Fran^aise, Paris, from Andr6 Gides Rdponse h une
enquite de Da Renaissance' sur le classicisme
;
Nouvelles fiditions Latines, Paris, from Andre Obeys Le Viol de Lucrece;
Oxford University Press, London, from G. L. Bickersteths lecture Leopardi
and Wordsworth, and to the British Academy, before which
the lecture was delivered ; from C. M. Bowras A Classical Education
;
H. Cushings Life of Sir William Osier; T. S. Eliots The Classics and
the Man of Letters; T. E. Lawrences translation of the Odyssey;
H. Peyres Louis Menard (Yale Romanic Studies 5); W. L. Phelpss
Autobio^aphy with Letters; Grant Richardss Housman iSgy-iggb;
A. J. Toynbees A Study ofHistory ; osid J. Worthingtons Wordsworth's
Reading ofRoman Prose (Yale Studies in English 102)
;
Pantheon Books Inc., New York, from Andre Gides These'e;
Paul, Paris, from J. Giraudouxs Elp^nor;
Picard, Paris, from G. Guillaumies J. L. Guez de Balzac et la prose
frangaise ;
Princeton University Press, from J. D. Spaeths Old English Poetry ;
Putnam & Co., Ltd., and G. P. Putnams Sons, London and New York,
from J. H. Robinsons and H. W. Rolfes Petrarch^ the First Modern
Scholar and Man of Letters ;
Random House, Inc., New York (The Modem Library), from Constance
Garnetts translation of Tolstoys Anna Karenina, and James Joyces
Ulysses ;
Rheinverlag, Zurich, from W. RiXegg'sXllcero und der Humanismus\
W. E. Rudges Sons, New York, from J, S. Kennards The Italian
Theatre ;
Charles Scribners Sons, New York, from Nicholas Murray Butlers
Across the Busy Years',
Simon and Schuster, Inc., New York, from Lord Russells History of
Western Philosophy', ^
The Society of Authors, London, as literary representative of theftmstees
of the estate of the late A. E. Housman, for quotations from A Shropshire
Lad',
The State University of Iowa, from J. Van Homes Studies on Leopardi
(Iowa University Humanistic Studies, v. i, no. 4);
Stock, Paris, from Jean Cocteaus Orphee;
B. G. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft, Leipzig, from U. von Wilamowitz-
Moeliendoiffs'Geschichte der Philologie, in Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft,
ed. Gercke and Norden, and from T. Zielinskis Cicero im
Wandel der Jahrhunderte ;
University of California Press, Berkeley, Cal., from G. Norwoods Pindar
(Sather Classical Lectures, 1945);
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, from H. T. Parkers The Cult of
Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries',
Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, Tenn., from C. M. Lancasters
and P. T. Manchesters translation. The Araucaniad',
The Viking Press Inc,, New York, from James Joyces A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man ;
The Warburg Institute, London, from the Vortrdge der Bibliothek Warburg,
ed. F. Saxl;
Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., from H. Peyres Louis Menard
(Yale Romanic Studies 5) and J, Worthingtons Wordsworth*s Reading
of Roman Prose (Yale Studies in English 102);
and to any other authors and publishers whose names may have been
inadvertently omitted, and to whom I am indebted for similar courtesies.
CONTENTS
ABBREVIATIONS xxxvii
Ichapter I. INTRODUCTION " 1-21
Our world is a direct spiritual descendant of Greece and Rome i
This book describes that descent in literature ... 2
THE FALL OF THE GREEK AND ROl^AN CIVILIZATION . . . 3-4
Civilization was highly developed in the Roman empire . 3
When that fell, Europe relapsed almost into barbarism . 3
THE DARK AGES ....... 4-II
How did civilization survive through the barbarian invasions ? 4
The languages of the Greco-Roman world ... 5
,, Greek 5
,The Roman empire was bilingual .... 5
The division of the empire and its effects ... 5
Greek* was forgotten in the west .... 6
Latin ........ 6
Romance languages and dialects .... 6
Church Latin ...... 7
Classical Latin . . . . . .8
Religion : Christianity enriched by Greco-Roman folk-lore and
philosophy ....... 8
Roman law........ 9
Roman political sense ...... 9
History and myth....... 10
THE MIDDLE AGES ...... II-I4
Gradual progress in civilization : the growth of education . 1
1
universities . . . . . . .11
monastic orders . . . . . . .11
travel ........ 12
international Latin v, local dialects . . .12
books and libraries . . . . . .13
Greek still closed . . . . . .13
expansion of western European languages through Latin . 14
THE RENAISSANCE ...... I42I
Rapid expansion of culture : new discoveries in literature and art 14
manuscripts of lost books and authors . . , , 15
works of art . . . . . . .16
Greek ........ 16
the spoken language . . . . . .16
thfe written language . . . . , .17
manuscripts . . . . . . .17
Stimulating effect of these discoveries . . . 18
classical scholarship improved . . .18
Romance languages and English enriched . . .18
(Teutonic and Slav languages unaffected) . . .19
improvement in style , . . . . .19
discovery of literary forms . . . . .20
exploration of classical history and myth . .20
renewal of the sense of beauty . . . .21
Chapter 2. THE DARKAGES : ENGLISH LITERATURE 22-47
English literature the most considerable in the Dark Ages . 22
Anglo-Saxon poetry . . . . . . 22-35
Secular poetry . . T . . . .22
Beowulf and Homer . . . . . .22
the conflict ....... 23
the world........ 24
the poetry : classical and Christian influence . . .24
Epic poetry and the fall of the Roman empire . . 27
Christian poetry . . . . . . 28
Caedmon
^
. 28
Biblical paraphrases .
.^
.29
Cynewulf ........ 29
The Dream of the Rood . . . . . *31
Phoenix ........ 32
its Latin sources . . . . . * 32
changes made by its English translator . . .32
its importance ....... 34
The advances made by British culture in the Dark Ages , 35
Anglo-Saxon prose ...... 35*47
Two great conflicts;
British church v, Roman church . . . .36
Pelagius . . . . . . . . 36
Augustine, Theodore, Hadrian . . . .36
Gildas and Aldhelm . . . . . "-37
Bede ........ 37
Alcuin and John Scotus . . . .... 38
Christian Anglo-Saxons v, pagan Northmen . . -39
Alfred and his translations . . . . *39
Gregorys The Shepherd's Book . . . -40
Bedes Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation . 40
Orosius History against the Pagans . , -40
The Consolation of Philosophy . . .41
Its author ....... 41
Summary of the book . . . . .41
Reasons for its greatness . . . . *42
individuality ...... 42
emotion ....... 43
content . . . . . . *43
educational power t . . . .44
persons^ example . . . . <45
How Alfred translated it . . . . *45
CONTENTS XV
46
translations of the Gospels . . . . -47
Britains primacy in the culture of the Dark Ages , . 47
Chapter 3. THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE
48-69
France the centre of medieval literature . . .48
Romances of chivalrous adventure . . . 4S-57
Roland . . . . . . . .49
Other chivalrous romances . . . . .49
Rise in culture and deepening of classical knowledge . . 50
The Romance of Troy Sind its sonxces . . . - St
Dares , . . . . , . *51
his purposes . . . . . .
his methods ....... 52
Dictys ........ 52
Why thipse books w^re used . . . . *53
Influence of The Romance of Troy . . . *53
The Trojan legend ...... 54
Imitators of the poem . . . . *54
The Romance of Aeneas . . . . . *55
The Romance of Thebes . . . . . 5^
The Romance of Alexander . . . . .56
The Lay of Aristotle . . . . . *57
Ovid and romantic love ..... 57-62
The conception of romantic love . . . .57
Some of its artistic products . . . . SS
Ovid . ... . . . . -59
his authority in French literature . . . *59
* his influence on the development of romantic love . *59
his stories and his poems : . . . . .60
Pyramus and Thisbe . . . . .60
Philomela ....... 61
The Heroides and others . . . . .62
The Art of Love . . . . . .62
The Metamorphoses moralized . . . .62
The Romance of the Rose ...... 62-9
Classical influences on its form . . . . *63
dream ........ 63
battle ........ 64
dialogue ........ 64
didactic tone ....... 65
sha1)elessness ....... 67
Classical influences on its ijp.aterial . . . ,67
illustrative examples ... . . . .67
arguments . . . .68
descriptions ....... 68
5076 b
xvi CONTENTS
Classical authors known to the poets of the Rose . . 68
Admirers and opponents of the poem . . . *69
Chapter 4. DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY . 70-80
Dante the synthesis of pagan and medieval Christian culture . 70
The Comedy: meaning of its title: happy ending . . *70
humble style . . ,71
Vergil as the guide of Dante : . . . . .72
prophet of Christianity . . . . .72
Christian by nature ...... 73
herald of Roman empire . . . . .74
lover of Italy ....... 74
poet : his influence on Dante^s style . . . *75
revealer of the imderworld . . . . -77
poet of exile . . . . . . . . 78
Interpenetration of pagan and Christian worlds in The Comedy . 78
The classical writers from whom Dante drew . ^ . *79
Chapter 5. TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE: PETRARCH,
BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER . . . . 81-103
The rebirth of Greco-Roman civilization began in Italy, where it
died latest ....... 81
Its two initiators were Italians with French connexions . .81
PETRARCH ........81-8
The contrast between Petrarch and Dante symbolizes the gulf
between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance . .81
Petrarchs dislike of The Comedy . . . ,82
His travel and friendships . . . . .82
His library and his discovery of lost classical books T 82
Petrarchs and Dantes knowledge of the classics . . 84
Petrarch and Dante as Christians . . . 85
Petrarchs works : . . . . . . .85
Latin ........ 85
Africa........ 85
Originality and adaptation . . . S5
Eclogues ....... 86
Secret ........ 86
Italian ........ 87
Canzoniere ....... 87
Triumphs ....... 87
Petrarch as poet laureate ...... 88
BOCCACCIO . . . . . . .
* 89-93
The contrast between Boccaccio and Dante . . .89
The Decameron . . .
*
. . . .89
Boccaccio as a synthesis of classical anS modern elements . 90
The Theseid 90
CONTENTS xvii
Filostrato ....... 90
Fiammetta ....... 90
Boccaccios scholarship and discovery of lost classics . .91
His conversion ....... 92
His earlier paganism . . . . . .92
Paganism v. Christianity in modem literature . . .92
CHAUCER ....... 93-203
English literature re-enters the current of European literature 94
Chaucers works inspired by French and Italian originals . 94
Chaucers knowledge of the classics . . . *95
Mistakes and mystifications . . . . *95
Lollius ....... 96
tragedy ....... 97
Authors whom he knew directly
:
Ovid ........ 98
ergil ........ 99
Boethius .* . . . . . -99
Statius ,
**
. . . . . . 100
Claudian ....... 100
Cicero........ 100
Seneca? ....... 100
Authors whom he knew through excerpts
:
Valerius Flaccus . . . . . . loi
Juvenal and others . . . . . .101
Effect of his scholarship on his mind and his style. The classics
in English ....... 102
Chapter 6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION . 104-26
Translation, imitation, and emulation are the channels for
classical influence . . . . . . ,104
Translation ....... 104-13
origin ........ 104
educational importance . . . . . ,105
intellectual importance . . . . . .106
linguistic importance . . . . . .106
expansion of French . . . . . .107
Latin words . . . . . . .107
verbal elements . . . . . .108
French words assimilated to derivations , . .108
Greek words ....... 109
low Latin words . . . . . .109
expansion of English . . . . . .109
Latin and Greek words ,
. . . , .109
verbal elements .
. . . . no
English words assimilated to derivations . . .110
expansion of Spanish . . . . .110
other European languages - . . . .111
xviii CONTENTS
artistic importance .... . 112
imagery ..... . IIZ
verse-forms ..... . 112
stylistic devices ..... 112
translations as a stimulus.... 113
Translation in the western European countries
Types of book translated from Greek and Latin
:
ii336
epic ...... 1 14
Ovid . . . .. 116
history ...... . 116
philosophy...... . 118
drama ....... 120
oratory ...... 122
smaller works ..... . 123
The power of translation in the Renaissance ^ . 126
Chapter 7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA . 127-43
Debts of modem drama to Greece and Rome . 127-31
Conception of drama as a fine art 127
Realization of drama as a type of literature . 127
Theatre-building and principles of production . 129
Structure of modern drama . 130
proportions ..... . 130
symmetrical division .... . 130
chorus ...... . 130
plot ...... . 131
verse ...... . 13X
High standards to emulate . 131
Classical playwrights who survived to influence modem drama I3i*3
Seneca the chief of these .... p . 132
Translations of Latin and Greek plays 133-4
Italy ...... 133
France ...... "
133
Spain, Portugal, Germany 134
Imitations of classical drama in Latin 134-5
Emulation of classical drama in modem languages 135-8
Italy: the first play .... 135
the first comedy .... . 136
the first tragedy .... . 136
France : the first tragedy .... 137
the first comedy .... - X 37
* England : the first tragedy 137
early attempts at comedy ^37
the first comedy .... . 138
Spain . 138
Other aspects of drama derived from the classics 3:38-43
Masques . . . 139
Pastoral drama ..... ^39
CONTENTS xix
Amyntas and The Faithful Shepherd . . . .140
Popular farce . . . . . . .140
Opera ........ 141
Dramatic criticism: the Unities . . . . .142
Summary ........ 143
Chapters. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC . . . 144-61
The four chief types of epic poetry in the Renaissance . 144-7
Direct imitations of classical epic . . . ,144
The Franciad . . . . . . .144
Epics on contemporary heroic adventures . . .144
The Sons of Lusus . . . . . .144
The Poem of Araucania . . . . ,144
Romantic epics of medieval chivalry . . . *145
The Madness of Roland . . . . . i4S
ThS Faerie Queenq . . . . . .146
The Liberation of Jerusalem . . . . .146
The Liberation of Italy from the Goths . . .146
Christian religious epics . . . . . .146
Paradise Lost . . . . . . -147
Paradise Regained . . . . . *147
Classical influences on these poems . . . 147-61
Subjects ........ 147
Structure ........ 147
Supernatural elements . . . . . *147
in contemporary epics . . . . . .148
in chivalrous epics . . . . . .148
in Christian epics . . . . . .149
The noble background . . . . . 151
continuity of history . . . . . .151
comparisons of heroic deeds . . . . .151
nature . . . . . . . *15^
scenery ........ 152
Adaptations of classical episodes . . . *152
evocations of dead and unborn . . . *153
heroic adventures . . . . . *153
crowd-scenes . . . . . . *154
Homeric similes . . . . . *155
characters . . . . . . *155
invocations of the Muses . . . . -155
Quotations and imitations . . . . 156
use and misuse of this device , . . . *156
Latinized and hellenized words and phrases . . *158
Miltons language . . , . . -159
words used in their etymological sense . . 159
latinisms in syntax .* . . . .160
criticism of this device . . . . .160
The richness of Renaissance epic . . . . .161
XX CONTENTS
Chapter RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND
ROMANCE
Introduction ...... Pastoral in Greece and Rome
Theocritus ..... Vergil and Arcadia .... Romance in Greece under the Roman empire
Description of the Greek romances
The three best known in the Renaissance
Pastoral and romance as wish-fulfilment literature
Modem parallels ..... Pastoral and romance in the Renaissance .
Boccaccio^s Admetus .... Sannazaro^s Arcadia .... Montemayors Diana .... Paganism in the pastoral
romances . ^
Sidneys Arcadia . . .... . r
DUrfes Astraea .
Other expressions of the pastoral ideal
bucolic poems ..... pastoral autobiography .... pastoral satire ..... pastoral elegy ..... pastoral
drama ..... pastoral opera ..... Arcadian societies . . . .
Continuity of the tradition ....
162-77
. 162
. 162
. 162
. 163
163
. 163
. 164
. 165
. 166
166-^0
. 167
. 167
''
. 168
. 169
. 169
170
170-6
171
. 172
173
173
. 174
175
176
. 176
Chapter 10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE . . 178-93
RABELAIS 178-85
The difficulty of appreciating Rabelais arises from conflicts
in him . . . . . . ... 178
The Renaissance was an age of conflicts . . .179
Catholicism v, Protestantism . . . . * ^79
liberal Catholics v. conservative Catholics . . .180
middle class v. aristocracy . . . . .180
science v, traditional philosophy and theology and v, superstition
....... 180
individuality v. authority . . . . .181
Rabelaiss life . . . . . .181
His book a childish series of giant-adventures containing his
wish-fulfilments . . . . . .182
Its classical learning and its medieval dirt . 1 .183
Classical elements in it: ^
names of characters and peoples . . . .183
themes . . . . . 183
the authors whom he knew . . . . .184
How his energy dominated his convicts . . .185
CONTENTS XXI
MONTAIGNE ....... l8593
Montaigne was a deeply read and widely experienced man . 185
His unusual classical education . . . . .186
His career and retirement . . . , .187
His Essays ........ 187
His reading ....... 187
principles governing it . . . . . .187
his favourite authors . . . . . .188
complete list of authors he knew . . . .188
His use of his reading . . . . . .190
Methods of employing classical literature in the Essays . 190
apophthegms . . . . . . .190
illustrations . . . . . . .190
arguments ....... 191
How he invented the modern essay . , . .191
philosophical treatises . . , . . .191
collectipns of apophthegms . . . . .192
(psychological character-sketches) . . . .192
the subjective element . . . . . .192
Autobiography, liberty, and humanism as expressions of the
Renaissance spirit . . . . . .192
Chapter II. SHAKESPEARE^S CLASSICS . . 194-.218
Introduction . . . . . . 194
Shakespeares chief subjects : contemporary Europe, British
history, classical myth and history . . . .194
English, Italian, and Greco-Roman elements in his characters
and their speech . . . . . . *195
Hi neglect of medieval thought . . . . .196
His knowledge of Rome and his knowledge of Greece . 197-203
The spirit of his tragedies Roman rather than Greek . .198
His use of Greek and Latin imagery . . . .198
Small Latin and less Greek in language . . . ^[99
Quotations and imitations ...... 200
parallel passages as a proof of the dependence of one author on
another ........ 201
transmission of ideas by osmosis .... 202
The classical authors whom Shakespeare knew well . 203-15
Ovid ........ 203
quotations ....... 204
imitations ....... 205
references ....... 207
mythology ........ 207
Seneca ........ 207
tragic fatalism . . . . ^ . . . 207
Stoical resignation and extravagant passion . . . 207
stock characters....... 208
xxii CONTENTS
repartee and other devices . 208
imitations ..... 208
Plutarch ...... . 210
stimulus of history .... . 210
use of Plutarchs facts .... . 211
transmutation of Plutarchs prose . 212
Plautus ...... . 214
use of Plautus plots and characters . . 214
neglect of Plautus language .* . 315
Other classical authors .... ai6-"i8
quotations in school-books . 216
Vergil ...... . 216
Caesar ...... . 217
Livy ...... . 217
Lucan ...... .
. " 217
Pliny . 217
Juvenal ...... . 217
Greek and Latin culture was an essential part of Shakespeares
thought and a powerful challenge to his spirit . 218
Chapter 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS:
LYRIC POETRY . 219-54
Songs are made naturally by every people, to go with music and
dancing ...... . 219
Lyric poetry is a highly developed dance-song . . 319
Classical influence on modem lyric poetry is limited to elaborate
and reflective poems .... . . 220
The classical models for modem lyrics 2ai"9
Pindar....... . 221
life 221
poems ...... . 221
difhculties in understanding them . 222
stmcture...... . 222
thought ...... . 224
Horace ...... . 225
poetry and models .... . 225
contrast with Pindar .... . 226
classical v. romantic.... . 227
Anacreon and his imitators .... . 228
The Greek Anthology .... . 229
Catullus ...... . 239
What modem lyric poetry took from classical lyric poetry
The name ode ..... .
".
' 230
The challenge of Pindar and responseg^ to it . 230-44
Ronsard ...... . . 231
his teachers an^ friends . . 231
revolutionary acts of the Pleiade . . 331
its principles ..... . 232
CONTENTS xxiii
his invention* of the ode
his emulation of Pindar
subjects .... style and mythology .
poetic structure
his abandonment of the competition .
results of his attempt .
Chiabrera ..... his career and work . .
his subjects and style
The ode in English
Southern .... Milton ..... Jonson ..... Defoiition of the modem ode .
Cowley ..... Musical, odes . ^ ^
.
Ceremonial odes
reasons for their failure
Dryden and Gray
Horace ..... Spain ..... Garcilaso de la Vega .
Herrera .... Luis de Le6n....
Italy ..... Bernardo Tasso
Attempts to re-create Horatian metres
France ..... Peletier .... Ronsard ....
England ..... Jonson and his sons.
Marvell .... Milton .... Pope, Collins, Watts .
Lyrical poetry in the revolutionary era
The Pindaric ode .... Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin
Hugo ..... Shelley ..... Wordsworth ....
tloratian odes blended with Pindaric elements
Keats ..... The nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Swinburne and Hopkins .
Modem free verse
. 233
233
233
233
. 234
235
23s
235
23s
, 236
. 236
24^
245
245
246
247
247
247
248
248
248
249
249
250-3
250
251
251
2$!
251
252
252
254
254
254
xxiv CONTENTS
Chapter 13. TRANSITION .... 255-60
The period from the Renaissance to our own day falls into two
parts : the baroque age and the modem era . . ^55
The modern era: five important changes which made it . .255
their effects in literature
:
increase in quantity . . . . . .256
shift to popular standards . . . . .256
specialization as a reaction . . . . .256
increase in vigour . . . . . .257
spread of education, involving spread of classical knowledge. 257
The end of the Renaissance and the counter-wave . .257
repression and gloom . . . . . .258
disasters to culture . . . . . .258
chief peaks of the reaction . . . . .259
Chapter 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOORS
^
.
*
261-88
Introduction . . . . , . . .261
Importance of the Battle . . . . . .261
Its locale ........ 261
The chief arguments used by the modems . . 262-74
1 . Christian works are better than pagan works . . 262
Dante, Milton, Tasso ..... 263
Classical education and the churches . . . 263
2. Science progresses, therefore art progresses . . 264
Emotional basis of this argument .... 264
Its tmth in science ...... 265
Its falsity in art and the problems of life . . . 265
Forgotten crafts ...... 266
The dwarf on the giants shoulders . . ? 267
The world growing older ..... 267
Spenglers theory of the relative ages of civilizations . 267
Intermptions and setbacks in progress . . .268
3. Nature does not change ..... 269
The material of art is constant, but the conditions of production
change ...... 269
4. The classics are silly or vulgar .... 269
Silliness ....... 270
the supernatural ...... 270
myths ....... 271
style ....... 271
thought ....... 271
Vulgarity , . . . . . . 27a
low actions and language * . . . . 272
primitive manners ..... 272
comic relief . . . . . . 273
Preconceptions behind these arguments . . . 274-7
Infallibility of contemporary taste .... 274
CONTENTS XXV
Nationalism in language . . . . . .275
Opposition to traditional authority .... 276
Naturalism v. convention ..... 276
Translations originals; Latin z;. Greek . . . 277
Chronological survey of the Battle . . . 277-87
Phase I : France ....... 278.
The French Academy (1635) ..... 278
Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin (1657-) .... 278
Fontenelle (1683) .?..... 279
Perrault (1687-97) . . . . . .280
History of the War . . . . . .281
Huet and Boileau (1692-4) . . . . .281
Reconciliation (1694) . . . . . .281
Phase 2 : England . . , . . . .2.82
St.^fivremond (1661-1703) ..... 282
Temple (1690)^ ....... 282
Wotton^(i694j ^. . . . . . . 283
BoyWs Letters of Phalaris (i6gs)- .... 283
Bentleys Dissertation (1697) . . . . .284
Bentleys Milton ...... 284
Swifts Tale of a Tub and Battle of the Boohs (1704) . .285
Popes Dunciad (1742) ...... 286
Phase 3 : France ....... 287
Mme Dacier (1699) ...... 287
Houdar de la Motte (1714) ..... 287
Mme Dacier (1714) ...... 287
Reconciliation (1716) ...... 287
Results of the Battle...... 287-8
CEyi^PTER IS. A NOTE ON BAROQUE
Meaning of the word baroque
The essence of baroque art is tension between passion and
examples from life
examples from art .
The greatest baroque artists
Classical influences on their work .
themes .... forms .... moral and aesthetic restraint
its exaggeration in classicism .
spiritual unity of the western world
Chapter 16. BAROQUE TRAGEDY
Classical and anti-classical forces acting on baroque tragedy
highly educated authors ,
Corneille
Racine . .
Milton
Dryden .
289-92
. 289
control 289
289
. 290
. 290
. 291
. 291
. 291
. 291
. 292
. 292
293-302
293-7
293
393
294
294
295
XXVI CONTENTS
* Johnson ...... 29s
, Addison ...... 295
Metastasio ..... 295
audiences less cultured .... 295
social conditions favouring tragedy 296
urbanization ..... 296
cult of grandeur .... 296
connexion of baroque tragedy and opera . 297
The failure of baroque tragedy . . 297--302
limitation of its audience .... 297
narrow range of subjects 297
classical learning .... 298
limitation of its resources 298
avoidance of low words 299
poverty of images .... ^ 300
restricted metre..... . 300
limited range of emotions 301
extreme symmetry .... 301
artificial rules ..... 301
Conclusion ...... 30Z
Chapter 17. SATIRE .... 303-21
Satire was a Roman invention 303
Roman verse satirists .... 303
Roman prose satirists .... 303
Greek influences on Roman and modem satire 304
Lucian ...... 304
Definition of satire ..... 305
Satirical writing in the Middle Ages 305
Modern satire created by the rediscovery of Roman satire 306
Prose satire not directly influenced by classical models 307
Abraham a Sancta Clara .... . 308
Verse satire based on Roman satire 308-21
The Renaissance ..... 309-13
Italian satirists ..... 309
Brants The Ship of Fools 310
English satirists..... 310
French satirists ..... 311
The Menippean Satire and DAubigne 311
Regnier ..... 312
baroque age ..... 313-21
Boileau ...... 3^4
Dryden: his originality # 314
mock epic . . ... 314
character-sketches .... 314
Pope . % - . . 315
Johnson ...... 315
Parini ...... 315
CONTENTS xxvii
Limitations of the classicar verse satirists in the baroque age:
metre . . . . . , . .316
vocabulary . . . . . . . .318
subject-matter . . . . . . ,320
Situations responsible for these limitations
:
attempt to emulate classical standards through refinement of
language........ 321
the aristocratic and authoritarian social order . . .321
Chapter 18. BAROQUE PROSE .... 322-54
The baroque era was the age of prose . . . .322
Its prose was modelled on classical, chiefly Latin, prose . 322
STYLE ....... 322-35
Two different schools ...... 322
Cicero ........ 323
" Seneca and Tacitus . . . . . -323
Modem imitators of Seneca and Tacitus . . .324
the loose manner and the curt manner . . *325
political implications of Senecan and Tacitean style . 326
Modem imitators of Cicero . . . . .327
What they got from the classics . . , . *327
illustrative parallels . . . . . .328
indirect allusions . . . . . *329
stimulus ....... 329
stylistic devices . . . . . . *330
sonority ....... 330
richness . . . . . . 33'^
symmetry ....... 332
division ....... 332
antithesis . . . . . . *333
climax ....... 333
tricolon ....... 334
FICTION ....... 33S"44
Fenelons career and his book . . . . *33^
Telemachus ....... 336
its sources in romance, epic, tragedy, and other fields . 337
its educational and critical purpose . . . 33^
its successors . . . . . . *339
Richardsons Pamela ...... 340
classical influences on it at second-hand . . . 341
Telemachus ....... ^4^1
^Arcadia ....... 34^
Fieldings Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones . . . 341
his claim that they were epics..... 342
classical comic e^ics...... 343
romances ....... 343
the trath of his claim ...... 343
xxviii CONTENTS
The classical ancestry of the modem novel , . ,344
history 344-54
Gibbons The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , . 344
Its international character . . . . -345
Its predecessors ....... 345
Bossuets Discourse on Unwersal History . . .345
Montesquieus Cofisiderations on the Causes of the Greatness
of the Romans and of their Decadence . . -345
Scope and skill of Gibbons work .... 346
Structure ........ 346
Style 347
Faults ........ 348
more Roman than Greek . . . . .348
failure to give reasons for the fall of Rome . . .349
bias against Christianity . . . .
*
. 352
its motive ....... 352
its resultfalsification of history . . . *353
Ch^ter 19. JHE time of REVOUITIPN . . 355-436
Y. INTRODUCTION ...... 355^^7
Thought and literature changed in the second half of the eighteenth
century . . . . . . 355
The name romantic* is inappropriate for the new era, and partly
false ........ 355
It was an age of protest, in which Greek and Roman ideals were
vital......... 356
Why is it sometimes called anti-classical*? . . .356
The revolutionary age abandoned hackneyed and unimagina-
tive classical allusions . . . . . *356
It rejected certain classical ideals . . . *357
It opened up new fields of thought and experience . *358
But it also penetrated deeper into the meaning of the classics . 359
It was a period of expansion and exploration . . -359
The explosion of the baroque pearl . . . .359
It resembled the Renaissance and was complementary to it . 359
The Renaissance explored Latin, the revolutionary era Greek . 360
What did Greece mean to the men of the revolutionary age ? 360-7
Beauty and nobility . . . . . . . 360
Freedom . . . . . . . . 361
literary ........ 361
moral . . . . . . ... 361
political ........ 361
religious : i.e. freedom from Christianity . . .362
Nature . . . . . 363
in literature . . . . . . .364
in conduct ....... 364
CONTENTS XXIX
Escape and fulfilment . 36s
physical ..... . 365
psychical..... . 366
aesthetic..... . . 366
2. GERMANY ..... 367-90
The sixteenth-century Renaissance did not affect Germany 367
Nor did the ideals of the baroque age in literature stir her . 368
The German Renaissance began in the mid-eighteenth century 369
Winckelmann . . . 369
His English predecessors . 369
His History of Art among the Ancients . 370
Lessing ..... 371
Laocoon ..... 371
the legend .... 371
the group .... . 37*
why it was admired 372
Other works *.
374
Voss . . .

. 375
Enthusiasm for Greek in Germany : Herder and Goethe 375
Difficulty of assimilating Greek influences 376
Schiller ..... 376
The Gods of Greece 376
Holderlin ..... 377
parallel to Keats .... 378
Goethe ..... 379
His love for Greek 379
His escape to Rome . 380
Iphigenia ..... . 380
Roman Elegies .... . 380
Xenia ..... . . 382
Hermann and Dorothea : a Homeric idyll . . 382
Woods Essay on the Original Genius of Homer - 383
Wolfs Introduction to Homer . . 383
his arguments and their conclusions . 384
their effect on scholars and writers 385
Goethes varying reactions to them . 386
Faust II . . 386
What does Helen of Troy symbolize? 387
physical beauty 387
aesthetic experience . 387
Greek culture 387
its difficulty and loftiness . 388
its* transience for modem men . 388
Euphorion and the revolutiionary poets . 388
Faust the German and Helen the Greek . 389
3. FRANCE AND THE UNITED "states . 390-407
Classicalinfluenceswere aleadingfactorinthe FrenchRevolution 3909
XXX CONTENTS
Their expression in art: David . . . . *391
in music: Gluck ....... 392
in political morality : Rousseau ..... 392
the idealized Sparta . . . . . .394
the inspiration of Plutarch . . . . -395
in political symbolism . . . . . * 39^
in oratory and statesmanship . . . . *397
Parallel expressions in the American revolution . . 399-401
institutions, illustrations, mottoes . . . *399
names of places . . . . . . .399
President Jefferson as a humanist .... 400
French literature of the revolution.... 401-5
Andre Chenier . . . . . . .401
his brother Marie-Joseph . . . .401
his poetry . . . . . . ^ . 402
Chateaubriand ....... 403
The Martyrs . . .
.^
. . . 403
The Genius of Christianity ..... 404
The heir of the revolution : Victor Hugo . . . 405-7
his revolution in the poetic vocabulary .... 405
his love and scorn of Vergil ..... 406
his revulsion from the discipline of the classics . . 407
^4. ENGLAND^ ....... 408-23
What did Greek and Roman civilization and literature mean for
the English poets of the revolutionary age ? . . . 408
Wordsworth might seem to be alien from classical influence . 408
as a child of nature ...... 408
as a poet who rarely imitated other poets . . . 408
as inventor of a new pastoral . . . . * . 409
But for Wordsworth the classics meant spiritual nobility . 409
Roman history ....... 409
Stoic philosophy . . . . . . .410
Platonism . . . . . . . .411
^/control of emotion . . . . . .412
^yron^s attitude to Greece and Rome was equivocal . . 4tz
knew much classical literature . . . -4^3
but bad teaching prevented him from accepting its full power 413
He preferred the countries themselves, and their ideals . .415
Keats compared to Shakespeare 4^
How he got his classical knowledge . . . 4^5
Latin books; translations; dictionaries; other authors . .4^5
the Elgin Marbles and Greek vases . .
. ' .416
The gaps in his knowledge as they affected his poetry . *417
For Keats Greek poetry and art meant beauty . . .417
Shelley compared to Milton .
*
. . . . 418
His wide knowledge of Greek and Latin . . . .418
CONTENTS XXXI
,His favourites . , . . . . .419
Homer . . . . . . . .419
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides . . . .419
Plato ........ 419
Theocritus and other bucolic poets .... 420
Aristophanes . . . . . . .421
Lucan ........ 421
Lucretius ........ 421
Vergil . . . % . . . . . 422
sculpture and architecture ..... 422
For Shelley the Greek spirit meant freedom . . . 423
The challenge and companionship of the Greek poets . . 423
5. ITALY ....... 4^3"34
The revolutionary poets of Italy were pessimists . . . 424
Alfieri ^ ...... . 4247
his early life and his self-education .... 424
his later life . ^
. . . . - 425
his tragedies . . . . . . .425
their classical form . . . . . .426
their revolutionary content . . . . .426
Foscolo ....... 427-9
his revolutionary career ...... 427
his disillusionment ...... 427
The Last Letters of lacopo Ortis . . . .428
his sense of the past . . . . . .428
On Tombs ....... 428
form ........ 429
thought ....... 429
Leopardi ....... 429-34
hi unhappy youth . . . . *429
his classical scholarship ...... 430
his Torgeries* of classical poems . . . . *430
his hope of a national revolution : early lyrics . . .431
his disillusionment : later lyrics . , . . *431
his despair : Short Works on Morals .... 432
his debts to classical art and thought . . . *433
Leopardi and Lucretius . . . . . >433
6. CONCLUSION .... 434-6
The revolutionary era and the Renaissance . . . 434
Other forces in this era ...... 434
Other authors ....... 435
Rich variety of the period . . . . . -435
Chapter 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST . 437-65
Many nineteenth-century v^iters hated the world in which they
lived ........ 437
They turned away to the world of Greece and Rome , 43^
5076 * -
xx>ai CONTENTS
because it was beautiful : Parnassus . . . 43B
because it was not Christian: Antichrist . . *438
Parnassus : its ideals ...... 439-".*t3
emotional control ....... 440
Poe ........ 440
Arnold ........ 441
Leconte de Lisle and others . . . . .441
severity of form ....... 442
Pleredia . . . j* . . . . 442
Carducci........ 443
Gautier ........ 443
art for arts sake ....... 443
origin of the doctrine ...... 444
its dangers ....... 445
, Huysmans, Swinburne, Wilde . .
. ^ *445
deep classical reading of most nineteenth-century writers . 446
aspects of their escape . . . . . . 447
physical beauty of Greece and Rome . . . . 447
widespread imaginative interest in history . . . 447
moral baseness of contemporary life .... 449
use of impersonal classical figures to express personal problems
........ 449
Tennysons Ulyssesy Lucretiusy and others . . . 449
Arnolds Empedocles on Etna . . . *450
evocative character of certain mythical figures . * 453^
Swinburnes and Arnolds tragedies . . .451
Brownings Balaustion's Adventure . . . -452
Parnassus means more than a mere escape to the past . 453
Antichrist: the chief arguments against Christianity . 453-*6z
Christianity is oriental and barbarous . . . ^. 454
Renan ........ 454
France ........ 454
Wilde ........ 455
Christianity means repression . . . . -455
Carducci........ 455
Leconte de Lisle . . . . . .456
Menard ....... 456
Swinburne ....... 457
Lou^^s ........ 457
Christianity is timid and feeble , . . . *459
Nietzsche . . . . . . *459
Flaubert ....... 461
Christian counter-propaganda in popular novels . . 462-5
The Last Days of Pompeii 462
Hypatia . . . . ^ . . . . 462
Ben-Hur ........ 463
Quo Vadis?........ 4^3
CONTENTS
Manus the Epicurean
xxxiii
464
The conflict resolved 46s
Chapter zi. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 466-500
During the last hundred years classical knowledge has increased
in intension but decreased in extension . , . 466
Reasons for the increase : . .

. 467-73
use of methods of experimental science . . 468
use of methods of applied science . 468
systematization .... 469
mass-production .... 470
specialization .... 470
international co-operation . 471
Three ^elds in which classical scholarship affected literature :
HISTORY ..... . . 472-9
Niebuhr . . . 472
Mommsen : why did he never finish his History of Rome ? 474
Fustel de Coulanges.... . , 477
Meyer...... 478
TRANSLATION ..... 479-90
Arnold and Newman on translating Homer 479
Homers language.... . 481
parallel with the English Bible , . 484
Lang ...... . 484
(Arnolds Balder Dead and Sohrab and Rustum) 48s
Tennyson ..... 487
Butler ..... . 487
Lawrence ..... . 488
Failure of translations by professional scholars . 489
EDUCATION ..... 490-500
Examples of bad teaching of the classics . . 490
Decline in general knowledge of the classics . 49^
Reasons for the decline : . 49Z-9
advance of science, industrialism, commerce 493
universal education 493
bad teachingits types and results 493
laziness ..... . 494
the cult of discipline . 494
etherialization .... 495
the scientific approach : Housman 495
bad translations . 498
bad writing .... . 498
ugly books ,
. ^ . . 498
Quellenforsckung 499
fragmentation of the subject . 499
The failure of classical teaching and the responsibility of the
scholar 499-500
XXXIV CONTENTS
Chapter 22, THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES
JOYCE 501-19
Symbolism ........ 501
The chief symbolist poets who use classical material
:
Mallarme, Valery, Pound, Eliot . . . . *501
Joyce and the two books in which he uses Greek legends . 501
The impressionist technique of the symbolists . . .502
How these writers try to use classical forms . . 504""7
Joyces Ulysses and the Odyssey T . . . . 504
How they use classical legends .... 507--16
symbolic figures . . . . . . .507
the Faun ....... 507
Herodias........ 508
the young Fate ....... 508
Narcissus. ....... 509
the Pythian priestess . . . ^ . . . 509
Daedalus . . . . ^ . . . 509
myths . . . . . , . .510
descent into the world of death . , . .510
Homers Odyssey . . . . . .510
Vergils Aeneid . . . . . 'Six
The Harrowing of Hell . . . . -Six
Dantes Comedy . . . . 5xx
Pounds Cantos . . . . . .5x1
Joyces Ulysses . . . . . *5x1
Eliots favourite legends . . . . *5x3
Sweeney as Theseus . . . . . -5X3
Sweeney as Agamemnon . . . . *5X3
Philomela . . . . . . 514
Tiresias ....... 514
the Sibyl . . . . . . '5X5
Their classical background of imagery and allusion . .516
Summary: ....... 517-19
Their debt to Greco-Roman literature is difficult to estimate 517
their poetry is elusive . . . . . *517
Pounds Papyrus . . . . . .517
their knowledge of the classics is non-intellectual . .518
they love Greco-Roman poetry and myth as stimulus and as
consolation . . . . . . .518
Chapter 23. THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE
MYTHS 520-40
PHILOSOPHICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ;SNTERPRETATIONS . 52O-5
Myths as historical facts . . . . . .520
gods as heroic men (Euhemeros) . . . ,520
gods as devils ....... 521
gods as tribes, animals, steps in civilization . . .521
CONTENTS XXXV
Myths as symbols of philosophical truths . . .522
Myths as symbols of natural processes . . . .522
the journey of the sun . . . , . .522
resurrection and reproduction . . . . *523
psychical drives . . . . . . *523
Freud ........ 523
Jung ........ 523
LITERARY TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE MYTHS . . 525-40
Andre Gide. . . * . . . . . 525
influence of Wilde on him . , . . *525
German playwrights . . . . . .526
ONeill 526
Jeffers and Anouilh . . . . . -527
de Bosis ........ 527
Camu^ ........ 527
Spitteler ... . . . . . . 528
Prometheus and Epimetheus . . . . *528
Olympian Spring . . . . . .529
allegorical meanings . . . . . *529
Greek and Swiss elements . . . . -530
Spitteler as an artist and as a voice of nature . * 53t>
The modern French playwrights . . . -531
why they use Greek myths . . . . *532
authority and simplicity . . . . *532
modern significance . . . . . -532
sources of humour and poetry . . . *532
classical form of the plays . . . . *533
changes in the plots . . . . . *533
, unexpected truths . . . . . *534
new motives ....... 535
modem language , . . . . *537
new symbols ....... 538
the supernatural . . . . . -539
eloquence ....... 539
The permanence of the myths . . . . *540
Chapter 24. CONCLUSION ^
. . . . 541-9
The continuous stream of classical influence on modem literature
... ..... 541
Other authors and other expressions of this influence . . 541
Greco-Roman philosophical thought . . . , . 541
indirect stimulus of the classics ..... 542
Wagner ........ 542
Whitman ....... 542
Tolstoy . . , . . . . . . 542
the story of education ...... 542
Currents outside Greco-Roman influence.... 543
xxxvi CONTENTS
This continuity is often underestimated or ignored . . 544
languages are not dead if they are still read . . *544
historical events are not dead if they still produce results . 544
literature as an eternal present . . . , 545
The continuity of western literature: what Greece and Rome
taught us. ....... 545
legends ........ 546
language and philosophy ...... 546
literary patterns and the ideals of humanism . . . 546
history and political ideals . . . . .546
the psychological meaning of the myths . . . 546
Christianity v. Greco-Roman paganism .... 546
Materialism v. thought and art . . . . -547
Civilization is not the accumulation of wealth, but the good life
of the mind . . . . . . ^ 5479
BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . .550
NOTES
Chapter i : Introduction .....
z: The Dark Ages: English Literature
,, 3 : The Middle Ages : French Literature
4: Dante and Pagan Antiquity .
5 : Towards the Renaissance
6 : The Renaissance : Translation
7 : The Renaissance : Drama
8 : The Renaissance : Epic
9 ; The Renaissance : Pastoral and Romance .
,, 10 : Rabelais and Montaigne
1 1 : Shakespeares Classics
12 : The Renaissance and Afterwards: Lyric Poetry
13 : Transition .....
14: The Battle of the Books
15 : A Note on Baroque ....
16: Baroque Tragedy ....
17: Satire ......
18: Baroque Prose ....
19: The Time of Revolution
20: Parnassus and Antichrist
21 : A Century of Scholarship
22 : The Symbolist Poets ^d James Joyce
23 : The Reinterpretation of the Myths
24: Conclusion . . .
556
562
573
583
587
593
598
601
611
614
617
627
638
640
646
648
649
654
661
683
690
69s
701
705
INDEX 707
ABBREVIATIONS
The following conventions have been used for the sake of brevity:
bk. = book
c. = chapter; and also circa: about
cc. = chapters
cf. = confer: compare
ed. = edition, or edited by
e. g. = exempli gratia
:
for example
f. == and following lines, or : and following pages
fin. ^ ad finem
towards the end
fi, = floruit
:
flourished, was active
ibid. = ibidem: in the same place
i.e. ^ id est: xhiSit is
init. = ad initium .^towards the beginning
I, = line
II. = lines
med. = ad medium
:
about the middle
n. = note
n.F. == neue Folge: new series
n.s. = new series
op. cit. = opus citatum
:
the work quoted
p. == page
para. = paragraph
pp. = pages
pt. == part
suppl. = supplementary volume
s.v. = sub voce
:
under the heading
tit. = titulus: title, or heading
tr. = translated by
V. = verse; and also versus: opposed to; and also volume
w. == verses ; and also volumes
The abbreviations of the titles of books and periodicals are
those shown in any standard list. Anaong the commonest are
:
Aen, == Aeneid
Aug. = Augustine
Buc. = Bucolics
Carm, = Carmina (generally of Horaces odes)
Cat. = Catullus
Ep. = Epistulae (the Letters of Augustine, Horace, Seneca, and
others)
FQ = Spensers Faejfie Queene
Georg, = Georgies
HF == Chaucers House of Fame
xxxviii ABBREVIATIONS
Horn. = Homer
Hor. == Horace
11. = Iliad
Juv. = Juvenal
LGW = Chaucers Legend of Good Women
L.L.L. = Love's Labour 's Lost
Met. ~ Metamorphoses
Od. = Odyssey
Ov. = Ovid
Proc. == Proceedings
FMLA == Proceedings, or Publications, of the Modern Language
Association of America
Sat. = Satires, and also Petronius Satirica
Serm. = Sermones (generally of Horaces satires)
Suet. = Suetonius
Verg. = Vergil.
A small superior number after a date shows the edition of the book
produced on that date. So 19143 means that the third edition of the book
mentioned came out in 1914.
I
INTRODUCTION
OUR modern world is in many ways a continuation of the world
of Greece and Rome. . Not in all waysparticu^rly not in
medicine, music, industry, and applied science. But in most of
our intellectual and spiritual activities we are the grandsons of the
Romans, and the great-grandsons of the Greeks.^ Other influences
joined to make us what we are ; but the Greco-Roman strain was
one of the strongest and richest. Without it, our civilization would
not merely be different. It^ would be much thinner, more fragmentary,
less thoughtful, more materialistic^in fact, whatever
wealth it might have atcumulated, whatever wars it might have
fought, whatever inventions it might have made, it would be less
worthy to be called a civilization, because its spiritual achievements
would be less great.
The Greeks and, learning from them, the Romans created a
noble and complex civilization, which flourished for a thousand
years and was overthrown only through a long series of invasions
and civil wars, epidemics, economic disasters, and administrative,
moral, and religious catastrophes. It did not entirely disappear.
Nothing so great and so long established does. Something of it
survived, transformed but undestroyed, throughout the agonizing
centuries in which mankind slowly built up western civilization
once more. But much of it was covered by wave after wave of
barbarism; silted over; buried; and forgotten. Europe slipped
backwards, backwards, almost into savagery.
When the civilization of the west began to rise again and remake
itself, it did so largely through rediscovering the buried culture of
Greece and Rome. Great systems of thought, profound and skilful
works of art, do not perish unless their material vehicle is utterly
destroyed. They do not become fossils, because a fossil is lifeless
and cannot reproduce itself. But they, whenever they find a mind
to receive them, live again in it and make it live more fully.
What happened after the Dark Ages was that the mind of
Europe was reawakened and converted and stimulated by the rediscovery
of classical civilization. Other factors helped in that
reawakening, but no other worked more strongly and variously.
5076 " B
2 1. INTRODUCTION
This process began about a.d. iioo and, with occasional pauses
and set-backs, moved on faster and faster until, between 1400 and
1600, western Europe seized on the arts and the ideals of classical
Greece and Rome, eagerly assimilated them, and, partly by
imitating them, partly by adapting them to other media, partly by
creating new art and thought under the powerful stimulus they
produced, founded modern civilizj^tion.
This book is intended to give the outlines of that story in one
field only : in literature. It could be told from many other vitally
interesting points of view. In politics, it could be shown how
democracy was invented and its essential powers and mistakes
explored by the Greeks, and how the ideals of democracy were
adopted by the Roman republic, to be revived again in the democratic
constitutions of the modern world ; and how much of our
thinking about the rights and duties of the citizen derives directly
from Greco-Roman thought. In law it would be easy to show how
the central pillars of American and British law, French law, Dutch
law, Spanish and Italian and Latin-American law, and the law of
the Catholic church, were hewn out by the Romans. (And it is
unlikely that we should have constructed them, as they stood,
without any help or stimulus from Rome. Our civilization is
fertile in some kinds of invention, and particularly apt for the
conquest of matter; but not in others. Judging by our inability
to create new artistic forms and new philosophical systems, it is
extremely improbable that, unaided, we could have built up anything
comparable to the firm, lofty structure of Roman law.) In
philosophy and religion, in language and abstract science, and in
the fine artsespecially architecture and sculpture^it could
equally well be shown that much of the best of what we write and
make and think is adapted from the creations of Greece and Rome.
There is nothing discreditable in this. On the contrary : it is discreditable
to ignore and forget it; In civilization as in human life,
the present is the child of the past. Only, in the life of the spirit,
it is permitted to select our ancestors, and to choose the best.
However, this book will deal only with literature, and will refer
to other fields of life only to illustrate important literary events.
Literature will be taken to meam books written in modern languages
or their immediate ancestors. Although Latin was currently
written and spoken in Europe until at least 1860,^ although Latin
is not only an ancient but also a modem European language, in
1. INTRODUCTION 3
which Milton and Landor, Newton and Copernicus, Descartes and
Spinoza, wrote some or all of their best work, the history of Latin
literature written by modern authors is so different from that of the
other European literatures of our era that it must be treated separately.
Still, the fact that Latin continued to live so long as an
independent language, and for some purposes (such as Mass) still
does, is itself one more proof that classical culture is an essential
and active part of our civilization. And thoughts live longer than
languages.
THE FALL OF THE GREEK AND ROMAN CIVILIZATION
It is not always understood nowadays how noble and how widespread
Greco-Roman civilization was, how it kept Europe, the
Middle East, and northern Africa peaceful, cultured, prosperous,
and happy for centuries*, and how much was lost when the savages
and invaders broke in upon it. It was, in many respects, a better
thing than our own civilization until a few generations ago, and it
may well prove to have been a better thing all in all. But we are so
accustomed to contemplating the spectacle of human progress that
we assume modern culture to be better than anything that preceded
it. We forget also how able and how willing men are to
reverse the movement of progress : how many forces of barbarism
remain, like volcanoes in a cultivated island, still powerfully alive,
capable not only of injuring civilization but of putting a burning
desert in its place.
When the Roman empire was at its height, law and order,
education, and the arts were widely distributed and almost universally
respected. In the first centuries of the Christian era there was
almost too much literature ; and so many inscriptions survive, from
so many towns and villages in so many different provinces, that
we can be sure that many, if not most, of the population could read
and write.2 The illiterates were probably (as they are in the United
States) the poorest workers, the least-civilized immigrants, the
slaves or descendants of slaves working on farms, and the inhabitants
of remote districts of forest and mountain.
But two or three generations of war and pestilence and revolution
destroy culture with appalling rapidity. Among the northern
savages who fought each other over the body of the Roman empire,
writing was not only uncommon. It was so rare that it was partly
magic. The runes^which were really a northern European
4 1, INTRODUCTION
alphabetcould raise the dead, bewitch man or nature, and make
warriors and even gods invincible. The word rune means 'a secret.
How barbarous were the people who believed that the purpose of
writing was to keep a thing secret ? Similarly, the word glamour,
which we take to mean magic, really means grammar, the power
of writing. During the Dark Agessay about a.d. 6oocivilization
in the west had dropped back almost to the point whence it
had risen in about looo b.c. : to something even rougher and
simpler than the Homeric age. All through the Iliad and the
Odyssey tokens and symbols are fairly common, but writing is
mentioned only once, and then it is described in a vague and
sinister way. Just as Hamlets companions on his mission to
England, in the original savage story, carried letters "incised in
wood, so Bellerophon was given baneful signs cut in a folding
tablet which called for his execution. 3 Like the runes, they were
rare and uncanny.
The same story of a relapse into barbarism which is told in this
retrogression in European ideas of writing can be read in many
excavations of Roman remains in provinces which have been reclaimed,
like Britain, or, like Asiatic Turkey and north Africa, still
remain more barbarous than they were under the Romans. The
excavator finds the outlines of a large and comfortable country
house, in a beautiful site overlooking a valley or a river, with
elaborate conveniences for living, and evidences of artistic taste
such as mosaic floors and fragments of statuary. It is ruined. On
its ruins it is sometimes possible to show that a later generation,
still half-civilized, established a temporary home, patched up
rather than rebuilt. Then there are new traces of burning and
destruction; and then nothing more. The whole site is covered
with the earth of the slow succeeding centuries, and trees are
rooted high above the decorated floors.^ What the Renaissance
did was to dig down through the silt and find the lost beauties, and
imitate or emulate them. We have continued their work and gone
farther. But now, around us, have appeared the first ruins of what
may be a new Dark Age.
THE DARi; AGES
Civilization did not completely perish during the Dark Ages.
How much of it survived ? and through what channels or transformations
?
1. INTRODUCTION 5
First of all, the languages of the Greco-Roman world survived.
But their fates were strangely different.
Greek was widespread all over the eastern Mediterranean. It
was spoken not only by people of Greek blood but in Egypt, in
Palestine, and elsewhere. s A simple colloquial Greek was the
standard language for intercommunication between Near Eastern
countries which had their own languages: that is why the New
Testament is written in Greek.
In most of Italy, western Europe, and northern Africa Latin was
spoken. Before it, nearly all the scores of native dialects and conquered
languages like Carthaginian disappeared, leaving few traces
in life and none in literature.^ However, at its highest development,
the Roman empire was not Latin-speaking but bilingual in
Latin and Greek. Because of the flexibility of Greek, the Romans
themselves used it as a sbcial and intellectual language. Of course,
they were (except for a few eccentrics) too strongly nationalist to
abandon Latin altogether; but nearly all the upper-class Romans
of the late republic and early empire used Greek not only for
philosophical discussion and literary practice, but for social conversation
and even for love-making. (French played a similar part
in the court of Frederick the Great and in nineteenth-century
Russia. Within living memory there have been noble families in
Bavaria who never spoke German at home, but always French.)
Thus it is that the last words of Julius Caesar, spoken at the actual
moment of his murder, were Greek, and that the emperor Marcus
Aurelius kept his private spiritual diary in Greek.
But in the fourth century the two streams of language and culture
which had flowed together to produce classical Greco-Roman
civilization diverged once again. The essential fact here was the
division of the Roman empire. Having proved impossible to administer
and defend as a unit, the empire was in a.d. 364 divided
into two : a western empire under Valentinian, with its capital at
Milan, and an eastern empire under his brother Valens, with its
capital at Constantinople. Thenceforward, although there were
frequent contacts, the differences between east and west grew
greater and greater. They increased sharply when in a.d. 476 the
last emperor of the v/est (who bore the reminiscent names of
Romulus, after the founder of Rome, and Augustulus, or little
Augustus*) was deposed and his power taken over by semibarbarous
kings; and thereafter they grew constantly more
6 1, INTRODUCTION
intense. After grave dissensions in the eighth and ninth centuries
the Christian churches were finally divided in 1054, when the
pope excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople and the
entire eastern Orthodox church as heretical. And at last the conflict
became virtually a war. The Greek Christian city of Constantinople
was sacked in 1204 by the French and Venetian
Christian armies of the Fourth Crusade, representing the Roman
and Catholic traditions of the west. The modern world still shows
many powerful effects of this division between the empires. The
pagans of western and west-central Europe were converted by the
influence of the church of Rome, but those of Russia and the
Balkans by Constantinople. The division runs down between
Poland and Russia, and is shown in their writing. Although Polish
and Russian are closely related languages, Poland (converted from
Rome 965) uses the Roman alphabet, and Russia (converted from
Byzantium 988) uses the Greek alphabet. But both the modern
emperors called themselves CaesarKaiser in the west and Czar,
or Tsar, in the east.
Long before the sack of Constantinople, Greek had been forgotten
in the west. It continued to be the official language of the
eastern empire until the Turkish conquest in 1453, and a muchdebased
form of the language persisted, even under the Turks,
in parts of Greece proper and of the islands. It has survived to the
present day, and long bore the historical name of Romaici.e.
Roman, the language of the Roman empire. But Greek culture
was cut off from the western parts of Europe during the Dark Ages,
except for the few trickles which penetrated through Arabian and
Jewish channels; and it only returned to the west hundreds of
years later, just in time to escape the mutilation which was to be
inflicted on it in its home by the Turkish barbarians.^
The fate of the Latin language w^as different and more complex,
Latin survived, not in one, but in three different ways.
First, it survived through seven modern languages and a number
of dialects:
Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Rumanian, Catalan,
Provencal; Corsican, Sardinian, Romansch, Ladin, &c.
r
These languages and dialects were not derived from the literary
Latin which we know from Ciceros speeches and Vergils poems,
1. INTRODUCTION 7
but from the simpler basic Latin spoken by soldiers, traders, and
farmers. Yet they are fundamentally Latin in structure and feeling,
and it is through these Latin-speaking nations that most of classical
culture was transmitted to western Europe and America.^
Also, Latin survived in the Catholic church. Here its life was
more complicated. At first the Latin spoken and written in the
church was kept deliberately simple and colloquial, to suit the
simple speech of the Latin-speaking people who were its congregations.
The Bible was translated into this simple Latin with the
express purpose of being understanded of the people. Again and
again, many fathers of the church explain that they care nothing
for fine classical language and style, nothing even for grammar.
All they want is that everyone should be able to understand the
gospels and their sermons. (For instance, the fighting pope,
Gregory I (a.d. 590-604), was bitterly opposed to classical learning,
and said that the colloquial and ungrammatical Latin he spoke
and wrote was the only suitable language for Christian teaching.
The monastic regulations drawn up for the order of St. Benedict
(c. A.D. 530) are one of our best documents for the vocabulary and
grammar of late colloquial Latin.
But, as the barbarian invasions continued and the provinces of
the empire split up into kingdoms and began their separate
existences, that same colloquial Latin split up sectionally, and
developed into the different languages and dialects mentioned
above; and so they grew away, in different directions, from the
simple Latin^of the Bible and the church. At this point the church
had one of the gravest decisions of its history to make : should it
have the Bible and the breviary and the rituals translated again,
into all the various languages of western Christendom, or should
it keep them in the original Latin, which, although originally
simple, was now becoming a dead language, a forgotten language
that had to be studied? For the sake of unity it chose the second
alternative : and so the Latin of the Vulgate, which had once been
deliberately used in order to make the teaching of the church
intelligible to everybody, became an obscure and learned tongue.
The Irish monk, the French priest, who spoke Old Irish or a
primitive French patois froiq. .childhood, and then had to learn
church Latin for his vocation, therefore found it still more difficult
and confusing to learn classical Latin^which was more elaborate,
had a different set of words, and even used a different grammar.
8 1. INTRODUCTION
Few churchmen did so; and, of course, there was always strong
opposition within the church to any study of classical civilization,
because it was the work of a world which was corrupt, pagan, dead,
and damned.
And yet the classical Latin language and literature did survive
in church libraries and schools. Manuscripts were kept, and were
copied by the monks as part of the monastic discipline. And
certain authors were taught to advanced students and commented
on by advanced teachers. But many, many other authors were lost,
in part or wholly, for ever. Pagan authors were much less likely to
survive than Christian authors. Informative authors were much
more likely to survive than emotional and individual authors.
Thus we have still the works of many unimportant gefographers
and encyclopaedists, but hardly any lyrical and dramatic poetry

although in the Greco-Roman world at its height there was far

more emphasis on pure poetry than on predigested information.
Moral critics were likely to survive, but immoralists not: so
Juvenal the satirist survived, and Horace survived chiefly as a
satirist, but Catullus reached us through only one manuscript,
preserved in his home town of Verona, and Petronius was, practically,
lost for ever.^^
Also, the scholars of the Dark Ages were more inclined to read
and copy authors nearer to them in time. Nowadays we are able,
as it were, to survey classical civilization in a single panorama, like
an aviator flying over a mountain range. But in the sixth or ninth
centuries the learned men were like Alpinists who see the nearer
peaks very big and impressive, while the more distant mountains,
although higher, fade into relative obscurity. Therefore they devoted
a great proportion of their time and energy to authors who
are comparatively unimportant but who lived near their own day.
The second main channel for the survival of classical culture in
the Dark Ages was religion. Although the origins of Christianity
were Jewish, other elements not of Jewish origin were embodied
in it by the western and eastern churches. Its early supporters
introduced some folk-lore, for instance. The miraculous birth of
the baby who is to announce a new age of peace and happiness was
a dream of men all over the Mediterranean world in the last centuries
of the pagan era. It appeared in a famous and beautiful
poem by young Vergil forty 3rears before the birth of Jesus the
story as told in Matthew i-ii has little to do with the actual life
1. INTRODUCTION 9
and teaching of Jesus, and is omitted from other gospels. Then, a
little later, Greek philosophy was added. The teachings of Jesus
himself are difficult to put into a single philosophical system; but
Gods purpose in sending him, the existence of the pagan deities,
the position of Christianity in the state, and such topics were
discussed, by the attackers and the defenders of Christianity, on
a philosophical basis. St. Augustine himself, in his autobiography,
actually says it was Ciceros introduction to philosophy, Hottensius,
that turned his own mind towards religion, to Christianity.
Through his works, and the works of many other fathers of the
church, classical philosophy was kept alive, converted to the
service of Christianity, and transmitted to modern times.^s
Even m^re important than the transmission of classical philosophy
was the survival, through the church, of Roman law and
Roman political sense. Even after the Roman empire dissolved
and barbarian kingdoms succeeded it, the western church retained
Roman law for its own use. This is clearly laid down in an early
Germanic law of the sixth century, and although the principle
developed, it did not change.^^ The canon law of the church grew
out of the great civilizing achievement of Roman jurisprudence
;
and it carried on, even through the Dark Ages, not only the methods
and principles of Roman law, but the fundamental conception that
law is a lasting embodiment of right, to be altered only with great
care, and always higher than any individual or group. This is a
conception more effective in western Europe and the Americas and
the English-speaking world than an5rwhere else on the planet, and
we owe it to Rome.
Roman political sense, chiefly as handed on to the church but
also as revived in monarchs like Charlemagne, saved western
Europe from degenerating into a Balkan disorder. Although Rome
was not the city in which Christianity originated or first grew
powerful, although a scholarly Roman at the end of the first
century a.d. knew practically nothing about Christianity and met
it only in the Near East,^7 ^e feel instinctively that it would be
destroying an important value to transfer the seat of the Roman
Catholic church from Rome to Jerusalem. And, although Catholicism
is more firmly established in South America than in Europe,
it would be still more improper to shift the centre of the church to
Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro. It was St. Paul who first felt this
:
for, as Spengler points out,^^ he did not go to the oriental cities of
lo 1. INTRODUCTION
Edessa and Ctesiphon, but to Corinth and to Athens, and then to
Rome. The Catholic church is the spiritual descendant of the
Roman empire. The successorship was marked long ago by-
St. Augustine in his City of God\ it was re-emphasized by Dante;
and it is necessary. Even the geographical distribution of the
power of the church (excluding America) bears a close resemblance
to the geography of the Roman empire ; and the great organization
of the church, with its single earthly ruler, its senate of seventy
princes of the church, its secure provinces under trusted administrators,
and its expeditionary forces in rebellious or unconquered
areas {in partibus infidelium), its diplomatic experience and
skill, its immense wealth, and its untiring perseverance, is not only
parallel in structure to the empire, but is the only continifously effective
international system comparable to that^created by Rome.^^
And lastly, some knowledge of Greco-Roman history and myth
survived through the Dark Ages, though often in a strangely
mutilated and compressed form. Many, perhaps most, of the men
of that time had no sense of historical perspective. As the early
painters mix up in one single tableau scenes distant from one
another in time, or draw in one plane, differentiated only by size,
figures which really belong to several different levels of perspective,
so the men of the Dark Ages confused the immediate with
the remote past and the historical with the fabulous. A good nonliterary
example of this is the famous Franks Casket, an Anglo-
Saxon box carved of whalebone about the eighth century a.d.^o
The pictures on it show six different heroic scenes from at least
three very distant ages:
Romulus, Remus, and two wolves (c. 800 b.c. ?)
the adoration of the Wise Men (a.d. o) ;
the capture of Jerusalem by the Romans (a.d. 70);
the story of Weland and Beadohild (c. a.d. 400 ?)
and an unknown myth, as well as an inscription about the
whale itself.
Evidently the artist did not feel the long, receding corridor of
fifteen hundred years, where these adventures, of different origins
and natures, had their places, on behind another, this near and
that remote. He saw one single unit, the Heroic Past; but some of
that past was Greco-Roman. This unitary view of history grew
more orderly and complex as the Dark Ages civilized themselves.
1. INTRODUCTION II
and at last it found its highest manifestation in the great review of
history which Dante called his Comedy.
THE MIDDLE AGES
The Dark Ages in western Europe were scarcely civilized at all.
Here and there, there were great men, noble institutions, beautiful
and learned works; but the mass of people were helpless both
against nature and against their oppressors, the raiding savages,
the roaming criminals, and the domineering nobles. The very
physical aspect of Europe was repellent : a continent of ruins and
jungles, dotted with rude forts, miserable villages, and tiny
scattered towns which were joined by a few atrocious roads, and
between A^hich lay huge backwoods areas where the land and
natives were nearly as savage as in central Africa. In contrast to
that gloomy and almost static barbarism, the MiddleAges represent
the gradual, steady, laborious progress of civilization; and the
Renaissance a sudden explosive expansion, in which the frontiers
of space and time and thought were broken down or pushed outwards
with bewildering and intoxicating speed.
Much of the progress of the Middle Ages was educational
progress; and one of its chief marks was that the knowledge of
classical thought, language, and literature expanded and deepened.
Organizations were founded or reoriented in order to study the
classics. The universities appeared, like street-lights going on one
by one after a blackout: Salerno, the earliest, and Bologna, Paris,
Oxford, Cambridge, Montpellier, Salamanca, Prague, Cracow,
Vienna, Heidelberg, St. Andrews ; and then schools, like Eton and
Winchester. These universities, although their staff and most of
their students were churchmen, were not clerical institutions.
They were advanced schools rather than religious seminaries; and
from their inception they had students who ranged more widely
than divinity. They were devoted, not to language and literature
as we understand the terms, but to philosophy: and philosophy
meant the Greek philosophy of Aristotle, however deviously
acquired and strangely transformed.
At the same time, the standard of scholarship rose within
certain of the monastic ordej;s. The Benedictines in particular
built up a tradition of learning and aesthetic sensibility which still
survives : many of our finest medieval manuscripts of the classics
were written for or preserved in Benedictine libraries.
12 1. INTRODUCTION
These scholarly activities were stimulated by correspondence,
and still more by travel. The men of the Middle Ages were great
travellers. Think of the Canterbury Pilgrims as types of the folk
who longed to go on pilgrimages; and remember the travelling
already done by the Knight (who had been in southern Spain,
Russia, northern Africa, and Turkey) and by the Wife of bisyde
Bath (who had been three times to Jerusalem, as well as visiting
Cologne and Compostella). Relatively far more people travelled
for education then than now. That strange cosmopolitan group,
the wandering scholars, with their wits sharpened by travel and
competition, played a considerable part in increasing the general
knowledge of the classics.^^ They improved the standards of
philosophical discussion; and by debate, competition, "" and criticism
they helped to prepare the way for modern scholarship. Of
course, they all spoke Latin and usually nCthing but Latin. They
argued, corresponded, delivered speeches, made jokes, and wrote
satires in Latin. It was not a dead language but a living speech.
It was the international language of the Middle Ages, not only for
philosophical debate, but for science and diplomacy and polite
conversation. (A. J. Toynbee, in A Study of History, 5. 495-6, is
disastrously wrong in stating that this international language was
directly descended from the Dog Latin of the Roman slums.
Low Latin actually grew into the modern Romance languages.
The international Latin was a direct continuation of classical
Latin, learnt through a continuous tradition of scholarly intercourse,
with at most some Low Latin influence from early church
writings.)
To-day many of us find it hard to understand why any intelligent
man in the twelfth or thirteenth or fourteenth century should
have spoken Latin and written books in Latin when he had a
language of his own. We instinctively think of this as reactionary.
The explanation is that the choice did not then lie between Latin
and a great modern language like Spanish or English, but between
Latin and some little dialect which was far less rich, far less supple,
far less noble in its overtones, and far less widely understood than
Latin. If a medieval philosopher wanted to write a book about
God, no single contemporary European tongue could provide him
with enough words and sentence-patterns to do it, and very few
with an audience which was more than^^merely parochial. And in
addition, few of the dialects had ever been written down, so that
1 . INTRODUCTION 13
their spelling and syntax provided still another difficulty for him
to surmount in expressing his thoughts. We can understand this
if we look at a modern parallel. Suppose an intelligent native of
Cura9ao in the Dutch West Indies wanted to write a novel about
the life of his people. It would be appropriate if he wrote it in
Papiamento, the local patois; but he would then find it very
difficult to set down anything beyond simple dialogue and descriptions.
And no one would read his book outside Cura9ao until it
was translated into Dutch, or English, or Spanish, or one of
the culture-languages. It would be the same ^ if he were an
Indian writing Navaho, or a native of eastern Switzerland writing
Romansch^ or a New Orleans Creole writing Gombo,^^ or a Basque
or a Neapolitan or a Finn writing in his mother tongue. The
reason is that local languages and dialects are useful to their own
groups, for daily life and for their own songs and stories, but
only the great languages can be used for the higher purposes of
communicating thought and spreading knowledge throughout the
civilized world.^s
Again, in the Middle Ages better books were read. During the
Dark Ages readers had paid great attention to comparatively late
and unimportant authors. The Middle Ages began to correct this
attitude. Manuscripts of the greatest classical writers, so far as
they were then known, began to increase in number. Libraries
were enlarged and systematized in abbeys, monasteries, and
universities. Anda sure sign of intellectual activity^translations
from Latin into vernacular languages became much more frequent
and much better.
Still Greek remained almost a closed field. Again and again
one finds that the medieval copyist who writes Latin correctly and
beautifully breaks down when he comes to Greek : he will copy a
string of gibberish, or add a plaintive note saying because this was
in Greek, it was unreadable. The division of the empires was
almost complete. In Latin there is an unbroken line of intellectual
succession from ancient Rome to the present day: remote, but
unbroken. We learn Latin from someone who learnt it from
someone . . . whose educational ancestor was a Roman. But the
Imowledge of Greek in western Europe died out almost completely
in the Dark Ages ; the few islands of spoken Greek that remained
in the west were outside the main streams of culture. It was almost
as hard to get beyond classical Latin to classical Greek as it would
14 1. INTRODUCTION
be for us to reconstruct the language of the Incas. A knowledge of
Hebrew and Arabic was probably commoner than a knowledge of
Greek. Aristotle was read, not in the language he wrote, but in
Latin translationssome made by Boethius soon after the fall of
the empire, others written by Jews from Arabic translations, and
others produced at the direction of St. Thomas Aquinas and forming
part of the general re-educajtion of Europe. Dante, whose
scholarship was very considerable, appears to have known no more
than a word or two of Greek. Nowadays, when both languages are
equally dead, schoolboys who begin one of them always start with
Latin; this is a survival of the curriculum of medieval schools
and thus, at a distant remove, a result of the division of the
empires.
However, the knowledge of Latin was constantly extending and
improving. The effect of this was to improve the western European
languages, most of which only took shape after the close of the
Dark Ages. French, Italian, Spanish, all expanded their vocabularies
by bringing in words from classical Latinsometimes
pedantic and silly additions, but more often valuable words to
connote intellectual, artistic, and scientific ideas which had been
badly or inadequately understood for lack of the language with
which to discuss them. English expanded in a similar way. And,
as any enlargement in language makes human thought more
flexible and copious, literature immediately benefited, becoming
subtler, more powerful, and far more varied. The study of Latin
poetry, and the attempt to emulate its beauties in current European
languages, assisted in the foundation of many modem national
literatures and greatly extended the range of those which already
existed.
THE RENAISSANCE
The life of the Middle Ages, though violent and exciting and
prone to strange sudden outbursts of energy, was essentially one
of slow gradual change from generation to generation. The
medieval world was built as unhurriedly and elaborately as its own
cathedrals. But the important thing about the Renaissance is its
unbelievable rapidity. Recently ourselves, within one or two
generations, have seen an equally sudden change^the expansion
in mechanical power, from the first electric niotor and the first
internal-combustion engine to far greater sources of energy, so
1. INTRODUCTION iS
great that the abolition of human labour is a possible achievement.
In much wider variety, but in the same astounding accelerando,
new possibilities burst upon the men of the Renaissance, decade
after decade, year after year, month after month. Geographical
discoveries enlarged the world^we can scarcely imagine how
surprisingly unless we conceive of expeditions to-day piercing two
thousand miles deep into the intj^rior of the earth, or exploring the
depths of the ocean to find new elements and new habitable areas,
or visiting and settling in other planets. At the same time, the
human body was discovered, both as an inspiration of beauty for
the sculptor and painter and as a world of intellectual interest to
be explored by the anatomist. Mechanical inventions and scientific
discoveries made the world more manageable and man more
powerful than ever before. Not only the printing-press and gunpowder,
but the compass, the telescope, and the great mechanical
principles that inspired Leonardo da Vinci, made it easier for man
to master his environment; while the revolutionary cosmological
theory of the Polish scientist Copernicus dissolved the entire
physical universe of medieval mankind.
In literature, our chief concern, the tempo of change was quite
as rapid. Much of the change was caused by new discoveries,
characteristic of an age of exploration; but the scholars of that time
called it rebirth.
Many manuscripts of forgotten Latin books and lost Latin
authors were discovered, hidden in libraries where they had lain
untouched and neglected since being copied hundreds of years
before. The great book-finder Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459)
describes how he would talk his way into monasteries, ask to see
the library, and find manuscripts covered with dust and debris,
lying in leaky rat-ridden attics : with touching emotion he speaks
of them looking up at him for help, as though they were living
friends of his in hospital or in prison.^^ Discovering a manuscript
of an author already known is scarcely very interesting, unless it is
extremely rare or ancient ; but the excitement of the Renaissance
scholars came from discovering quite unknown works by authors
whom they knew and admired, and sometimes from finding the
books of writers whose works had been entirely lost and who had
been known only from a fe^ quotations in encyclopaedias. Their
excitement was intensified by the precariousness of the operation.
It was like looking for buried diamonds. A number of authors
i6 1. INTRODUCTION
were found in only one manuscript, and no more copies of their
books have ever been discovered.
This activity was paralleled by the rediscovery of classical works
of art which had been buried in the ground for a thousand years
and more: the famous statues, the cameos, coins, and medals
which now fill museums all over the world. Thus, the Laocoon
was dug up in a vineyard among^the ruins of the Baths of Titus,
and straightway bought by Pope Julius II for the Vatican Museum.
When one particularly fine statue was excavated, it was carried in
a special procession, with music and flowers and oratory, to be
shown to the pope. This work was not scientific excavation but
artistic investigation. It was art that was being searched for, and
artists studied it when it emerged. As each new statue came to
light, artists began to copy and emulate its special beauties, and
sometimes to restore, with the dashing self-confidence of that era,
its missing limbs. The Medici Pope Leo X appointed a general
superintendent of antiquities for the city of Rome who produced
a plan for excavating the innumerable hidden treasures that lay
beneath the gardens, cottages, and ruins. His name was Raphael.
An even more important rediscovery was that of the classical
Greek language. This was a slower event. It had two main
aspects.
Western scholars learned Greek from Byzantine visitors to Italy.
Petrarch was the first to make this attempt. He started in 1339,
with the monk Barlaam, who was apparently a secret agent of the
eastern empire. But he was too old, the lessons were broken off,
and he had to be content with a Pisgah-sight. However, in 1360,
his younger friend Boccaccio had one of Barlaams pupils, Leontius
Pilatus, made the first professor of Greek in western Europe
at Florence, which long remained the centre of this activity. With
Leontiuss help Boccaccio produced the first complete translation
of Homer, into very wooden Latin prose. Subsequently other
emissaries from Byzantium continued the work of teaching Greek
in Italy.^5
Now, the official and court language of Byzantium was recognizably
connected with classical Greek through a continuous
living chain of descent; but it wasmot classical Greek. Therefore,
although the Byzantines could teach classical Greek to the Italians
as a living, though archaic, language, they introduced Byzantine
methods of writing and pronunciation which were false to classical
1. INTRODUCTION 17
standards and took a long time to eradicate. Gibbon illustrates the
difficulty by an amusing note
The modern Greeks pronounce the as a V consonant, and confound
three vowels and several diphthongs. Such was the vulgar pronunciation
which the stern Gardiner maintained by penal statutes in the
university of Cambridge (Gibbon was an Oxford man) ; but the monosyllable
^7} represented to an Attic ear the bleating of sheep, and a bellwether
is better evidence than a l?ishop or a chancellor.
As for writing, the first printers took for their models the best
available standards of handwriting. Therefore, when they undertook
to print Greek they asked Byzantine scribes to write out alphabets
on which to model their founts. But Byzantine handwriting
was very different from Greek as written in classical times. It was
full of contractions, or ligatures, used to increase speed in cursive
writing : ou, for instance,' became and /cat became In Roman
type we still keep a few such contractions: fl, for instance, and &;
but there they are not cumbrous, while the early Greek founts
were full of them, so much as to be unreadable by non-specialists,
difficult to set, and expensive. One Oxford Greek fount needed
354 matrices. They were gradually expelled during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries
; yet the slope of Byzantine Greek handwriting
survives in the Greek type used by most university presses,
and purists are still urging that the Greek founts be redesigned to
cut out the last Byzantine influence and to present the language as
the classical Greeks wrote it.^^^
The second aspect of the rediscovery of classical Greek was the
appearance of manuscripts of Greek authors in the west. As the
Turks drew nearer Constantinople, there was an exodus of
scholarly emigrants, like the exodus from central Europe to
America in 1933; and the Byzantine refugees brought Greek
manuscripts with them. At the same time, Italian patrons of
learning were eagerly searching for Greek manuscripts in both
east and west. Gibbon quotes the statement that Lorenzo de^
Medici of Florence sent his Greek agent, Janus Lascaris, to
Greece to buy good books at any price whatever, and that
Lascaris actually visited the remote monastery of Mount Athos
and found the works of the Athenian orators. Before Lorenzo the
same activity had been carried on by his grandfather Cosimo and
by Pope Nicholas V (who reigned from 1447 to 1455). It was
Nicholas who created the present Vatican Library, employing
5076 Q
1
8
1. INTRODUCTION
hundreds of copyists and scholars, and in a reign of eight years,
formed a library of five thousand volumes.^^
Thus the greater part of classical culture was discovered as
though it were absolutely new, while mens knowledge of the other
part, the Latin area, was immensely extended. The effect on
modern languages and literatures was immediate and has not yet
disappeared ; it is a revelation of tjpie amazing power and flexibility
of the human mind that all the new ideas, emotions, and artistic
devices could be so easily and sanely assimilated as they were. It
was as though the range of colours visible to the eye had suddenly
been enlarged, from the present small spectrum of seven to twelve,
and as though artists had been supplied both with new media to
work in and with new subjects to paint. We shall study the effects
of this revolution in detail later, and meanwhile summarize them.
Of course classical scholarship took a tremendous forward leap.
At last, men began really to understand and sympathize with the
ancients. Difficulties of interpretation, confusions of personalities
and traditions, stupid myths and silly misunderstandings which
had existed since the onset of barbarism, perpetuated century
after century by rationalization and misinterpretation, began
rapidly to disappear. Vast areas of antiquity were explored,
mapped, and became real. The Latin of western scholars improved
until it was not far inferior to that of Cicero himself.
Symonds particularly emphasizes the work of Coluccio de
Salutati, who became the chancellor of Florence in 1375 and for
over twenty-five years wrote diplomatic correspondence and
political pamphlets in Latin so pure and pointed that it was admired
and imitated by the chanceries of all the other Italian powers,
including the Vatican.^^
The Romance languages were still further enriched by the
incorporation of words taken directly from classical Latin and, to
a smaller but still important extent, from classical Greek. English
also assimilated Greek and Latin words, some directly from the
classics and otjtiers from adaptations already made by French and
Italian writers. Only lexicographers can trace the exact proportion
between these two different types of loan-words in English. But
they combined with the Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French bases
of English to make it far wealthier t|ian any Romanic tongue as
a vehicle for literature. Again and again, Shakespeare makes his
finest effects from a combination of genuine old English, simple
1 . INTRODUCTION 19
and strong, with the subtler Norman-French and the grander
Latin derivative : thus

This my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one vtdJ^
But German and the othe^r northern European languages

Swedish, Flemish, &c.^were scarcely expanded at all by this new
Imowledge of Latin and Greek. After all, English is akin to Latin
through one of its ancestors, Norman-French. German, having
no such close kinship, finds it more difficult to borrow and assimilate
Latin words. Besides, the standard of culture in Germany
was then relatively low; and although classical scholars and
humanists existed, the interaction between them and the general
public in Germany was far more tenuous than, for instance, in
France and Italy.
During this period, the Poles wrote nearly all their prose and
poetry in Latin, the Russians in Old Slavonic. The native literatures
went on in their own way, almost unaffected by the rediscovery
of classical literature in the west. The Turkish conquest,
which cut the current of civilization that had been flowing into the
Slavic peoples from Byzantium, was a serious set-back to Russian
culture.
The rediscovery of the classics meant much more in western
Europe than an enrichment of the vocabularies of the Romance
tongues and of English. It improved and extended the styles used
by poets, orators, and prosaists. The Roman, and still more the
Greek, writers and orators were extremely subtle and experienced
artisans in language. There is hardly a single stylistic trick now
in use in modern writing which they did not invent. The vernacular
writers of the Renaissance eagerly imitated all the newly
found devices of sentence-structure and paragraph-structure, of
versification, of imagery and rhetorical arrangement, copying and
adapting them in the modern languages as enthusiastically as the
Renaissance latinists did in Latin. It is this that really makes the
watershed between pre-Renaissance and post-Renaissance literature.
We feel of many medical writers that their style, by its
naivete and awkwardness,, cramps their thought: that^ it was
painfully difficult for them to get their ideas into words and their
words into groups. But from the Renaissance on there is no
20 1. INTRODUCTION
such difficulty. In fact, the reverse : there are many good stylists
who have little or nothing to say. The comparative fluency with
which we write to-day is because we are part of the rich tradition
of classical style that re-entered western European literature at
the Renaissance.
Even more important than stylistic innovations was the discovery
of literary forms. There h^s only been one people which
could invent many important literary forms capable of adaptation
into many other languages and of giving permanent aesthetic
pleasure : the Greeks. Until the models which they perfected and
the Romans elaborated were rediscovered, western Europe had
to invent its own forms. It did so imperfectly and with great
difficulty, apart from small folk-patterns like songs and fables.
The revelation of the Greco-Roman forms 6f literature, coming
together with the introduction of so many stylistic devices, the
expansion in language, and the wealth of material provided by
classical history and legend, stimulated the greatest production of
masterpieces the modern world has ever seen
:
tragedy in England, France, and Spain;
comedy in Italy, England, and France;
epic in Italy, England, and Portugal;
lyric and pastoral in Italy, France, England, Spain, and
Germany
;
satire in Italy, France, and England;
essays and philosophical treatises throughout western Europe
;
oratory throughout western Europe: there is a continuous
line of descent from the Renaissance stylists to such modern
orators as Abraham Lincoln, who used, with great effect,
dozens of naturalized Greco-Latin rhetorical devices. '
The Renaissance also opened up a vast storehouse of new
material to western European writers in the form of classical
history and mythology. Some of it was known in the Middle Ages,
but not so fully realized. Now authors seized on this treasure and
exploited it so enthusiastically that they often turned out elaborately
polished trash. It is almost impossible nowadays not to be
bored with their endless classical*" allusions^which if commonplace
are hackneyed and if scholarly are obscure; with their
classical comparisonsevery orator a Cicero, every soldier a
Hector; and with the mythological apparatusBacchus and the
1. INTRODUCTION 21
fauns, Diana and the nymphs, shepherds and harpies, Titans and
cupids^which loads the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, often to the exclusion of all matters of real
interest. The best evidence that the myths invented by the Greek
imagination are really immortal is the fact that they survived such
treatment, and are still stimulating the imagination of poets and
artists. ^
Finally, the rediscovery of classical culture in the Renaissance
was more than the addition of books to the library. It involved an
expansion in the powers and resources of all the artssculpture,
architecture, painting, and music tooand a closer, more fruitful
alliance between them. As in every great artistic era, all the arts
stimulated one another. The sense of beauty was strengthened and
subtilized. Pictures* were painted, poems were written, gardens
were designed and armour forged and books printed for the chief
purpose of giving aesthetic pleasure; and the detestable medieval
habit of extracting a moral lesson from every fact or work of art
was graduallyalthough certainly not entirelyabandoned. The
faculty of criticism, hitherto almost confined to philosophical and
religious controversy, was now applied intensely to the artsand
not only to the arts, but by radiation from them to social life, to
manners, costumes, physical habits, horses, gardens, ornaments,
to every field of human life. The sense of beauty always exists in
mankind. During the Dark Ages it was almost drowned in blood
and storms ; it reappeared in the Middle Ages, although hampered
and misdirected. Its revivification as a critical and creative faculty
in the Renaissance was one of the greatest achievements of the
spirit of Greece and Rome.
2
THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE
OF all the great modern European languages, English has by
far the largest and most important early literature. During
the Dark Ages of history, between the fall of Rome and, say, the
year looo, there must have been some vernacular poetry in France,
in Italy, in Russia, in Spain, and elsewherealthough it is unlikely
that there was much more than songs and ballads in local
dialects. But virtually none of it has survived : it may never have
been written down. In German there is nothing but two or three
fragments of war-poems; two poetic paraphrases of the Gospel
story, with a section of a poem on Genesis"and a short description
of Doomsday ; and several of Notkers philosophical and biblical
translations. In the peripheral landsIceland, Ireland, Norway,
Walesthere were growing up interesting collections of sagas
and romances, mythical, gnomic, and occasionally elegiac poems;
and in popular Greek some ballads and heroic tales have survived.
Of course Latin books were being written in a continuous international
tradition, while the Byzantine scholars continued, often
with remarkable freshness, to compose in the forms of classical
Greek literature. But scarcely anything else has survived in the
language of the people out of so many centuries.
However, long before looo, a rich, varied, original, and lively
national literature was being created in England. It began soon
after the western Roman empire fell
j
and it developed, in spite of
frightful difficulties, during the dismal years known as the Dark
Ages, when western European civilization was fighting its way up
from barbarism once again.
ANGLO-SAXON POETRY
The most important poem in old English literature is an epic
called Beowulf. It deals with two heroic exploits in the life of a
warrior chief, but also covers his youth, his accession to the throne,
his kingship, and his death. Beowdlf is his name, and he is called
prince of the Geatas. This tribe is Jbelieved to have lived in
Gotaland, which is still the name of southern Sweden; and the
battle in which his uncle Hygetac was killed is known to have
2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE 23
occurred about the year a.d. 520.^ The chief tribes mentioned are
the Angles, the Swedes, the Franks, the Danes, and the Geatas
themselves. The material of the poem was therefore brought over
from the Baltic area by some of the fierce war-bands who invaded
Britain after the Romans left it.
Its chief interest is that it shows us an earlier stage of development
in European civilization than any other comparable document,
Greek and Roman books included. Compare it with Homer.
The type of life described, a disorganized world of tribal states,
raiding-parties, and gallant chiefs, is pretty much the same.
Beowulf himself would have been welcomed in the camp of the
Achaeans outside Troy, and would have won the swimming
prize at tatroclus funeral games. But there are important
differences
:
{d) In Beowulf
y
the conflict is between man and the sub-human.
Beowulfs chief enemy Grendel is a giant cannibal living in a cave.
(Apart from GrendePs terrific size, he is not necessarily a mere
fable. As late as the seventeenth century there are reports from
outlying parts of Europe of cannibal families inhabiting caves not
unlike GrendePs. The most famous case is Sawney Bean, in
southern Scotland.) The other opponent of Beowulf is a firedrake,
a flame-spitting dragon guarding a treasure. So the story represents
the long fight between brave tribal warriors on one side and,
on the other, the fierce animals of the wilderness and the bestial
cave-beings who live outside the world of men and hate it.^ But
in the Iliad the war is between raiding tribesmen from a Greece
which, though primitive, is not empty of towns and commerce,
and the rich civilized Asiatic city of Troy, with rich and civilized
allies like Memnon. There is no prolonged conflict between men
and animal monsters in Homer. (Bellerophon was forced to fight
against a lion-goat-snake monster, the Chimera, which breathed
fire; but that incident takes only five lines to narrate. ^ The chief
Homeric parallels to this aspect of Beowulf are to be found in
the Odyssey
y
where they are located in wild regions far outside the
Greek world : GrendePs nearest kinsmen are the Cyclopes of the
Sicilian mountains, or the man-eating Laestrygones in the land of
the midnight sun.) Compared*with Homer, Beowulfs adventures
take place, not in the morning light of civilization, but in the
twilight gloom of that huge, lonely, anti-human world, the forest
primeval, the world so beautifully and horribly evoked by Wagner
24 2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE
in The Ring of the Niheliings ; or that of the weird Finnish Kalevala,
which is ennobled in the music of Sibelius.
(b) The world of Beozvulf is narrower and simpler than that of
Homer. Mens memories are very short. Their geographical
range is small : north central Europe, bounded by pathless forest
and serpent-haunted sea, with no trace of Slavs or Romans beyond.
Within this frontier their settlements are lonely, scattered, and ill
organized. When new champions face each other in the Iliad, or
when Odysseus makes a new landfall in the Odyssey, there is
usually a polite but clear exchange of information which shoots
rays of light into the surrounding darkness. We hear of great cities
in the distance and great heroes in the past. The result is that the
epics gradually build up a rich collection of historical and geographical
knowledge, rather like the books of Judges and Samuel
in the Bible. But Beowulf contains faf less such information,
because its characters and composers knew far less of the past and
of the world around. Any three thousand lines of Iliad or Odyssey
take us into a wider, more populous, more highly explored and
interdependent world than all the 3,183 lines of Beowulf] and the
customs, weapons, stratagems, arts, and personalities of Homer
are vastly more complex than those of the Saxon epic.
(c) Artistically, Beowulf is a rude and comparatively unskilled
poem. Epic poetry is, like tragedy, a highly developed literary
growth. Its wild ancestors still exist in many countries. They
are short poems describing single deeds of heroic energy or
suffering: the ballads of the Scottish borders, the songs about
Marko Kraljevic and other Serbian chiefs, the fine Anglo-Saxon
fragment, Maldon, about a battle against the invading Danes.
Sometimes these are roughly linked together, to make a cycle or
a chronicle telling of many great exploits performed in one war,
or under one dynasty, or by one group of strong men.^ But still
these do not make an epic. All the adventures of Hercules, or
King David, or King Arthur and his knights, will form an interesting
story, but they will not have the artistic impact of a real epic.
An epic is made by a single poet (or perhaps a closely linked
succession, a family of poets) who relates one great heroic adventure
in detail, connecting it with as mueh historical, geographical, and
spiritual background as will make it something much more deeply
significant than any isolated incident, however remarkable, and
causing it to embody a profound moral truth.
2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE 25
Now, most of the heroic poetry in the world belongs to the first
stage of this development. It tells the story of Sir Patrick Spens,
or the battle of Otterbum, and then stops. There is an Anglo-
Saxon poem like this, called Finnsburh^ which we can also find
built into Beowulf in a different shape, like the little chapel
which later architects have worked into a large and complex
church. 5 The Icelandic sagas correspond to the second stage, the
long chroniclealthough a few, like Njdla, have the nobility of
true epic. Beowulf is a dogged, though unskilled, attempt to reach
the third stage, and to make a poem combining unity and variety,
heroic action and spiritual meaning. Here is its skeleton
:
ioor-1,062 Beowulf fights the giant Grendel;
1,233-1,921 Beowulf fights GrendeFs mother;
2,211-3,183 Beowulf fights the fiery dragon, and dies.
So the poem is mostly occupied by relating two (or at most three)
heroic adventures, which are essentially similar, not to say repetitious.
Two happen in a distant country and the third at the end of
Beowulfs long life ; while his accession to the throne and his fifty
years reign are passed over in less than 150 lines. ^ The other
episodes, evoking the past,^ comparing Beowulf with earlier
heroes, s and foretelling the gloomy future,^ were designed to coordinate
these adventures into a single multidimensional structure
;
but the builder could scarcely plan well enough. It would have
been astonishing If the age which made only the most primitive
churches and castles and codes of law could have produced poets
with the power to conceive a large and subtle plan and to impose it
on the rough recalcitrant material and half-barbarous audiences
with which they had to deal. The style and language of the poem,
in comparison with the greater epics of Greece and Rome, are
limited in range, sometimes painfully harsh and difficult; yet, even
if awkward, they are tremendously bold and powerful, like the
hero of whom they tell.^*^
There is apparently no direct classical influence on Beowulf dind.
the other Anglo-Saxon secular poems.^^ They belong to a different
world from that of Greco-Roman civilization. Attempts have been
made to prove that Beowulf instates the Aeneid, but they consist
mainly in showing that both poems describe distantly similar
heroic incidents in heroic language; and on these lines we could
prove that the Indian epic poets copied Homer. The differences in
26 2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE
language, structure, and technique are so striking as to make any
material resemblance merely coincidental, even if it were probable
that a poet working in one difficult tradition at such a period would
borrow from another even more difficult. When early craftsmen
like the creator of Beowulf know any classical literature, they are
forced by its superior power and elaboration to adapt it very
carefully and obviously.
There is, however, a certain amount of Christian influence

although it is evidently peripheral, and later than the main conception

of the poem. Beowulf
y
like the world in which it grew,
shows Christian ideals superimposed upon a barbarous pagan
substructure, and just beginning to transform it. We see the same
thing in some of the Icelandic sagas and in the Gaelic legends.
Lady Gregory tells how Oisin argued with St. Patrick from the old
heroic standpoint, and said to him:
Many a battle and many a victory was gained by the Fianna of
Ireland; I never heard any great deed was done by the King of Saints
(i.e. Jesus), or that he ever reddened his hand.^^
So Beowulf hath begins and ends with a thoroughly pagan funeral.
It is significant also that, when Heorot the haunted palace was
first opened, a minstrel sang a song about the first five days of
Creation (evidently based on Genesis, like Caedmons hymn) ; but
later, when the ogre began to attack the palace, the chiefs who
debated about preventive measures vowed sacrifices to the slayer
of souls" ( = the devil = a pagan divinity). Such inconsistency
can be a sign either of interpolation or of the confusion of cultures.
What Christian influence doesappearisstrictly OldTestamenttradition.
The audience of Beowulf, the half-barbarous folk" to whom
Aldhelm sang vernacular songs, was scarcely at an intellectual and
spiritual level which would permit it to appreciate the gospels
and the Pauline epistles. God is simply a monotheistic king, ruler,
and judge, venerable because of His power. There is no mention
of Jesus Christ, of the cross, of the church, of saints, or of angels.^ 3
One or two early Old Testament stories appear, as it were grafted
upon paganism: the giant Grendel, together with ogres and elves
and sea-monsters", is said to come i)f the race of the fratricide Cain
;
and there is a mention of the Flood. But all this, although it
comes through the Latin Bible, is cfassical influence at its very
thinnest. Greece and Rome had no immediate influence on Beo2
. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE 27
wulf and its kindred poems, any more than on the Welsh Malinogion^
the stories of Fingal and his warriors, the great legends of
Arthur, and other heroic tales which grew up along the frontiers
of the dissolving civilization of Rome. Classical influence, if it
reached them and their makers at all, reached them through the
church. After the Greek world had been cut off and the Roman
world barbarized, the church civilized the barbarians. Beowulf
allows us to see how it began : gradually and wisely, by converting
them. Aftermany dark centuries, Europe regained civilization, urged
forward largely by feeling, once again, the stimulus of the spirit
of Greece and Rome ; but it was the church which, by transmitting
a higher vision through that influence, began the reconquest of
the victorious barbarians upon the ruins of the defeated empire.
In A Study of History Mr. A. J. Toynbee discusses the very odd
fact that none of the northern epics describes the greatest war-like
achievement of their peoples, the overthrow of the Roman empire. ^5
His explanation is that the barbarians found the Romans too
complex to write about, and the chiefs who conquered them (such
as Clovis and Theodoric) too dull. This answer is incomplete.
Not all the victors were dull. Many were memorable figures like
Attila ( = Etzel and Atli in epic and saga). But the Roman
empire was indeed too vast and complicated. Its conquest therefore
took too long for the tribesmen and tribal poets to see it as one
heroic effort. The Iliad is not about the siege of Troyalthough,
because of Homers genius, it implies the ten years fighting and
the final capture : still less is it about the whole invasion of the
Mediterranean area by the men from the north. For primitive
man the stimulus to action and to poetry is single: an insult, a
woman, a monster, or a treasure. Further, although they looted
cities in the Roman empire, although they displaced ofScials and
occupied territories, many of the barbarians did not think they
were subjugating an alien enemy so much as taking over their due
share in privileges from which they had been kept. They did not
abolish the empire. They moved in and took it over. To adapt a
phrase of Mommsens, the conquest meant the romanization of the
barbarians even more than the barbarization of the Romans.^^
And lastly (as Mr. Toynbee hin4s) the very process of conquering
the empire tended to abolish their urge towards epic literature, for
it was a successful operation, and a success that made them richer
and more staid. Heroic poetry seldom describes successes, unless
28 2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE
against fearful odds. It prefers to tell of the defeat which makes
the brave man even braver and rounds off his life.^^ Not through
conquering Rome would the barbarians will become harder
and their hearts keener. But centuries later they re-created
the heroic style. When they themselves, led by a new Caesar (a
Christian of barbarian descent), w^ere threatened by new pagans no
less formidable, then, over high mountain and dark valley, rang
out the dying trumpet of RolanS.
Christian English poetry is specifically stated by the greatest
English historian of the Dark Ages to have sprung from the Anglo-
Saxon poetic tradition. The story is in Bedes Ecclesiastical History
of the English Nation. Bede explains that at parties *it was often
arranged that each guest in turn should play the harp and sing a
song (the songs must all have been on non-religious subjects).
A Northumbrian cowherd called Caedmon had lived to an advanced
age without learning any poetry, so he used to leave the party
before his turn came. But one night, after doing this and going
away by himself to sleep in the byre, guarding the cattle, he was
inspired in a dream to sing about the beginning of created things,
in praise of God the Creator. When he woke he had firmly in his
memory all that he had sung in his sleep, and to these words he
later added others in the same noble religious style. After news of
this was taken to Whitby Abbey, Caedmon was examined by the
abbess Hilda and declared to be divinely inspired. The monks
repeated to him the text of a sacred story or lesson to turn into
verse, and he did it overnight. He could neither read nor write
;
but all he could learn by listening he pondered in his heart.
Taken into the abbey, he was taught the contents of the Old and
New Testaments. Gradually, ruminating like a clean animal, he
turned the stories and teachings of the Bible into Anglo-Saxon
poetry.^9 And sosome time after a.d. 657, when Whitby Abbey
was founded^the two great traditions, Anglo-Saxon and Latin,
flowed together. When Csedmon ruminated the sublime chapters
of the Bible and turned them into sweet songs, he was doing what
secular poets like Deor and Widsith did with legends of old
chieftains and battles long ago. But the material he was using was
translated for him by scholars using the Latin Bible.^o
synthesis is symbolized by the fact that Caedmon gave up his
secular life and entered the monastery.
2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE 29
Of Caedmons poetry nothing now remains except a fragment
which is the right beginning for the long magnificent series of
Christian poems in Englisha short and beautiful hymn to God
the Creator. But there are other Old English poems written later,
on Caedmons system and probably inspired by his example. They
are poetic paraphrases and expansions of biblical narratives,
apparently by authors who could jead the originals in Latin. The
essential fact about them is that they combine Bible tradition
with Anglo-Saxon style and feeling. They are written in the same
short rough metre and the same poetic language as Beowulf^ full
of fist-griping, teeth-grinding phrases. And they have all the
martial energy and strength of will characteristic of Old English
secular poetry. Abraham appears in Gefieds as a bold Hebrew
earl rescuing Lot from the northmen. The grim resolution of
Satans rallying speech m Genesis B (which may conceivably have
been known to Milton^^) is that of a thousand northern chiefs who,
although defeated, had courage never to submit or yield. The
material of these poems is not Christian tradition but Jewish
history and legend. Just as the few biblical reminiscences in
Beowulf come from the very beginning of the Old Testament, so
two of these works are on Genesis and one on Exodus. There is
another on the book of Daniela story which, although it was
written fairly late, is one of the most primitive and strongly
nationalist Hebrew books. No doubt the simplicity and violence
of the story appealed to the primitive people of England, who
were themselves resisting cruel and powerful pagans. A similar
paraphrase of biblical history is Judith^ a fragment about 350 lines
long, praising the national Jewish heroine who killed the general
of the Assyrian invaders. It was of course attributed to Csedmon,
as so many short Greek heroic poems were attributed to Homer
or Hesiod ; but it is now placed in the tenth century, during the
long resistance to the invasion and occupation of England by the
savage Danes. Along with two similar German works, these are
the first translations from the Latin Bible into a modern vernacular
;
and they announce the great series of English renderings of the
Bible which culminates in the King James Version.
Cynewulf, the next Imo^yn Anglo-Saxon poet, represents the
usual second stage in the development of primitive poetry. In lays,
chronicles, and epics, as in other traditional stories (e.g. fairy-tales),
30 2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE
the composers own personality is suppressed. No one knows who
put together the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, or Judges. But while
the epic style still lives, there often appears a poet conscious of his
own mission and proud of his skill, v/ho inserts his own name in
poems written within or near the epic tradition, and alters the
conventional style to suit his personality. The earliest known
Greek poet after the Homeric ^ics is Hesiod, whose Works and
Bays, although full of traditional lore and language, also embodies
his name, some of his autobiography, and much of his personal
outlook on life. In one of the hymns written in epic style long after
the Iliad, the poet says he is a blind man living in rocky Chios
:
this was the origin of the tradition that Homer was blind.^^
Phocylides, who wrote poetic proverbs, signed each of them by
putting his name into the first line. And similarly in Old English
poetry, after the traditionalist Caedmon* comes the much betterdefined
personality of Cynewulf.
We know that he existed, and know a little of his life, and know
four of the poems he wrote. These are
:
{a) Christ, a poetic paraphrase of a sermon on the Ascension by
Gregory the Great
(i) Juliana, an account of the martyrdom of St. Juliana,
evidently versified from a Latin martyrology
(c) The Fates of the Apostles, a short versified mnemonic
summary of the missions and deaths of the twelve apostles
;
{d) Helena, a long and detailed account of the journey of St.
Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem,
where she searched for the buried cross of Jesus, found it
(by threatening to execute a large number of Jews), and
instituted its cult.
All these poems contain the name of Cynewulf inserted in runes.
This odd cipher is based on the fact that the letters of the runic
alphabet had not only their own value as letters but also meanings
as words. So they could be worked into a poem as words, but
written as letters spelling out a name. (For instance, if a poets
name were Robb, he could insert his signature by using the words
are, oh, be, and bee in prominent p4aces close together in his poem,
but writing them R, 0, B, and Bj^^\ Helena also contains autobiographical
information : Cynewulf says he was a poet, rich and
favoured, but suffered sin and sorrow until he was converted to
2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE 31
the Christian faithor, more probably, to a more intense and
sincere Christianity, centring on the adoration of the Cross.
Cynewulfs work, like Caedmons, is a synthesis of Anglo-Saxon
poetic style with the Christian thought which came through Rome,
His subjects, however, are not taken from the Old and New Testaments
which were read aloud and translated for Caedmon, but
from late Latin works of Christian doctrine and history. He thus
marks a more advanced stage in the Christianization of Britain and
in its penetration by classical learning. And his style is more
orderly and smooth, with a new command of vocabulary and the
structure of thought which is classical in origin.^^ For all that, his
emotional tone is unmistakably Anglo-Saxon, tough and combative,
full of'naive energy and love of the bolder aspects of nature
:
his zestful description of Queen Helenas voyage to Jerusalem
contrasts sharply with th.6 hatred of seafaring shown in most Greek
and Latin poetry, and is an early expression of the long English
sailor tradition. Even the fact that his signatures are in runes

which must have been obsolescent to a scholar like Cynewulf

is typical of English individualism and conservatism.
Although we cannot examine separate works in detail, two unique
poems, often attributed to Cynewulf on grounds of style but not
signed, deserve attention. The Dream of the Rood is a poem
describing a vision of the Cross and of the Crucifixion. It is more
individual than any other work of its time : although it is as intense
as the fighting heroic poems, its intensity is that of a stranger, more
difficult spiritual world. Some of it is in the tradition of early
English art. For instance, the Cross speaks a long description of
itself^which is like the inscriptions on Anglo-Saxon weapons and
ornaments : the King Alfred jewel says JElfred mec heht gewyrcean^
Alfred had me worked. No doubt that is why some of the poem
was carved on the Ruthwell Cross in southern Scotland, so that the
Cross could seem to tell its own story. Again, the author begins
Listen! as does Beowulf^ and Christ is described as a young
hero. But the poem contains some elements which are unlike
anjthing in earlier English literature, and which are harbingers of
the Middle Ages : the sensuous beauty of the descriptions^the rood
drips with blood and glows with jewels, as though in the rosewindow
of a Gothic cathedral ; the setting of the whole as a dream ^that characteristic mark of medieval
otherworldliness ; the cult
32 2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE
of the Cross^which was established in the eighth century, and was
a novelty for the western church; and the adoration of Christ,
neither as a powerful king nor as a moral teacher, but as a supreme
and beloved person. As far as can be traced, the poem is neither
a translation nor an adaptation, but an entirely original utterance,
the mystical cry of one enraptured soul.
But the strangest synthesis of classical and English traditions in
this period is the poem Phoenix, Its author tells the story of
the miraculous bird, the phoenix which lives far away near the
gates of paradise ; when it grows old, it builds its own funeral pyre,
is burned, dies, and is resurrected. Then the poet goes on to draw
the allegorical moral, of the type so dear to medieval zoologists : the
fire symbolizes the fire of Doomsday, and the rebirth of the bird
images the resurrection of Christ and Christian souls into eternal
life. His description of the phoenix is "an expanded translation
of a late Latin poem on -the myth, by the Christian writer Lactantius.=^^
The allegory comes largely from a sermon by Ambrose
on the resurrection of Christ, with additions from the Old Testament,
Bede, and others.^^
It is fascinating to see how the author of Phoenix has changed
Lactantiuss rather dull poem. The most important alteration is
in emotional tone. Lactantius is, despite his remarkable theme,
commonplace: full of cliches from earlier poets, sinking into a
peevish pessimism at the end, and seldom rising above conventional
description, even in his account of the paradisiacal home of the
phoenix. It is a gorgeous subject, even finer than the swan so
beloved of the Elizabethans and the symbolists. It could have
inspired lyrics like those of Tennyson on the eagle, Baudelaire on
the albatross, Mallarme on the swan. It could have been a mystical
symbol full of breathless aspiration, like Hopkinss falcon. It could
have been a piece of ornate and splendid Miltonic description. But
all that Lactantius does with it is to stitch cliches together, and his
chief emotion is the dreary early Christian hatred of life. The
Anglo-Saxon poet, on the other hand, loves life and loves the
subject. He describes the strange bird with an affectionate admiration.
He gives far more detail about nature, both in picturing
the rich home of the phoenix and in contrasting it with the
hideous climate of Britain ; and his imagination is far more alive.
For instance, Lactantius says that the home of the bird is away in
the east, where the gate of the sky opens (patet)a flat word
2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE 33
used of any gate which was not permanently closed, and really
worth not much more than is*. The English poet takes this, not
as a conventional word, but as a stimulating image, and makes a
beautiful new idea out of it. The gate of heaven not only stands
open, but lets out the echoes of the anthems of the blest^to be
heard by people who really ought not to be there, since the home
of the phoenix is unpeopled, but the conception is too good to lose
:
Peerless the island, peerless her maker,
Glorious the Lord who laid her foundations.
Her happy people hear glad singing
Oft through Heavens open doorJ^
Similarly, at the end, the Anglo-Saxon poet suppresses Lactantiuss
misanthropic reflections that the phoenix is happy because
it has no mate and children and because it attains life through
death
:
O fortunate in fate, of birds most blessed,
whom God permits to give its own self birth!
And, be its sex female, or male, or neither,
blessed the being which knows nought of love!
Death is its love, and death its only pleasure,
and, that it may be born, it yearns to die. 32
He changes the former observation into praise of the wonderworking
power of God, and the latter into intimations of
immortality.
Then the English poet liberates and expands. His Latin
original is in tight couplets, often balanced couplet against couplet
in narrow antithesis. He pays no attention to that. Following
the Old English habit, he does not try to confine the sense within
a couplet, but lets it run on, and even breaks off a speech or a
description in mid-line. This is a fundamental difference between
English poetry and poetry of the Romance tradition, and continues
for many centuries. 3 ^ In quantity, the English poet produces much
more verse than his original, not because he is afraid of mistranslating
or of being misunderstood, but because he wishes to heighten
the emotional power of his descriptions. Lactantiuss poem is 170
lines long, but the Anglo-Saxon poem has 677 lines, of which
380 more or less correspond to Lactantiuss verses. Thus, there
is a happy land in line i qf Lactantius inspires eleven lines of
Anglo-Saxon poetry, plus the fine image of singing heard through
the gate of heaven.
5076
34 2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE
The Englishman modernizes to suit his audience. Lactantius
writes
When Phaethon^s flames had kindled all the zenith,
that place remained inviolate by fire,
and when the deluge plunged the world in billows,
it overcame Deucalions mighty flood. 34
His translator, however, suppresses these remote Greek myths,
substitutes the more real and terrifying Hebrew flood, and changes
Phaethons fires into lightning and the final fire of doomsdaythe
theme with which he is going to end his poem
No leaf shall waste,
no branch be blackened with blast of lightning,
till doomsday come. When the deluge swept
with might of waters the world of men,
and the flood oerwhelmed tKe whole of earth,
this isle withstood the storm of billows
serene and steadfast mid raging seas,
spotless and pure by the power of God.
Thus bleat it abides till the bale-fire come.3
s
And to the list of woes which Lactantius (following Vergil) says
are absent from the home of the phoenix, the English poet adds
two more, which often threatened Anglo-Saxon Britain:
foes assault, or sudden end.36
To conclude, he adds a long sermon in verse, ending with a
curious blend of alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse and Latin hymnal
phrases, half a line each. God, he says, has given us the chance to
earn heaven by our good deeds, and to
see our Saviour dmfine^
prolong his praises lande perenni
in bliss with the angels

Alleluia!^'^
Whoever this poet may have been, he was a good scholar (better
than many clerks in the Middle Ages centuries later), a powerful
and positive poet who could outsoar his original, and a devout
Christian, Obviously the cultural level of England was high to
produce such a poet and his audience.
The greatest importance of the Phoenix is that it is the first
translation of any poem in classicah literature into any modern
language. Its author knows his Latin, and is not at all afraid of his
task. He feels that his own language with its poetic traditions, and
2.
THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE 35
his own energies and imagination, are fully equal to those of his
Latin model. This is a concrete proof of the advanced civilization
of Britain in the interim between the Saxon and the Danish
invasions. In literature, the tide comes forward in five waves:
1. First, pagan poetryBeowulf the smaller heroic poems
and fragments. In them, there is no traceable Greco-Roman
influence; but a faint irra!diation of Christianity from the
Latin world.
2. Then Casdmon, writing in the second half of the seventh
century, composed poems in the traditional Anglo-Saxon
style on subjects from the Latin Bible. Following him, other
poets fead the Bible in Latin and produced free adaptations of
several of its les^ Christian books.
3. About 800, Cynewulf adapted material from Latin Christian
prose writers as subjects for Anglo-Saxon poems.
4. An imaginatively free translation, blending, and expansion of
Latin poetry and Latin Christian prose works was made in
Phoenix,
5. Finally, with The Dream of the Rood^ an English poet created
apparently new and original poetry on themes introduced
to Britain through Latin Christianity.
It was to be many centuries before any other European nation
would venture to make such translations and write such poems,
at once so learned and so creative. The phoenix, miraculously
reborn in the image of Christ, symbolizes the miraculous rebirth,
in surroundings once barbarous, of Greco-Roman culture transformed
through Christianity,
ANGLO-SAXON PROSE
The story of English prose literature during the Dark Ages is
also the story of the much-interrupted upward struggle of civilization
in the British islands. Poetry nearly always looks backwards,
in form or matter or both, to an earlier age. Prose is more contemporary,
reflecting the needs and problems and powers of its
time. Therefore English prose literature in this period was
primarily educational. Its inteittion was to civilize the British, to
keep them civilized, and to encourage them in the struggle against
the constantly recurring attacks of barbarism. To do this it used
two chief instruments. One was the Bible and Christian doctrine.
36 2, THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE
The other was classical culture. There was nothing frivolous, no
fiction or fancy, about English prose in this era. It was resolutely
religious, or historical, or philosophical.
The effort to keep civilization alive in Britain was not a single
unidirectional process. It was interrupted and diverted by grave
conflicts. The first of these was the conflict between the British
church and the church of Ronie,38 The British church lost, but
the conflict was long and bitter. Most of the early British churchmen,
St. Patrick probably and St. Columba certainly, were not
Roman Catholics. They did not consider themselves to be directly
under the authority of the bishop of Rome, and they interpreted
the Christian doctrine differently from their contempqrary coreligionists
in Italy. Most of them have by now been appropriated
by the church as saints or expelled as heretics; but it was not
always so simple as that. One of the most interesting among the
pariahs was the Celtic priest Pelagius (c, 360-420), who originated
the doctrine later denounced as the Pelagian heresy. In opposition
to St, Augustines view that man was totally depraved from birth
and absolutely incapable of saving himself from sin and damnation
without Gods grace, Pelagius taught that God expects us to do
only what we can. Man can be good, or God would not punish him
for being bad. Obligation implies ability. It is possible, although
difficult, to live without sinning. Pelagius toured the Christian
worldRome, Africa, Palestinepreaching this doctrine; but
he lost. Some see in him, Gael as he was, the earliest Protestant.
The Roman church set out to recapture the western outposts of
the empire, and to conquer its British rivals, in a.d. 596. Then the
great Pope Gregory I sent St. Augustine {not the bishop of Hippo
mentioned above) with a mission to establish himself in southeastern
England. Because of the invasion of the pagan Saxons, the
mission was much needed. The struggle between the churches,
however, was long, and Augustine was not wholly victorious. He
failed to persuade the British churchmen to adopt the Roman
calendar with the Roman calculation of Easter, and there was also
some difficulty about the manner of tonsure. 3 9 But after winning
the great debate called the synod of Whitby (664), the Romans had
the upper hand. They at once imptoved their advantage by sending
out two cultural missionaries, Theodqre and Hadrian. Theodore,
an Asiatic Greek from Tarsus, who knew Greek as well as Latin
(a rare thing then), was named archbishop of Canterbury The
2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE 37
two opened a school where Latin, Greek, sacred literature,
astronomy, metrics, and arithmetic were taught. We can, however,
trace the conflict of the two churches, and occasionally a synthesis,
all through the first period of British prose literature.
It was the era of Caedmon and Cynewulf in poetry. In prose only
Latin works have survived, but their cultural level is fairly high.
The first known historical account of Britain in the Dark Ages was
written by a Celtic monk, one Gildas (c, 500-70): he considers
himself a direct survivor of the Roman civilization in Britain,
calling Latin our language and despising the fierce native chiefs
as heartily as the early Americans despised the Red Indians. The
earliest Saxon scholar, Aldhelm (abbot of Malmesbury in 675),
w^s educated first by a Gael (Maeldubh) and then by Hadrian the
Roman.^^ His poetry* is good, and much of it is lightened and
charmed by Vergilian influence. The prose ofhis letters and articles
on religion, morality, and education suffers from imitating the
church fathers : evidently he read mostly late and tortuous Latin,
and quotes Cicero only three times.
A much greater man followed him: the Venerable Bede (=
Bates: c, 672-735), the first English author in whom we can trace
the strong common sense and amiable directness which characterize
the English at their best. He was a northerner, got his early
schooling from Irish and north British churchmen, and dedicated
his greatest work to Ceolwulf, king of Northumbria. All his works
are in Latin, many are compilations, and most are now obsolete
or uninteresting; but none of them is silly, or obscure, or extravagant
in the way that medieval works so often are.^^ Most are
commentaries on scripture (the Old Testament still predominant)
and on biblical subjects such as the temple at Jerusalem. The
synthesis of classical and modern is greatest in his Ecclesiastical
History of the English Nation from Caesars invasion in 55 b.c, to
A.D. 731. That he himself regarded this as the pinnacle of his
life-work he showed by adding his autobiography and a list of his
publications at the end.^ It is an essential book, because;
it is one of the first of the great documents describing the
reconquest of barbarism by civilization, after the fall of the
Roman empire;
it is real history, giving more weight to central truth than to
impressive d^ails or propagandist lessons
;
it is well constructed : by far the largest work of its kind in all
38 2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE
early English literature, it contrasts very favourably with the
patchy and discontinuous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle \
it was produced by genuine research: as well as incorporating
the work of earlier annalists, Bede used invaluable unpublished
documents and verbal tradition, collecting
evidence from sources as far distant as Rome. It is to him
that we owe immortal stgries like Casdmons inspiration,
Gregorys 'Angles with the face of angels, and the old
thane who compared mans earthly life to the flight of a
swallow through a lighted hall.
Bede was both an Englishman and a latinist. For him, Latin was
still a living language, which took time and trouble t6 write, but
which was clear and memorable and luiiversally intelligible.
European culture was profoundly influenced by his historical
vision : for example, he was chiefly responsible for inti'oducing the
Christian era in dating events b.c. or a.d. He was the first Englishman
who transcended his age and who, as Dante saw,4 s belonged
to all humanity.
(If Beowulf corresponds to Homer, and Caedmon to the authors
of the early Homeric hymns, and Cynewulfto Hesi od, then to whom
does Bede correspond, if not to the pious, patriotic, legendcollecting
historian Herodotus?)
Another proof of the high standard of British learning in the
Dark Ages is provided by two scholars who were so great that they
were invited to help with the re-education of Europe. These were
:
Alcuin of York (born 735), who went to teach in the school
of classical learning founded by Charlemagne as part of his
resistance to barbarism, and who left over 300 essays (in
the form of letters) on literature and education, written
while he was head of the school and later of the abbey at
Tours;
John, who called himself emphatically Scotus Erigena or
Eriugena, meaning 'the Gael from Ireland. He was the
greatest philosopher of the Dark Ages.^^ And he was
another product of the Celtic church, which continued in
existence all through this difficult time, leaving monuments
of its work in the missions it founded and supported on the
Continent as well as in many fine Latin manuscripts written
in Irish hands. John, whose knowledge of Greek was
2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE 39
unique in his age, succeeded Alcuin by heading the court
school founded by Charlemagnes successor Charles the
Bald. More of a philosopher than a churchman, he worked
out a mighty pantheistic scheme of the universe, which
shows that he had a genius for metaphysics, narrowed and
strengthened, like the genius of the Gothic cathedralbuilders,
by the surrounding barbarism of his era.
But now, after the earlier invasions had ceased, and the tough
Anglo-Saxons had been partly civilized and Christianized, new
waves of pagan invaders were attacking Christendom. Only five
years after Alcuin left England for France, in a.d. 787, the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says
:
In these days the first three ships of the Northmen arrived, from the
pirates country.
The sheriff, it goes on, dutifully went down to arrest the pirates,
and was killed ; and these were the first Danish ships that visited
the land of the English. From then on, the attacks got worse and
worse. Repeated entries in the Chronicle carry no more than
communiques of disaster
:
This year there was great slaughter in London, Canterbury, and
Rochester.^7
The Celtic monasteries and churches in Ireland and Scotland and
elsewhere were attacked soon after 787, and destroyed piecemeal,
so that their inhabitants were scattered all through western and
central Europe as displaced persons.^s The worship of Thor was
set up in the holy city of Armagh.^^ in England the Danes settled
as a permanent armed force of occupation : the Chronicle simply
calls them the army. It was King Alfred (848-901) who led the
resistance and ensured that, in spite of frightening defeats, British
culture was kept alive, and the Christian religion did not perish
from the stricken island.
Alfred negotiated peace with the Danes in 878. This was really
a Munich settlement made to hold off the invaders for a breathingspace,
but it gave him time to revive British civilization within the
territory that remained under -his influence. Almost all the work
of the Celtic church and of the Roman missions and teachers had
m
now been undone. Alfred himself wrote^o that there was nobody in
southern England, veryfew in the midlands (south of the Humber),
40 2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE
and not many in the north, who could understand the Mass in
English or translate a Latin letter*i.e. who knew what the Latin
ritual and prayers really meant, or who could read at sight the
ordinary current Latin which was the international language of
educated people. Britain was almost cut off from religion and
civilization. And that was only one aspect of her cultural losses
during the invasions. Schools, churches, the ordinary mans
consciousness of British history and world history and geography
all had to be revived. It was a great and difficult work, which only
a great man could have carried out.
Alfred used a number of methods to revive civilization and
culture in Britain; but for our interests the most important is
translation. He chose four important Latin books, and with some
assistance turned them into Anglo-Saxon, for the instruction and
improvement of his people. They dealt with the four most
essential subjects.
1. The practice of the Christian religion was explained in Alfreds
Hierdeboc {^Shepherd's BooK)^ a translation of the great Pope
Gregorys manual for parish priests, the Regula pastoralisJ^
Gregory was the pope who expressly disowned any attempt to
write classical Latin and any interest in classical culture; but he
was a great fighter and teacher (it was he who sent Augustines
mission to Canterbury) and his energy and ability and practical
wisdom were needed at this time. Alfreds preface^which has
been called the first important piece of prose in English^^

emphasizes the essential role played in education by translations,

and Alfreds determination to rebuild the mind of England by
translating such books.
2. The Christian history and the continuous national existence of
the English people, as well as the stage of culture it had attained
before the Danish invasions, were stressed in a translation, done
either by or for Alfred, of the Ecclesiastical History of the English
Nation by the Venerable Bede.
3. World history and geography were explained and interpreted
from a Christian point of view by a translation of the fifth-century
Spanish writer Orosiuss History against the Pagans, Dedicated to
St. Augustine of Hippo, this book, like Augustines own City of
God, gave a long proof that the introduction of Christianity was
not, as the pagan philosophers asserted, responsible for the fearful
sufferings of mankind which began when the declining empire was
2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE 41
attacked by plagues and savages. The historical sections of the
book contain Greek and Roman mythology as well as history and
some geography, in a convenient if sometimes distorted form.
Alfred wisely omitted Orosiuss geographical data about distant
parts of the world which were then beyond the horizon of the
English, and inserted some valuable chapters on the geography of
north-western Europe, including verbatim narratives of two great
exploratory voyages carried out* by the sailors Ohthere, in the
White Sea, and Wulfstan, in the Baltic.
4. Moral philosophy in its relation to theology was summed up
in The Consolation of Philosophy^ by Boethius. Since the influence
of this book on European thought was far greater than that of the
other three, it deserves a detailed examination.
*
The philosopher of late Rome, Anicius Manlius Severinus
Boethius, born about a.d. 480, and brought up by the distinguished
pagan statesman Symmachus (whose daughter he married), was
for a thousand years one of the most influential writers in Europe.
Rich and noble, he was highly educated, and was devoted to Greek
from which, just as the knowledge of the language was perishing
in the western world, he translated a number of the important
books that became the foundations of medieval science and philosophy.
53 As a patriotic Roman, who no doubt disliked the
Ostrogothic rulers of Italy (although for some time he tried to
collaborate with them), he was arrested by the Ostrogothic king
Theodoric on the charge of inviting the eastern Roman emperor
Justinian to drive out the barbarians. After some months in
prison, he was executed in 524. The account of his death says that
a cord was slowly tightened round his brain, and that, while
enduring this torment, he was clubbed to death. It was while
under sentence of death that he wrote his most famous work. The
Consolation of Philosophy.
This is a treatise in five sections, called books. In form it is
a cross between the Platonic dialogue, invented by Plato to reproduce
the teaching methods of his master Socrates, and the Menippean
satire, a mixture of prose and verse used for philosophical
criticism by the Cjmic Menippus.ss Alternate chapters are in
prose and verse; or perhaps we should say that each prose chapter
is followed by a verse intermezzo. The prose is late Latin, struggling
not without success to be classical; the verse is a collection of
42 2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE
many different metres, predominantly short-line patterns appropriate
for lyric poetry, and many copied from the reflective choruses
of Senecas tragedies: there is surprisingly little of the long rolling
didactic verse one would expect. The style of the whole varies
from rapid, though dignified, conversation to stately rhetoric. The
general scheme is that of a conversation between Boethius, in his
cell, and his nurse and doctor Philosophy.
After listening to his complaints, Philosophy tells him that he is
ill. His soul is ill, with ignorance and forgetfulness. He has
forgotten the real character of the power and wealth he has lost

they are purely external and transitory things. He has forgotten

the truth about the worldthat it is governed by Gods providence.
He has forgotten the corollary of that fact^that not only happiness
but pain too is sent us for our own good, as punishment, or
exercise, or discipline. ^7 So Philosophy questions him, as a doctor
questions a patient, carefully and firmly drawing out the errors
from his sick soul, and applying the remedy of truth.
Although Boethiuss book ends nobly, it appears to be unfinished.
It has no final dialogue to correspond to the initial
conversation between doctor and patient; it has no diagnosis, no
summing-up, no drawing-together of the results of the consultation,
no prescription for the patient to take, and (although we
might expect it from Boethiuss admiration for Plato) no poetic
and mythical conclusion. Why it is unfinished, we can guess.
Unfinished or not, it is a great book. Many who have glanced
into it, expecting to find a late-Latin cliche-monger or compilator,
have been surprised and moved by the depth of its feeling. There
are several reasons for its power.
It is individual. Although The Consolation of Philosophy is a
synthesis of the arguments of many other philosophers and the
images of many other poets, it is much more than a collection of
echoes. The noble character and able mind of Boethius himself are
manifest all through it; and they make it a unity. Then the
recurring poetic interludes, always sung by Boethius himself or
by his lady Philosophy, unify the book and keep it from resembling
a metaphysical treatise: no Ph.D. thesis is punctuated with songs.
And the book is closely connected with Boethiuss own life and
death, which gives a real uniqueness to what might otherwise have
been an abstract dissertation. It has**, therefore, as distinctive a
character as Platos great dialogues, Gorgias, Phaedo, The Republic.
2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE 43
It is full of emotion, which transforms the book. Its setting is
burningly dramatic : a condemned cell, in which a Roman nobleman,
once rich, famous, and learned, once high in a great career,
sits waiting for death at the hands of a half-civilized occupying
army. The philosophical arguments, however dry and difficult,
are made vitally moving by the urgency with which Boethius and
his physician pursue themmuch more so than in most earlier
classical philosophy. (Even in Platos Phaedo the proof of immortality,
although it does serve as a consolation for the beloved
masters imminent death, is presented as an impersonal analysis
of the facts; and it is only in a few of Ciceros philosophical
treatises, written when he himself was suffering bitter sorrow, that
the same depth of emotion as in Boethius becomes apparent.) This
sense of urgency is again heightened by the poetry : lyrical aspiration
transcending the limits of a prison, beautifully expressed in
songs of despair and consolation, which, to early Christians, must
have sounded like the hymns of the persecuted church. The
problem Boethius faces is one which every man and woman must
face, and his difficulties are ours. Just as we all have bodily
illnesses in which, although only for a moment, we feel the
shadow of death touching us, so we all have periods of doubt and
despair, profound spiritual illnesses when the whole life of the
soul appears to ebb and falter. To see Boethius suffering from this
illness, and to watch him being cured, must stir our sympathy.
And there can be no doubt that the emotions of Boethius and his
teacher are sincere. Boethius has literally nothing left to live for
but to find the truth that will make him whole. Philosophy herself
is not an abstraction. She is a stately lady, wise, loving, and kind

a type which appealed deeply to the men of the Middle Ages. She
prefigures the medieval conception of the Virgin Mary, as well as
such angelic guides as Dantes Beatrice. She was one of the first
of a long series of gracious womanly spirits, such as Lady Holy
Church in Piers Plowman, who move through medieval thought and
soften the brutality of the times.
Boethiuss book is very rich in content, for it is a synthesis of
much of the best in several great realms of thought:
{a) Greco-Roman philosophy, Platonism above all. Boethius
much admired Platos Gorgias, Phaedo, and Timaeus. It is clear
that the figure of Socrates, calmly preparing for death in his
prison-cell and consoled by his own philosophy, was in Boethiuss
44 2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE
mind ; he refers several times to the doctrine of reminiscence ; and
his entire book describes, step by step, a process of conversion like
that which Plato held to be the necessary entrance to the philosophical
life. Boethius also used the Physics and other works of
Aristotle; and Ciceros philosophical writings, particularly the
Tmculan Discussions (which deal with mans great unhappinesses)
and The Dream of Scipio (which is a revelation of immortality).
And, although he does not mention them, he depended very
heavily on the treatises and commentaries of the Neoplatonists.^s
One of the greatest things in the book is Boethiuss constant
comparison of the physical universe, regarded as a rational system,
to the moral law. The stars, he says, follow the same kind of law as
the life and soul of man. We can see him, a condemned prisoner,
looking up from his cell towards the serene heavens, and, like
Kant, who declared that the two greatest things in the universe
were the starry sky above, the moral law within, assuring himself
that wickedness, however powerful, was bound to sink and disappear
before the army of unalterable law.^ (This thought also
flowed into the medieval belief in astrology, since if man and the
stars both obey laws ordained by God, it is easy to assume that they
are part of a single interdependent system.)
(i) In classical literature, Boethiuss emphasis is more on Roman
than on Greek works: Seneca is his principal model in verse, he
modelled his prose style on Cicero, while Vergil and Horace
supplied many of the general maxims which he used, in those bad
days, to prop his mind.
{c) Christian ideals are not expressed, but something close to
them inspires the whole book. Although Jesus Christ is not
mentioned, although Boethius never quotes the Bible explicitly
and only once appears to allude to it, although it is not religion
but philosophy that consoles him, still, the book is an expression
of the belief in monotheism, begins by postulating immortality,
emphasizes the importance of the moral life, mentions other
Christian beliefs such as purgatory, and embodies such Christian
ideals as moral courage under persecution.
The fourth great merit of the book is its educational power. It
is one of the supreme educational books of the world. Like Platos
dialogues, it educates the reader by carrying him through the
process of education which it describes. It is moving to watch
Socrates interlocutors being forced or persuaded to see the light
2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE 45
which they had denied ; and so it is moving, but even more moving,
to watch Philosophy curing Boethius (or Everyman) of the blindness
into which his sufferings coming after his happiness had
thrown him. It is touching to remember that his very name comes
from the Greek word which means (among other things)
to assist a patient and relieve his illness. Just as Socrates often
compared himself to a physician, so Philosophy here likens her
work, not to that of a teacher with a pupil, but to that of a doctor
with a patient: a mental patient undergoing psycho-analysis, we
should now say. It is a mark of the difference between the Greeks
and ourselves that for them all was health, and even the doctor
told them chiefly how to keep fit (as a trainer advises a young
athlete), while Boethius, like a modern man, feels himself to be
suffering from a mortal disease of the soul.^^
All these causes combined to make the influence of Boethius
widespread and long-lasting through the Dark and Middle Ages.^^
And there was a personal reason for his popularity. He had faced
the same problem which recurred for a thousand years, and he
faced it nobly. He was a good man killed by vicious tyrants. He
was a civilized man imprisoned and executed by the barbarians,
but immortalized by his ideals. Many a Christian priest or knight
hemmed in by savages took consolation from the pattern set up
by Boethius. King Alfred himself, surrounded by Danes, on an
island within an island, identified himself with the Roman hero
:
in his preface to the translation he says
:
King Alfred ... set forth this book sometimes literally and sometimes
so as to preserve the sense of it, as clearly and intelligently as he
could,dn the various and multiple worldly cares that often troubled him
in mind and body. During his reign, the troubles that came on the
kingdom to which he succeeded were almost innumerable.
When translatifig Boethius, Alfred adapted the book to suit
the audience for which he meant it. He omitted much which
was too difficult for them, and perhaps for himself^including
nearly all the difficult argument of book 5. Sometimes he substituted
simpler paraphrases of the general drift of meaning, and
sometimes little moral homilies of his own. Much as a modern
translator might insert footniotes, Alfred adds explanatory phrases
and extracts from the annotated editions which he used for his
translation. He makes the whole thing much more of a Christian
46 2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE
work. He mentions Christ by name, which Boethius does not;
he brings in angels, the devil. Old Testament history, and Christian
doctrine ; and the name of God occurs much oftener than in the
original. There is one touching personal addition. In his complaint
Boethius tells Philosophy that, although he is not greedy
for money or publicity, he had wanted to find some scope for his
talents rather than to grow old uselessly. To this Alfred adds his
own thoughts
:
Now no man can get full play for his natural gifts, nor conduct and
administer government, unless he has fit tools, and raw material to work
on. By material I mean that which is necessary to the exercise of natural
powers : thus, a kings raw material and instruments of rule are a wellpopulated
country, and men of religion, men of war, and men of work. . .
,
Also he must have means of support for the thrfie classes : land to live on,
gifts (= money?), weapons, meat, ale, clothes, and anything else the
three classes need. Without these means he cannot keep his tools in
order, and without the tools he cannot perform any of the tasks entrusted
to him.^s
Still, many of his explanations are astonishingly naive, and show
the great decline in British scholarship, under the pressure of war,
since the days of Bede.^^
On his own grateful admission, Alfred was helped in his
'translations by four priests, notably a Celt from Wales named
Asser, whom he calls my bishop, and who, like Aldhelm, became
bishop of Sherborne.^7 It should also be remembered that Alfred
had vital connexions with Rome and with the Holy Roman empire.
His father married Judith, daughter of the emperor Charles the
Bald; Alfred himself had visited Rome in his youth, and kept in
communication with it.^^
The last great pre-Norman educator in England was iElfric
{c. 955-1020), a southern scholar, bred at Winchester. He summed
up the activity which preceded him by being almost bilingual in
Latin and English. Many of his sermons are filled with Old
English alliteration, and some are even dominated by a rhythmical
beat comparable to that of the antique heroic poems. But he also
wrote a Latin grammar, with prefaces in English and Latin and a
Latin-English vocabulary. This was pne of the very first modern
Latin schoolbooks. He also made, or edited, a paraphrase of the
first seven books of the Bible in English, with the dull and difficult
2. THE DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE 47
parts left out. In his time, and partly through his work, English
became a literary languagethe earliest in Europe.
During the tenth century a number of English versions of the
gospels were produced : the Lindisfarne Gospels in northern
Northumbrian, the Rushworth Gospels in northern Mercian
and southern Northumbrian, and the West Saxon Gospels, The
manuscript of the Lindisfarne Gospels is one of the finest works
of art preserved from the Dark Ages. Like Alfreds England, like
British civilization, it was gravely endangered by the Danes : it was
being removed from its home for safety when it was washed overboard
in a storm; but, like the culture to which it belonged, it was
recovered almost undamaged when the tide ebbed.
During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance it became fashionable
for British writers t6 translate and copy continental writers.
But before the Danish and the Norman conquests, the standard
of vernacular literature was so high, and the distribution of classical
scholarship so wide, that culturally Britain was the most advanced
state in Europe. That position she lost through the repeated
attacks of the northern savages, and then through the conquest by
their Norman kinsmen.'^^ During all that long struggle to resist
and to assimilate, there was growing up in Britainat a level lower
than that of Greco-Roman mythology, but soon to compete with
the tale of Troy and the tale of Thebesthe splendid British
legend of Arthur and his knights, the gallant band who resisted the
heathen and the forces of darkness. The Danish conquest was a
disaster. The Norman conquest was another disaster, alleviated
only by the fact that it destroyed the Danish dominion and built
a broader bridge to the Latin area of the Continent. The effect of
the two was, first, to retard Britain^which had been so far in
advance of the rest of Europeand then, later, to link her more
closely to the civilization of the Continent, in which she had once
shared and which she had helped to revitalize.
3
THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE
The focus of literature in the Middle Ages was France^both
northern France and, until its destruction in the crusade
against the Albigensian heresy, the gay southern land of Provence.
From France, poetry radiated outwards, warmly to Italy and
Britain, less strongly to Spain, Germany, and the Low Countries.
Although languages and dialects differed greatly, and although
there were political divisions through and between the European
countries, on the spiritual plane western Europe was more of a
unity than it is to-day. The world of schdlarship, with its international
language of Latin, was a unity. " The world of the church
was a unityalthough it was troubled by heresies (Albigensians
and Hussites), doctrinal disputes (St. Bernard v, Abelard), and
schisms (the worst being the great schism between the rival popes).
The world of courts and chivalry was a unity, however distracted
by political and personal feuds. And, on the level above folkpoetry,
the world of literature was also a unity. Before Italian,
French was the literary language of northern Italy: at the end of
the thirteenth century Brunette Latini wrote his encyclopaedia,
the Treasure, in French because the language sounds sweeter
;
Marco Polos travel memoirs were set down in French too. There
was such an invasion of Italy by Proven9al minstrels, and their
poems were so warmly welcomed, that the magistrates of Bologna
had to pass a law forbidding them to stand and sing in the streets.^
The best symbol of the unity of the Middle Ages is the Comedy of
Dante, in which scholars and poets and great men of all ages and
countries known to ,him are brought together in a single, mainly
medieval afterworld.
But it was in France, the nearest of the western provinces of the
Roman empire, that the radiation of medieval thought and literature
centred and grew strongest: it dominated and largely shaped
that unity : so to France we turn first.
ROMAKCES OF CHIVALROUS ADVENTURE
French literature (apart from a few small and unimportant
religious works such as an eleventh-century life of the Syrian saint
3 . THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE 49
Alexis) opens with The Song ofRoland. Like Beowulfy which opens
English literature, this poem is rather more primitive than Homer;
and it is almost as unaware as Beowulf of the existence of classical
civilization and Greco-Roman history. It is a 4,000-lme epic,
arranged in strophes bound together by assonance, and inspired
by the Saracenic wars of Charlemagne. It relates the heroic death
of Charlemagnes Lord Warden of Brittany, Hruodland, in
A.D. 778. (Roland is his modern name, and he was actually killed
not by the Saracens but by the Basques.) The few classical reminiscences
that occur in it are feeble, and distant, and distorted.
For instance, we are told that the pagan Saracens worship a trinity
of idols. One is Mahomet ; one is Tervagant, whose name survives
in the word for a woman with a devilish temper; and the third is
Apollo, in the strangest company that the Far-Darter ever kept.^
Then once the poet, telling how a Saracen enchanter was killed by
a Frankish archbishop, adds that the sorcerer had already been in
hell, where Jupiter led him by magic, ^ At a great distance, this
might be a reminiscence of the visit of Aeneas to the underworld.
Lastly, in the Baligant episode (which is not thought to be by the
original poet of Roland)y the emir of Babylon is said to be so old
that he quite outlived Vergil and Homer There is no other
trace of classical influence, nor should we expect to find it in a
poem whose author barely knew the Roman deities.
Roland is the earliest of an enormous series of heroic poems
dealing with adventure and war all over the western world. These
can be called romances. s The word romance simply means a poem
or story written in one of the vernacular Romance languages
instead of Latinand so, by implication, less serious and learned
;
but in time it acquired the sense that indicates the essential quality
of these works, their love of the marvellous. They were extremely
long poems^not long and rich like Homer, but diffuse and rambling
to suit the leisurely tempo of the Middle Ages. Homers
hexameters gallop forward with the irresistible rush of a chariot
in a charge; the short-line couplets of the romances and other such
medieval poems jog along, league after league, as patiently as the
little horses that carried the knights on their interminable quests.
The earliest such poems dealt with the heroic exploits of Charlemagne
and his court, or sometimes more distant contemporaries,
during the Dark Ages. These were followed by romances on the
exploits of Greek, Roman, and Trojan heroes, historical or
S076 E
50 3. THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE
mythical; and by tales of the adventures of the British King
Arthur and his knights. Only the second of these groups concerns
us here.
Before we begin to discuss it, it must be said that the appearance
of a large and growing number of poems and prose works on
subjects drawn from classical antiquity is only one aspect of the
expansion of culture which was noticeable in the eleventh and
admirable in the twelfth century.^ This was the period when the
universities began to assume something like their modern form,
when a new spirit of questioning and criticism invaded and improved
philosophy, and when a quantity of important Greek and
Roman books were translated and taught for the first time since
the onset of the Dark Ages. This was the century of the great
logician and metaphysician Abelard, of John of Salisbury, and of
many other progressive thinkers. It was also an age of increasing
poetic production, and, very obviously, an age of broadening,
though still shallow, knowledge of Greek and Roman things.
Songs, satires, and romances poured out in overwhelming profusion.
The songs and satires stop, but the romances seem to run
on for ever. They are as endless as medieval wars.
The greatest of the romances on classical subjects is The Romance
of Troy, Le Roman de Troie, It was written by Benoit de Sainte-
Maure, a poet of north-eastern France, about a.d. ii6o; and it
runs to some 30,000 lines. The story begins with the Argonauts
sailing eastwards to find the Golden Fleece and dropping off a
detachment to capture and loot Troy. Troy is rebuilt by Priam.
Priams sister Esiona (= Hesione) is kidnapped by the Greeks.
The Trojans send a punitive expedition to Greece which carries
off Helen. The Trojan war then begins.
Obviously this alters the usual story so as to make the Trojans
innocent and the Greeks brutal aggressors. This shift of perspective
is maintained throughout the poem. The Trojans win nearly
all the time; and Troy is only defeated when the Trojan prince
Antenor, as a fifth-columnist, plots with the Greeks to admit a
storming-party.
After the fall of Troy the romance describes the return of the
Greek troops, and ends with the murder of Ulysses by his own son
Telegonus: Circes child.
Benoit says he takes the whole story from an eyewitness, who
3 . THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE 51
knew much more about it than Homersince Homer lived more
than a hundred years after the warand who did not commit the
foolishness of making gods and goddesses fight in human battles.
The book written by this eyewitness (or a version of it) still exists.
It is a very curious little thing.
It is called The History of the Destruction of Troy (De excidio
Troiae historia)^ by Dares Phrygius, or Dares the Phrygian. (The
Phrygians were neighbours and allies of the Trojans.) As we have
it, it is a short work in bad, flat Latin prose of extreme simplicity,
verging on stupidity, obviously written very late in the decline of
Latin literature,^ It is prefaced by an introduction in somewhat
better Latin, saying that it was found by Cornelius Nepos (a
contemporary of Julius Caesar) in Athens, written in Daress own
hand, and that it was then translated into Latin. Both the preface
and the book are forgeries.
The book is really a late Latin translation and abbreviation of a
Greek original, now lost but probably also in prose, which pretended
to be a day-by-day description of the Trojan war written
by one of the combatants. This is indicated by the sentence in the
last chapter summing up the casualties with a transparently bogus
pretence of accuracy:
There fell on the Greek side, as the daily reports written by Dares
indicate, 886,000 men.
We can reconstruct the original in its main outlines. It was a
piece of pure fiction, probably written in the period known as the
Second Sophistic (second and third centuries a.d.) : we have other
stories of adventure from that period, although none deals with
Troy. 9 Historical romances of the same type have been produced
in modern times: for instance, Tolstoy's War and Peace^ which
undertakes to prove that Napoleon did not really control the invasion
of Russia, and Gravess King Jesus, which describes the career
of Jesus as a pretender to the kingship of the Jews, from the point
of view of an interested but unsympathetic contemporary. The
peculiarities of this book were its special purposes:
to justify the Trojans against the Greeks
;
to denigrate the Romans, by defaming their ancestor Aeneas:
the author, instead of saying that Aeneas saved the remnants
of Troy (as he does in Vergil), actually makes him join
Antenor in opening the gates to the invaders; and the
52 3. THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE
founding of Rome is not mentioned^Aeneas is merely
dismissed in anger by Agamemnon, and sails away;^
to bring in love, which is not prominent in the Iliad and
Odyssey. Thus, the invulnerable hero Achilles is killed at
a secret rendezvous with Polyxena, the daughter of Priam.
Their story provides the main love-interest. It is peculiar
that, in the version of Dares which we have, there is nothing
corresponding to what later became the most famous lovestory
of the Trojan war: Troilus and Cressida. But there
is a detailed description of the beautiful Briseis, Achilles
captive, who appears under the name of Briseida;^^ and
Troilus exploits are much emphasized (partly in order to
throw Aeneas into the shade) : so it is possible that Benoit
used a fuller version of the story, which connected Troilus
and Briseis in a love-adventure parallel but opposite to that
of Achilles and Polyxena.
The Greek author, like a good forger, made his falsification as
convincing as possible. He seems to have given far more detail
than we find in the Iliad: battle after battle, truce after truce,
covering the whole ten years instead of the brief episode of the
Wrath of Achilles. He omits all mention of the gods and their
constant interference in the course of the war: this looks more
reasonable and realistic. He gives precise eyewitness descriptions
of the appearance of the main characters, which Homer never does
directly. As for the fictitious authors name, there is a Trojan
warrior Dares mentioned by Homer in Iliad, 5. 9, but the book as
we have it does not call him the authorobviously because that
would be an appeal to the veracity of Homer, which the forgerwants
to explode. And the story about the books being hidden, and
discovered many centuries after the Trojan war, is the usual trick
to explain how, if authentic, it could have survived without being
mentioned by a single classical Greek writer from Homer through
Herodotus to Euripides and Plato. Basically, it is the same trick
as Poes MS. found in a Bottle, and we shall meet it again later.^^
As well as Dares, Benoit used another book of the same type.
It is the Diary of the Trojan War by Dictys of Crete, who pretends
to have been the official historian of the war on the Greek side.
The Latin translation of this is simple, but much better written
than Dares; and pieces of the Greek original have now turned up
among the Tebtunis papyri.^"^ If one is prior to the other, then
3 . THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE 53
Dictys is probably prior to Dares, for it is more intelligent and less
extreme. Just as Daress book was justified by a story about its
being hidden and then discovered in Athens, so this is justified by
the statement that it was found in a tomb in Crete, written in
Phoenician characters. The story about the death of Achilles in
a love-intrigue with Polyxena occurs here too, and so does the
betrayal of Troy by the fifth-columnists Antenor and Helenus.
Aeneas does not appear as a traitor, but his founding of Rome, or of
Alba, is not mentioned. Neither Briseis nor Chr^^seis, the two
beautiful captives who blended to make Cressida in the Middle
Ages, is mentioned by name. The book ends with the return of
the heroes and the adventures of Odysseus illegitimate son
Telegonus.
Now, why did Benoit use these two late and bogus books, which
through him acquired such an enormous influence? Chiefly
because they were easy to read. He had had a little classical education.
From his name, we might conjecture that he got it at the
monastery school in the famous Benedictine cloister of St. Maur;^^
but it was not much more than a smattering. Vergil, whom he
might have used, is much more difficult than Dares and Dictys;
and he does not tell the whole story of the war. Homer was
lost, and the only existing Latin translation of the Iliad was little
known and incomplete.^^ As well as being easy, the method ofDares
and Dictys would be attractive to a medieval poet: for they both
contain an enormous number of incidents (which is in the vein of
all the romances), they emphasize romantic love, and they leave out
the battles of the gods, which would have perplexed or repelled the
twelfth-century Christian audiences. Benoit did not use them very
intelligently. For instance, he made both Palamedes and Ajax die
twice, in two different ways : because he was translating the two
different versions given by Dares on the one hand and Dictys on
the other. But his book became extremely popular and extremely
important.
The Romance of Troy virtually reintroduced classical history and
legend into European cultureor rather spread it outside the
scholarly world. Its essential act was to connect Greco-Roman
myth with contemporary times. The tactics, sentiments, and
manners of Benoits characters are, of course, all twelfth century,
but that means that the story and its heroes and heroines were
quite real for Benoit and his readers. It is a seminal book, which
54 3. THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE
announced and encouraged a whole new school of poetry and
imagination.
Among other things, it stimulated one strange fashion: that
of tracing genealogical connexions between modern families or
nations and the peoples of antiquity. This had been a habit even
in ancient Rome. Vergil and others spent much thought and care
on proving that the Trojans, although defeated, were really the
virtuous side, and that the survivor, Aeneas, had been the founder
of the Roman stock and ancestor of Augustus. This kept the
Romans from feeling themselves to be a parvenu tribe who had
conquered the intelligent Greeks by sheer brute force, and it
helped to legitimize the new imperial dynasty. We are told that
Cassiodorus actually provided a Trojan family-tree for the
executioner of Boethius, Theodoric the Ostrogoth.^^ In the Dark
Ages men lost their historical perspective and the habit died away,
but now it was revived. The Middle Ages and even the Renaissance
were pro-Trojan. There was a contemporary parallel to
Benoits work in Geoffrey of Monmouths History of the Kings of
Britain (1135), which, in addition to containing the first detailed
story of King Arthur, traced the ancestry of the British kings back
toTroy.^ Centuries later the idea still persisted. At the beginning
of the Renaissance, Anthony k Wood says that a party in Cambridge
University who opposed the introduction of Greek studies called
themselves Trojans and nicknamed their leader Hector.^^ Sir
Philip Sidney still believed the story when he wrote the Apologie
for Poetrie^ for he said it was "more doctrinable to read about the
feigned Aeneas in Vergil than the right Aeneas in Dares Phrygius^^ i.e. Vergil was beautiful, but
Dares was true. In France,
Ronsard tried to use the myth as a theme for his epic, The Franciad,
Seldom has there been such a successful forgery. Evidently it
became ordinary slang, at least in English, for Jonson calls an
amiable judge the honestest old brave Trojan in London, and
Dekker says the patriotic cobblers are all gentlemen of the gentle
craft, true Trojans.^^ The idea still survives in the laudatory
phrase to fight like a Trojan rather than like a victorious Greek.
In heroic legend, a glorious defeat is remembered longer than a
victory.
The Romance of Troy was widely translated, and even more
widely imitated.^^ It is appropriate for such a book that its imita3.
THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE 55
tions should have been even more influential than the original
particularly one which does not mention Benoit by name. This is
the History of the Destruction of Troy^ written in Latin late in the
thirteenth century by Guido de Columnis.^^ Guido never mentions
Benoit and often cites Dares and Dictys, yet it is clear that
Benoit was his chief source. This book had an overwhelming
success all over Europepartly because it was written in the international
languageand was much oftener translated than The
Romance of Troy itself, being turned into Italian, French, German,
Danish, Icelandic, Czech, Scots, and English.^^ The tale of Troy
as told by Benoit came to Britain by two different routes, equally
interesting.
1. In about 1340 Boccaccio wrote a poem called Filostrato,
expanding the incident in The Romance of Troy where Briseida,
daughter of Calchas (a Trojan priest who deserted to the Greeks
and left her behind in Troy), coquets with one hero for each camp,
Troilus the Trojan and Diomede the Greek.^^ Possibly by confusion
with Homers beautiful captive, Boccaccio called the girl
Griseida, and he emphasized the role ofPandarus as a go-between.^^
This is the poem which Chaucer adapted in Troilus and Criseyde,
2. Guidos Latin plagiarism was put into French by Raoul
Lefevre in 1464, as Le Recueil des hystoires troyennes. (He did
not name Guido, any more than Guido named Benoit!) William
Caxton turned this into English in 1474, and his version

together with Chaucers poem and Chapmans Homeris probably

the source of Shakespeares Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeares
bitter play is therefore a dramatization of part of a translation
into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of
an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance.
The Romance of Troy was only one of many romances on
classical themes; but the quality and historical function of them
all was the same, and so, unfortunately, were most of their sources.
To the men of the Middle Ages, most of the world and most of
history was unknown: therefore they were ready and glad to
believe marvellous tales about both. The Romance of Aeneas^
which in essence is a rewriting of Vergils Aeneid to serve as a
sequel to The Romance of Troy^ decorates and disguises its original
with mythical details taken from commentaries on the Aeneid;
marvels from books on the Seven Wonders of the World ; erotic
56 3. THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE
touches from Ovid ; and incidents (possibly original) of romantic
passion.^9 Thus Lavinia, who in the Aeneid is a quiet dutiful
passive little girl, falls hotly in love with Aeneas the moment she
sees him, and has her first love-letter shot to his feet by an archer.
The Romance of Thebes, another io,ooo-line poem more or less
contemporary with Troy and Aeneas, tells the story of Oedipus and
the curse which he laid on his children, to work itself out in the
fratricidal war of Polynices and the rest of the Seven against
Thebes. There was a source for this at hand, in the Thehaid of
Statius (written about a.d. 8o), but the proportions and emphasis
of the romantic poem are different. The author says he is using
a Latin book called Statius, because laymen cannot read Latin:
some of his work is careful transcription, apparently from an
epitome of Statius, and the rest is romantic invention. 3
There were many poems on that gallant figure Alexander of
Macedon. The Romance of Alexander by Lambert le Tort and
Alexandre de Bernay is a poem of over 20,000 lines, in the twelvesyllable
metre to which it gave the name Alexandrine, This is
medieval romance at its most absurd, although the actual outline
is a recognizable account of the parentage, education, and campaigns
of Alexander the Great. Its source is quite as curious as
that of The Romance of Troy. The philosopher Aristotle was
Alexanders tutor. Aristotle had a nephew called Callisthenes,
who accompanied the king on his campaigns and left an unfinished
history of them. It is lost. But Alexander soon after his death
became a favourite subject for free fantasy^particularly his strange
adventures in the Eastand a number of forgeries or forged amplifications
of Callisthenes history were written.^^ These became
frequent in the late Greek romantic period which produced Dares
and Dictys. We have a vulgar Latin book of this kind by Julius
Valerius, written in the late third century a.d., containing a letter
from Alexander to Aristotle about the marvels of India, full of
travellers tales which were, when revived in the Middle Ages, to
be perpetuated form any centuries. The Arch-priest Leo, from
Naples, that home of gossip and folk-tale, produced another
version in the tenth century ; and, to show the kind of milieu which
produced this stuff, there are Syrian and Armenian versions.
Thus it is not only the best of th^ Greco-Roman world that
comes down to us in modem adaptations, but the most trivial.
Yet still it stirs the imagination. The Middle Eastern tales spun
3 . THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE 57
into late Greek and late Latin romances lived on to inspire that
mendacious traveller Sir John Mandeville, whose very name is
fiction, to make Rabelais compete with them in the voyage of
Pantagmel, and finally to help Othello in bewitching Desdemona
with tales of
the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.
The Lay of Aristotle^ which shows the philosopher saddled and
bridled by a pretty Indian girl, and cavorting about the garden as
an object-lesson for Alexander, is pure invention on the typical
fabliau theme of the power and tricksiness of women; and were it
not that the Greek philosopher was the model, rather than Bang
David or King Solomon, it would scarcely be worth mentioning. 3 3
But it was widely popular in the Middle Ages. In a number of
French Gothic churches you can still see, among the Carved
grotesques, the philosopher (bearded, gowned, and wearing his
doctoral bonnet) down on his hands and knees, with the Indian
houri riding him side-saddle and whip in hand. This, at the time
when the universities were developing the study of Aristotelian
philosophy to the highest point it had reached for many centuries,
is a fine example of the gulf between the scholars and the public
in the Middle Ages.
OVID AND ROMANTIC LOVE
The conception of romantic love which has dominated the
literature, art, music, and to some extent the morality of modern
Europe and America for many centuries is a medieval creation;
but there were important classical elements in its development.
It took shape in the early twelfth century, as a fusion of the following
social and spiritual forces (and in smaller degrees of many
others) :
the code of chivalrous courtesy, which compelled extreme
deference to the weak;
Christian asceticism and scorn of the body;
the cult of the Virgin Mary, which exalted the purity and
transcendent virtue of woman;
feudalism : the lover wa.s his mistresss vassal, and she owned
him like a serf
medieval military tactics: the process of winning a womans
58 3. THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE
love was often compared to the alternative operations of
storming a fortified place, or capturing it after a long
blockade : the whole plot of The Romance of the Rose is a
combination of the two
;
the poetry of Ovid, who wrote a cynical intellectual discussion
of love-making as a science, but whose other works contain
mahy immortal stories of passionate devotion conquering
death
;
at a later period, in the dawning Renaissance, this conception
was deeply influenced by Platonic philosophy ; but at this
time that influence was felt only faintly, through its Neoplatonic
distortions and exaggerations. 3
s
The ideal of romantic love had a long and rich artistic history,
with a remarkable revival in the nineteenth century. It will be
enough to mention a few of its greatest products
:
Dantes New Life, and the guidance of Beatrice throughout
his Comedy ;
Spensers Faerie Queene, and several aspects of Queen Elizabeths
personality;
Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet, his Sonnets, and how much
else?
Chopins music, and Wagners Tristan and Isolde, and most
nineteenth-century Italian opera;
Heines love-poems and the Schubert and Wolf settings for
them;
Victor Hugos The Toilers of the Sea and many modern novels
;
the Sonnet of Arvers and countless modern lyrics
;
Rostands Cyrano de Bergerac and The Distant Princess',
and an infinite number of parodies and burlesques, notably
Don Quixote and Tom Jones.
It is interesting that the conception should have died first in
France, where it was born. In modem French literature, and for
that matter in modem French society, there is scarcely any trace
of it. There are many inversions of it, for instance the disgusting
novels of Montherlant and Sartres Nausea, and one great book
symbolizes its cormption and decline. This is Madame Bovary,
whose heroine mins her life seeking for love and romance, while
her husband treats her in a normal, sensible, French way, like most
husbands throughout the modem world.
3 . THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE 59
Although the ideal of romantic love was forming independently
of the classics in the twelfth century, it was a great classical poet
who gave it authority by his antiquity, illustrated it by his stories,
and elaborated it by his advice. This was Ovid, who had been
already known to scholars, but now entered the world of general
literature.36 Ovid was born in 43 B.c., won quick and brilliant
fame by his love-poems (particularly The Art of Love), and increased
it by a tragedy now lost (Medea) and an epic-historicdidactic
poem on the history of miraculous metamorphoses from
the creation to the death of Julius Caesar. At the age of fifty-one
he was involved in the disgrace of Augustus^ daughter Julia, to
which his Art of Love apparently contributed, and was banished
to Tomi (= Costanza or Constanta in Rumania), where he naturally
died. He is one of the three or four finest Roman poets, and, like
Vergil and Horace, represents a fertile synthesis of Greek and
Roman culture. His disgrace did nothing to injure his reputation
after his death: Dante ranks him with Homer, Horace, Vergil, and
Lucan. 37
It is amusing to imagine that, just as the Latin language in
different environments gave birth to the different modern Romance
languages, so the different Latin writers produced different literary
traditions in western Europe. The spirit of Vergil, with its
solemnity, its devotion to duty, its other worldliness, and its profound
sense of the divine, is reincarnated in the Roman Catholic
church and its greatest literary monument, the Comedy of Dante.
Cicero produced the rhetoric and philosophical prose of England.
Lucan the Spaniard had his imitators in Spanish epic. 38 But Ovid
was the most French of Latin writers; and so he was the strongest
classical influence on nascent French literature. Not only French:
Ovid also typifies and helped to inspire the light, supple, amorous
element in Italian literature^the spirit of Boccaccio and Ariosto.
But the literature of France received his influence earliest and has
retained it longest.
The medieval French romances dealt with three topics above
all others: fighting, love, and marvels. As the years passed, as
the medieval world became a little more sophisticated, fighting
became less and less important, and love and marvels more and
more. Now, Ovid was the jnaster poet of love, and the greatest
poet who had ever told of marvels^miraculous transformations
and weird adventures, mostly motivated by sex. He was therefore
6o 3. THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE
a principal cause, and his popularity a symptom, of the increase
in the power of love and the marvellous in the twelfth century.
One example will illustrate this. An early and beautiful story of
romantic love is that of Heloise and Abelard, a pair of star-crossed
lovers. Peter Abelard (1079-1142), master of Notre Dame, was
one of the greatest twelfth-century philosophers, but he was also
a popular and successful poet of love. Even after (with true Dark
Age savagery, surviving into these difficult centuries) he had been
castrated and silenced, he corresponded with his love Heloise;
and, writing to her, he quotes the Loves of Ovid
:
we yearn for the forbidden, desire the denied^^

while she, writing to him, quotes six lines from Ovids Art ofLove,
a moving passage on the multiplied power of love reinforced by
wine.4<> Even after their love was ruined, they still recalled the
subtle and sensuous Latin poet who expressed it, and perhaps
kindled it.
Early in the twelfth century we hear of a group of less desperate
and more consolable nuns holding a Council of Love to decide
whether it is better to love an aesthete or a soldier, a clerk or a
knight. The debate began by the reading of the instructions of
Ovid, that admirable teacher, just as a church service is begun by
the reading of the Gospel; and the reader was Eva de Danubrio,
an able performer in the art of love, as other women say.^^
This argues a good deal of close interest in the amorous Ovid.
Not much later the stories he tells begin to enter European literature.
Perhaps the first is Pyramus and Thisbe, a French poem of
some 900 lines. It is mostly in the dreary octosyllabic couplets of
the romances, but fantasy breaks in from time to time, and there
are some stanzas, and some dissyllabic lines. The story is a free
rendering of the tale of two unhappy lovers which Ovid says he
got, not from Greece or Rome, but from the East, and which he
alone, apparently, found and saved from oblivion.^^ Coming from
Babylon through Rome to medieval France, it became very
popular again and had a long history. It is often quoted from Ovid
by Proven9al troubadours and by French and Italian poets from
the end of the twelfth century onwards. Chaucer makes it second
in his Legend of Good Women; Gower puts it into his Confessio
Amantis; it is retold in UAmorosa Fiammetta by Boccaccio, and it
reappears in Tasso; there are some remarkable correspondences
3. THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE 6i
between it and the plot of Aucassin and Nicolete; it is essentially
the same story as that of Romeo and Julietthe couple divided by
the hatred of their parents, meeting secretly, and dying separately
under a mistaken belief in each others death; and one of its latest
appearances is in A Midsummer-Night^s Dreamy as
THE MOST LAMENTABLE COMEDY AND MOST CRUEL DEATH
OF
PYRAMUS AND THISBY.
Another of Ovids stories, one of the most poignant, tells how
Philomela was ravished and mutilated by her sisters husband
Tereus. He cut her tongue out and kept her prisoner, but she
wove her story into a tapestry and sent it to her sister Procne.
With Philomela, Procne killed her children and made Tereus eat
them, and then at the extreme of suffering changed into a bird
:
she into a brown-blood-stained swallow, and Philomela into the
nightingale, which laments wordlessly in the darkness and yet
somehow tells her story This is one of the oldest legends in our
world. It appeared as early as Homer, and went all through Greco-
Roman literature, to be reborn in medieval French literature,
paraphrased from Ovids version, under the softer title
it then passed into the Renaissance, where it was used and brutalized
in ? Shakespeares Titus Andronicus, There Lavinia, like
Philomela, is ravished and has her tongue cut out, but her hands
are cut off too, so that she may not write. Nevertheless, she points
out the story in Ovid to show what happened to her:
What would she find ? Lavinia, shall I read ?
This is the tragic tale of Philomel,
And treats of Tereus treason and his rape;
And rape, I fear, was root of thine annoy.
See, brother, see! Note how she quotes the leaves
Philomel was a convention for many years after that; was ignored
by Keats in his ode To a Nightingale; but revived in the thought
of later, more deeply troubled poetsin Arnolds Philomela and
in Eliots Waste Land,
So rudely forcd.
Tereu. . . .
In FlamencUy a Proven9al poem dated to a.d. 1234, there is a list
of the well-known stories which minstrels would be expected to
sing.4^ Some of them are tales of Christian chivalry, but by far the
62 3. THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE
greater number are tales from Greco-Roman myth, and most of
these come from Ovid. There is a large selection from his HeroideSy
the letters of famous ladies to their lovers, and there are others
from the Metamorphoses, This was the period when many of the
favourite stories like Pygmalion and Narcissus entered European
literature,
Ovids Art of Love was translated by the first great French poet,
Chretien de Troyes (fl. ii6o). His translation is lost, but there are
four others extant. One of them is an interesting modernization
by Maitre Elie. Ovid advises the young man in search of pretty
girls to frequent public places in Romethe porticoes, the temples,
and above all the theatres. Maitre Elie brings it up to date by
inserting a list of good hunting-grounds in contemporary Paris.
Some time later, probably between 1316 and 1328, Ovids
Metamorphoses were not only translated but supplied with an
intellectual and moral commentary, to the extent of over 70,000
lines of octosyllabic couplets. The author, who is unknown but
seems to have been a Burgundian, first translates the fables as
Ovid gives them, and then adds an instructive explanation.47 For
instance, Narcissus pined away for love of his own reflection and
was transformed into a flower. This, explains the translator, is a
symbol of vanity. What flower did Narcissus become? That
flower spoken of by the Psalmist, which cometh up and flourisheth
in the morning and dies by the evening: the flower of human
pride.4^ Perhaps only the Middle Ages could have blended
elements so diverse as the brittle, cynical, beautiful legends of
Ovid and this pious Christian moralizing.
THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE
To understand the Middle Ages through literature it is necessary
to read three books: Dantes Comedyy The Canterbury Tales
y
and
The Romance of the Rose. Le Roman de la RosCy incomparably the
most important of the medieval love-romances, is a poem in some
22,700 octosyllabic verses, rhymed in couplets, of which the first
4,266 are by Guillaume de Lorris and were written about 1225-30,
and the rest by Jean Chopinel or Clopinel, called Jean de Meun,
who wrote them about 1270. It is the tale of a difficult, prolonged,
but ultimately successful love-affair, told from the mans point of
view. The hero is the lover, the heroine the Rose. The characters
are mainly abstractions, hypostatized moral and emotional
3 . THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE 63
qualities, such as the Roses guardians, Slander, Jealousy, Fear,
Shame, and offended Pride. There are also anonymous human
personages, notably Friend, who gives the lover some Ovidian
advice, and an Old Woman, who advises the Roses projection,
Fair Welcome. Cupid, too, plays a part, and finally Venus herself
appears, to win the definitive victory over Chastity. The
entire poem takes place in a dream, and contains a great number
of symbols, some of them emphatically sexual: thus, the action
takes place in a garden, and the climax is the capture of a tower,
followed by the lovers contact with the imprisoned Rose. The
most permanently valuable elements in the poem are the romantic
fervour and idyllic youthfulness of the first part, and the digressions
in the second part, by the mature, satiric, and well-educated
Jean de Meun: even in their confusion, they give a vivid and
brilliant picture of the thought of the Middle Ages.
Classical influence in the romance is much more noticeable in
the second part than in the first: still, it runs through the whole
poem. We shall analyse it first as formal and then as material.
The general scheme of the poem is an adventure within a dream.
Lorris actually begins with a reference to one of the most famous
visions of antiquity, the Dream of Scipio which Cicero wrote to end
his book On the Commonwealth, Most of the book is lost now, but
the Dream was extant throughout the Middle Ages, having been
preserved with the commentary written for it by the fifth-century
author Macrobius. It was really Plato who introduced the habit
of conveying deep philosophical ideas in dreams or visions, and
Cicero merely copied him: of course, Lorris knows nothing of that,
nor, indeed, is he clear about Cicero and Scipio: he says Macrobius
wrote the vision
that came to king Scipion.^9
But the dream appears in many medieval authors who were not
influenced by classical culture, and in contexts which are not
borrowings from the classics : for instance, The Dream of the Rood
and Piers Plowman, We may conclude that, in spite of Lorriss
garbled reference to a classical author, the dream in The Romance
of the Rose is not a classical device. It should rather be connected
with the frank and powerful sexual symbolism of the poem. The
rose is not, of course, exclusively a sexual symbol : in Dante {Farad,
30--1) the blessed appear as a great rose of light, and we recall the
64 3. THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE
rose-windows which are among the most beautiful features of
Gothic cathedral-architecture. But it is primarily sexual, and here
it certainly is. A symbol of this kind is a disguised expression of
a subliminal emotion ; and dreams are the channels through which
many subliminal emotions express themselves and find relief. We
should therefore take the dream-form, together with the sexual
symbolism of rose, garden, tower, &c., as expressions of the
intense subconscious life which was produced by the new conception
of romantic love. The two inharmonious partners, physical
desire and spiritual adoration, are united in romantic love, in an
extremely difficult and tense relationship. so That tension, and its
expression by symbolism, are not classical but modern.
Within the dream, the plot of the romance is a quest, ending in
a siege and a battle. Obviously this is the plot of many of the heroic
romances, whether they deal with Arthur and his knights or the
Greeks and the Trojans. The quest of the lover for the Rose is not
far different from the quest of Arthurs knights for the Grail and
many other such adventures. But when we examine the actual
battle more closely, we find classical influence in it. For the entire
conflict takes place, not between human beings, but between two
parties of personifications (with the assistance of a few deities).
This idea has a long history and a classical origin. The tale of
allegorization in the Middle Ages would be endless. But the actual
conception of representing a spiritual conflict as a physical battle
probably entered modem literature from the Psychomachia or
SouUhattle of the Christian Latin poet Pmdentius (348-410),
which describes the vices and virtues battling for the soul, and which
was itself an elaboration and spiritualization of the older and
simpler battles described by Homer and Vergil. Lorris did not
take the idea from Pmdentius, whom neither he nor Jean de Meun
seems to have known, but that was its origin nevertheless.
But there is more talk than fight in the poem. The talk is in
the form of dialoguesometimes becoming monologueand the
talkers are usually abstractions. The most important talker is
Reason, who comes to console the lover when, after having reached
and kissed the Rose, he is temporarily separated from her. Reason
is obviously an imitation of Boethiuss Lady Philosophy, and the
idea is obviously that of the Consolation of Philosophy, Reason
actually recites a series of extracts from Boethius and the entire
tone of her sermon is that Fortune is not to be admired but (as
3 . THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE 65
Philosophy explained to her patient Boethius) to be despised.^^
She observes that he who translates Boethius on Comfort well will
do laymen a great deal of good,s4 and in fact, Jean de Meun did
translate it later. It should, however, be noted that many of Jean^s
ideas came not directly from Boethius, but through his medieval
Latin imitator Alain de Lille, or Alanus de Insulis (1128-1202),
author of a Boethian dialogue with Nature on sodomy (De planctu
Naturae) and a great poem on the nature and powers of man,
Anticlaudianus.
The romance begins with an explicit reference to Ovid:
This, the romance of the Rose,
does the whole art of love enclose. ss
And Ovid is quoted and referred to throughout: a little vaguely
by Lorris, frequently and in detail by Jean de Meun. There are
in both parts of the poem long passages on the art of love. The
Old Woman makes a speech nearly 2,000 lines long about the
methods a woman can use to improve her appearance, increase
her attractions, tease her lovers, and extract money from them.^^
About 600 lines of it come directly from the third book of Ovids
Art of Love. There is one amusing personal allusion. Ovid says
it is essential to bring girls presents
:
Although you brought the Muses with you, Homer,
but took no gifts, youd soon be shown the door. 57
Jean alters this to bring in Ovid himself:
To love a poor man she wont care,
since a poor man is nothing worth
:
and were he Ovid or Homers self,
she wouldnt care two pins for him.5
8
Now, Ovids Art of Love is a frivolous version of the didactic
treatise as written by so many classical philosophers and scientists
;
and it is the didactic element in The Romance of the Rose that
echoes him. There is, however, an important difference, which is
not often pointed out. Ovid wrote a handbook whose wit consisted
in treating love as a science (that is the real meaning of ars
amatoria): he gave the most efficient methods of starting and
continuing love-affairs, and he even wrote a book of Cures for Love
showing how to recover from an unsatisfactory liaison. There is
scarcely anything spiritual about the entire poem: physical, yes,
66 3. THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE
and social, and aesthetic in a high degree, but nothing spiritual.
The girls are the reverse of ideals or symbols : they are Roman golddiggers
or Greek kept women. But The Romance of the Rose does
not give the science of love. It begins by giving the good manners
of love, the higher approach to the experience, and goes on to give
the philosophy of love. Jean de Meun is not much interested in
the good manners of love, but he philosophizes endlessly. His
part of the poem is an intellectual exercise of the same type as the
metaphysical debates of the twelfth-century and thirteenthcentury
universities. It is, of course, far less chivalrous and more
satiric than the first part of the romance, and is inspired as much
by Juvenal as by Ovid, He philosophizes in a harsh tone of cynicism
and protest which sorts very ill with the ideal quest for the
ideal Rose, We have suggested that the symbolism of the poem
was produced by the sexual tension which came into the world
with the modern consciousness. The conflict between the idealism
of Lorris and the realism of Jean de Meun is another expression of
that disharmony. However, despite the misogyny and cynicism
of Jeans section of the romance, it has not the materialistic, nonmoral
outlook of Ovids Art of Love, it deals far more in abstracts,
and it insists incomparably more on moral ideals, even by satirizing
those who fall short of them.
The Romance of the Rose contains the entire metaphysics of
medieval love, as the Divine Comedy contains the metaphysics of
medieval Christianity. Lenient observes that the subject became
a dominant and permanent one in French literature.^^ The French
have always been much more interested in the intellectual aspect
of love than any other European nation. The disquisitions on the
Passions, declaimed by the heroes of Corneille and Racine, the
maps of Tenderness in baroque fiction, the treatise of Stendhal
De ramour, the surgical dissections of love in Proust and many
modern authors, all these stem from the spirit that produced The
Romance of the Rose. For that spirit, the odd blend of emotion
and reasoning which issues in an intellectual discussion of the
supreme human passion, the principal authority respected not
only by the authors of The Romance of the Rose, but by their predecessors
and contemporaries, was Ovid. The methods they used
in discussing love came partly from Roman satire, and partly from
contemporary philosophy, which itself was a direct heir of the
philosophy of Greece. And for the psychological penetration that
3 . THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE 67
enabled them to enter deep into the heart of a tormented lover,
and to vivisect it in soliloquies and anguished solitary debates, all
medieval poets were indebted to the brilliant psycho-analytical
poetry of both Ovid and Vergil.
We have examined various aspects of the form of the poem. But
as a whole it is almost formless, in the sense that its parts bear no
reasonable or harmonious proportion to one another. Its bitterest
enemy, Jean Gerson, chancellor of Notre Dame, described it as
a work of chaos and Babylonian confusion^ and not even its
most convinced admirer could praise its arrangement and structural
plan. In principle, this formlessness is the reverse of classical.
We shall see later how, as the modems became better acquainted
with the great books of Greece and Rome, they learned to give
better form to their own by learning the simple rules of proportion,
relief, balance, and climax. The Romance of the Rose is in this
respect a medieval product, comparable to the enormous tapestries,
the endless chronicles, the ononiscient encyclopaedias, bestiaries,
and lapidaries, the vast Gothic cathedrals which grew slowly up,
altering their plan as they grew, and sometimes, like The Romance
of the Rose^ ending with two different kinds of spire on the same
building.^^ Nevertheless, there was a faint classical justification
for formlessness in a quasi-philosophical work. The tradition of
satire was that of a rambling, apparently extempore diatribe in
which the author spoke as his fancy and humour moved him. It
was in that tradition, crossed with the form of the philosophical
dialogue (also fairly loose), that Boethius wrote his Consolation of
Philosophy, But not even these two loose, roomy, disquisitive
patterns can be held responsible for the shapeless garrulity of The
Romance of the Rose,
Materially, the classical influence is very much stronger in the
second part of the poem than in the first. It is seen chiefly in
illustrative stories, in arguments, and in descriptions.
There are many illustrative stories. Jean makes the Old Woman
say, with an unusual touch of self-criticism:
Examples ? Thousands I could give,
but I should have to talk too long.^^
The habit of using examples from history and myth to illustrate a
moral lesson is very old in classical tradition. It can be found as
early as Homer, where the great heroes of the still-earlier past are
68 3. THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE
used as models and quoted in speeches, so that their successors can
imitate their virtues, avoid their errors. ^3 it spread through nearly
all classical literature to an almost incredible degree. For instance,
Propertius, who writes love-poetry, feels that his own passion is
inadequate as a subject for a poem, unless it is objectified and
exemplified by mythological parallels. The satires of Juvenal
swarm with examplessome taken from contemporary or nearly
contemporary life, but many others merely historical cliches:
Xerxes = doomed pride; Alexander = boundless ambition. Both
the authors of The Romance of the Rose use classical stories in this
illustrative way. Guillaume de Lorris rewrites the tale of Narcissus
from Ovid, although he simplifies it: he makes the nymph Echo
merely Echo, a great lady and omits the metamorphosis of
Narcissus into a flower. Jean de Meun takes the tale of Pygmalion
from the same poem, the tale of Dido and Aeneas from Vergil,
the story of Verginia from Livy, and many other illustrations from
Boethius. ^5
Arguments derived from the classics are mostly in the second
part of the poem. For instance, Jean de Meuns anti-feminist
attitude is strengthened by arguments derived from Juvenals
sixth, the famous misogynist satire. As for descriptions, a good
example is Ovids picture of the Golden Age, which is adapted in
lines 9106 ^7
It goes without saying that the actual work of translation was
done in a more scholarly way than in The Romance of Troy and
works of that kind. Jean de Meun was more learned than Lorris.
Although Lorris mentions Macrobius, Ovid, Tibullus, Catullus,
and Cornelius Gallus, he really appears to have known only Ovid
welL^^ Jean de Meuns chief sources were:
Ciceros philosophical dialogues On Old Age and On Friendship]
Vergils Bucolics^ Georgies^ and Aeneid]
Horaces satires and epistles, though not his odes;
Ovid, who contributed about 3,000 lines to The Romance of
the Rose;
Juvenal, chiefly satire 6, but also satires i and 7;
Boethius;
but there are minor mentions of other classical authors, enough to
show that he was a remarkably well-read man.^^
3 . THE MIDDLE AGES: FRENCH LITERATURE 69
The Romance of the Rose had an immediate and long-lasting
success. One remarkable proof of the popularity of Lorriss unfinished
poem is the fact that Jean de Meun thought it worth while
to take it over and make it the vehicle for his own ideas. And its
wide appeal is proved by the existence of hundreds of manuscript
copies, as well as by the fact that it was translated into English
(by Chaucer) and German. Two hundred years after its appearance
it was turned into French prose by Molinet (1483). Forty
years later Clement Marot re-edited it, in a beautiful printed
edition, with moral comments which remind us of Ovid Moralized,
He said, for instance, that the Rose signified (i) wisdom, (2) the
state of grace, (3) the Virgin Mary (who is defamed by Male-
Bouche == heresy), and (4) the supreme good. Nevertheless, the
poem was not universally approved. The poetess Christine de
Pisan in 1399 reproached it for its unchivalrous attitude to womanhood;
and the greatest of all its opponents was Jean Gerson, who
wrote a Vision in 1402 describing it as an ugly and immoral book.*^
In the dispute which ensued, its morality was hotly debated on
both sides. The poem which stirred up so much excitement more
than a century after its publication was a very vital work of art.
4
DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY
Dante alighieri was the greatest writer of the Middle Ages,
and The Divine Comedy incomparably their greatest book.
Now it is not possible to understand either Dante or his poem
without recognizing that the aim of his life was to create, in fact,
to he the closest possible connexion between the Greco-Roman
world and his own. He did not think the two worlds equal in value
:
the Christian revelation had raised all Christendom above the
antique pagans. But he held that the modern world could not
realize itself without the world of classical antiquity, which was a
necessary prior stage in the ascent of man. His work is a synthesis
of ancient Rome and modern Italy (or rather modern Europe),
so alive and natural that it is scarcely possible to disentangle the
various elements without breaking the organic whole they make.
Again, it was Dante who created the modern Italian language and
inaugurated Italian literature. But He was also a competent writer
in Latin : he was one of the few medieval authors who made considerable
contributions to world-literature both in an ancient and
in a modern tongue. That itself typifies the synthesis, and shows
what is sometimes forgotten, that Greek and Latin are not dead
languages so long as their literatures are living carriers of energy,
and thought, and stimulus, to scholars and poets.
The Divine Comedy is great because it is rich. It is rich with
much of the highest beauty and thought of the Middle Ages; and
in that thought and beauty the Greco-Roman tradition played not
only an important, but an essential, part. As usual in the Middle
Ages, the tradition was, even by Dante, imperfectly understood,
and in certain respects distorted ; but he was a great enough man
to apprehend its greatness.
The title of the poem is The Comedy,^ Dante himself explains,
in his important letter to Can Grande della Scala, why he chose
this title. It is evident that he has little conception of its essential
meaningnor, indeed, of the meaning of drama as a/orm, a distinctive
literary pattern. He says that comedy is a kind of poetic
narrative which begins harshly and ends happily, and which is
written in humble unpretentious language. He explains this
4. DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY 71
further by distinguishing comedy from tragedy^which begins
quietly and ends in horror, and is written in a lofty style. Apparently
this is a garbled reminiscence of Aristotles definitions of
the two main types of drama.^ When we recall that Dante makes
Vergil himself describe the Aeneid as my tragedyV we see that
Dante considers comedy to connote what we should now call an
epic, a poem of heroic length, provided it has a happy ending. By
calling his own work comedy in contrast to Vergils tragedy, he
clearly means to set up his poem as a complement, not perhaps
a rival but certainly a partner, to Vergils Aeneid. (It should be
added that such misapprehensions of the meaning of technical
terms were widespread in the Middle Ages and were part of the
general ignorance of literary patterns. Lucan was known as a
historian; even The Madness of Roland was called a tragedy.4^)
So, like the Odyssey and Paradise Regained^ Dantes poem is an
epic with a happy ending.
Dante says the language is humble. Of course the original
classical definition of comedy as low in style included the fact that
such plays were full of slang and obscenity and broad verbal
humour generally. Dante does not mean that. He means that his
Comedy is in a straightforward unpretentious style compared with
the grandeur and complexity of tragedy. This explanation is
supported by a passage in his essay on vernacular Italian style.
There he declares that grand language should be kept for poetry
written in the tragic manner, while comic writing should sometimes
be intermediate in tone, and sometimes low. And, as we
shall see, his poem is far less elaborate in style, and its vocabulary
far plainer, than the work of Vergil and other classical heroic poets.
Yet it cannot really be called low and humble. It is sometimes
very involved. It is often exalted and ecstatic. And although it
has a supremely happy ending, it does not, like the comedies of
Terence, deal with ordinary everyday life. In his earlier essay Dante
went on to say that the grand style was reserved for lyric poetry on
great subjects, such as salvation, love, and virtue. But these are the
chief subjects of the Comedy itself, and it is difficult to believe that
Dante really thought the style of his Paradise meaner than that of
his own earlier lyric poems and those of his contemporaries. It is
arguable, therefore, that by the time he wrote the letter explaining
the Comedy he had dropped his earlier theories and subdivisions,
and now meant that the language was low, not because it was a
72 4. DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY
plain style of vernacular Italian, but simply because it was vernacular
Italian as contrasted with literary Latin. This would not be
mock modesty or classicist snobbery, but an acknowledgement of
the fact that, like all modern languages of the time, Italian was far
less flexible and sonorous, far more degraded by conversational
usages, and far less noble in its overtones, than the language of
Latin literature. ^
The subject of the poem is a visit to the next world, the world
after death. This theme was common to poets and visionaries
in the Greco-Roman, and even more in the medieval Christian,
world. ^ The general structure Dante followeda division into
hell, purgatory, and heaven^was Christian; and so was much,
though not all, of the theology and morality which Dante learnt
during his descent and ascent. Nevertheless, he does not mention
any medieval seer as his authority, or any medieval work as his
model. The essential point is that his guide into the next world,
through hell, and through purgatory is the Roman poet Vergil.
Before Vergil leaves him, the two are met by another Latin poet,
Statiusa pupil of Vergil, but described as a converted Christian^ ^who takes Dante to paradise,
where he is met, conducted, and
taught by his own first love Beatrice, in whom the ideals of
romantic love and Christian virtue are united. It is quite clear that
Dante means us to infer that, just as his poem is a complement to
the Aeneid^ so the imagination and art which made it possible for
him to see and to describe the world of eternity were due (after
God and Beatrice) to Latin poetry, and in particular to Vergil.
Had it not been so, had there been a Christian model for the work,
Dante would have introduced a Christian mystic as his guide.
Dante^s selection of Vergil as his guide was prompted by many
traditions (some trivial, some important) and by many profoundly
revealing spiritual factors.
First, Vergil was above all others the pagan who bridged the
gap between paganism and Christianity. He did this in a famous
poem {BucolicSy 4) written about forty years before Christs birth,
foretelling the birth of a miraculous baby, which would mark the
opening of a new age of the world, a golden age corresponding to
the idyllic first beginnings, when there would be no more bloodshed,
toil, or suffering. The child when grown was to become a
god and rule the world in perfect peace.
4. DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY 73
This fact has two aspects. The first is external. Mainly through
this remarkable poem Vergil acquired, the reputation of having
been a Christian before Christ and of having, through divine
inspiration, foretold the birth of Jesus. ^ St. Augustine held this
beliefs and many others after him. (Many modern scholars
believe that Vergil actually knew something of the Messianic
writings of the Hebrews.) The belief was strengthened by other
interconnected facts
:
that the whole of the Aeneid (unlike any other classical epic)
relates the fulfilment of a great and favourable prophecy,
and that the prophecy led to the establishment of Rome;
that at the climax of the Aeneid a famous prophetess, the
Sibyl, appears to advise Aeneas
;
that the Sibyl is mentioned in Vergil's earlier poem {Buc, 4. 4)
in connexion with the coming of the divine baby and the
kingdom of God;
that numerous Greek, Jewish, and Near Eastern prophecies
and apocalypses were in existence during the two centuries
before and after the birth of Christ, many of which, to give
them authority, were known as Sibylline books;
that in medieval Italian folk-lore Vergil was known as a
great magician (although Dante himself does not pay any
attention to that kind of story).
The internal aspect of Vergils Christian mission is more important
and has been less often considered. It is that his poem was
not merely an accident. It was the expression of a real spiritual
fact : of the profound longing for peace, the unvoiced yearning for
a world governed by the goodness of God rather than the conflicting
desires of men, which ran all through the Mediterranean world
after a century of terrible wars.^^ The future emperor Octavian
himself, with whose family the divine baby was doubtless connected,
was hailed in many towns of the Middle East as God,
Saviour, and Prince of Peace: the designations were apparently
quite sincere or prompted by quite sincere motives.^^ It was this
longing that prepared the way for the expansion of Christianity,
and it is a tribute to Vergils greatness that even as a young man
he should have grasped it and immortalized it in an unforgettable
poem.
Vergils own character is the clue to this visionary power, and
74 4. DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY
to his immortality as Dantes guide. Anyone who reads his poetry
with intelligence and sympathy, as Dante did, recognizes that in
essentialsin nearly all the essentials except the revelation of Jesus
Christhe was a Christian soul. So much so that throughout the
Aeneid we feel the task of writing an epic about war and conquest
to be repugnant to him.^^ He hated bloodshed. He had, and
embodied in his hero, a deep devotion to selfless moral ideals : his
pius Aeneas is far more of an idealist than the angry Achilles, the
clever Odysseus, or even the patriotic Hector. Although passionate
by nature, he had a singular refinement in sexual matterswhich
was recognized in the medieval misspelling of his name, Virgilius
the virginal. All we learn of his character from his friends and
from his ancient biographers shows him as humble, and gentle,
and loving-kind. But most of all, what marks out Vergil from other
poets is his melancholy sense of the transitoriness and unreality
of this life and his concentration, even in an epic of ardent passion
and violent action, upon eternity.
A third great factor influencing Dantes choice was that Vergil
was a herald of the Roman empire. For Dante, the two most
important facts in this world were the Christian church and the
Holy Roman empire. The church and its revelation Vergil had
only announced with a dim prophetic foreboding. But the empire
he had sung better than any other. Essentially, the Aeneid is a
proclamation of the Roman empire as established by the will of
heaven, and destined to last for ever. This, Dante thought, was
the same empire which governed central Europe in his day, and
which he glorified in one of his two great Latin books, De monarchia
a proof that the existence of the empire was the direct will
of God.^5 The same belief appears most strikingly in his climactic
description of the lowest circle of hell, which is kept for those who
have been traitors to their masters. In it, Dante and Vergil see the
supreme traitor Satan, eternally immobilized in ice, and chewing
in his three mouths the three worst earthly traitors. One is Judas
Iscariot, and the other two are those who murdered the founder of
the Roman empire, Brutus and Cassius.^^
But apart from the Roman empire as a political entity, Dante
loved Vergil because Vergil loved Italy, There is a superb description
of Italy in Vergils farming poem, which is the finest
sustained tribute ever paid to a country by one of its citizens.^
Far gloomier, but no less sincerely patriotic, is the apostrophe to
4. DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY 75
strife-torn Italy in Dantes Purgatory, which is introduced by
the affectionate embrace of the modem Mantuan Sordello and the
ancient Mantuan Vergil. Again and again Dante speaks proudly of
Vergil as a fellow-citizen : il nostro maggiorpoeta, our greatest poet.
And it should not be forgotten that, although neither Dante nor
Vergil was a Roman born, they both assumed and preached that
the ideals of Rome should cover and vivify all Italy. That is one
of the main themes of Vergils Georgies \ it reappears constantly in
the Aeneid\ and it is often restated by Dante, who calls Italy simply
Latin land^9 and speaks of Italians whose souls he meets as
Latins For Dante the Roman world of the past was part of the
Holy Roman empire to which he belonged, as limbo and hell were
^ part of the eternal world that culminated in heaven.
Another factor, quite as important as the others, was that for
Dante Vergil was the greatest poet in the world; and that he himself
modelled his poetry upon Vergil. Although he referred to
other classical poets, although he well knew the classics available
to him then, he knew Vergil far best. It has often been said that,
of Dantes two guides through the next world, Vergil represents
Reason and Beatrice Faith. But it has been asked why, if Reason
was to be one of Dantes guides, Dante did not choose the master
of those who know, Aristotle.^^ He sees Aristotle in the next
world, and pays him a high tribute, but does not speak with him.
Instead, it is Vergil who takes Dante through hell and purgatory,
helped by Vergils warmest Latin admirer and imitator, Statius
(whom Dante believed to have been converted to Christianity
through Vergils Messianic prophecy), and parting from him only
when heaven and Beatrice are near. And if we read the Comedy we
do not find that the influence of Vergil is predominantly that of
Reasonalthough he is conceived as having encyclopaedic, or
divine, eternal knowledge. What Dante first praises him for is his
style :
You alone are he from whom I took
that beautiful style which has brought me honour.^^
We must examine what Dante meant by this : for at first sight it is
not more easily understandable than saying that Vergil, the poet
of mystic imagination and haunting beauty and great distances,
represents Reason.
To begin with, Dante did not imitate the verbal style of Vergil.
This is obvious. It can be tested by comparing the passages where
76 4. DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY
he uses Vergilian material and their originals in Vergil. For
instance, in Inferno, 13, the two poets enter a wood where the trees
bleed when broken, because they contain the souls of suicides. This
is imitated from the Aeneid, But there, when Aeneas breaks the
branch, Vergil describes the effect picturesquely and elaborately:
Chill horror
shook my limbs and cold fear froze my blood.^^
But when Dante breaks the branch, and words and blood come
out together, the effect is described with absolute, irreducible
plainness
:
I let the twig
fall, and stood like the man who is afraid.^^
Again and again, where Vergil is elaborate, Dante is simple. His
simplicity is none the less great poetry, but it is not the brilliantly
ornate, highly compressed language of Vergil, loaded with various
sounds and significances. It is a clear, direct style, and he was
partly thinking of that quality when he called his poem a comedy.
But there is another passage where he speaks of his style. In
purgatory, he meets a poet of the old school, who quotes one of
Dantes own lyrics, praising it as the sweet new style.^^ Now
Dantes manner in his lyrics was a development of Provenfal lovepoetry,
deepened and enriched by truer inspiration.^^ It was not
Vergilian. It was not classical in origin at all.
And finally, what is the metre in which the whole Comedy is
written? It is an elaborate system of triply rhymed hendecasyllables:
ABABCBCDC .... This, as one of the earliest commentators
on Dante recognized, is an elaboration of a Proven9al
pattern called the serventese?'^ The metrical scheme, like the whole
architecture of Dantes poem, is of course dictated primarily
not by Provencal influence but by his wish to do honour to the
Trinity: it is only the first example of the number-symbolism
which penetrates the entire work. But the rhyme-scheme which
he chose for this purpose, and the triple pattern of the poem in
general, were Provencal, and not classical Latin,
The language is vernacular Italian, not classical Latin. The
style is simple and direct, not rich and complex. The metre and
rhymes are modem Italian developed out of Proven9al folk-poetry.
What is there left? What else can Dante mean by saying that he
took his beautiful style from Vergil alone?
4. DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY 77
In a later passage of the Inferno a brother-poet, Guido Cavalcante,
who wrote love-lyrics like Dantes, is described by him
as perhaps despising Vergil.^s Dante means that most of the
modern vernacular lyric poets thought nothing was to be learned
from studying the classics: which, for their purposes, was true
enough. But he himself tells Vergil that he has read the Aeneid
with long study and much love.^-^ Therefore the essential
qualities which differentiate the Comedy from Dantes early sweet
lyrics, and which differentiate the Comedy from the work of all
contemporary European poets, are the beautiful style which
Dante took from Vergilas he says, alone. These qualities are
grandeur of imagination and sustained nobility of thought. They
are essentially classical and essentially Vergilian qualities; and
Dante was the only modern poet who attempted to clothe them in
modern language. Thus, by the testimony of Dante himself, one
of the greatest of Dantes greatnesses, which raised him high above
the jongleurs and amorists of his own day, was directly created by
classical literature,
This is borne out by a scrutiny of the actual imitations of Greco-
Roman literature and of the ideas inspired by it which appear in
the Comedy. There is an admirable analysis of Dantes debts to
his classical teachers in Moores Studies in Dante. To two of them
Dante owes far more than to all the others. One is Aristotle, the
thinker. The other is Vergil, the poet.^i
The sixth factor which determined Dante to make Vergil his
guide is the obvious one that Vergil had written a famous description
of a journey through the world beyond this world, in the sixth
book of the Aeneidand not only an account of its marvels, but
a profound philosophical and moral exposition of the ultimate
meanings of life and death. Vergil himself imitates and adapts so
many of his forerunners that we tend to forget how original the
final synthesis really is. His chief model is Homer {Odyssey
y
ii),
but in Homer and in other poetic descriptions of the underworld
there is no such intellectual content as Vergil has put into his poem,
bringing together mystical ideas from Orphism, Platonism, and
many other doctrines now unknown. True, Vergils physical
description of the other world is vague. Dante wished his to be
realistic and exact and detailed: therefore he based his moral
geography on Aristotles arrangement of vices, with elaborations
from St. Thomas Aquinas and alterations of his own.^^ But almost
78 4. DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY
all the supernatural inhabitants of his hell are taken from Vergil
rather than from medieval Christian belief: the ferryman Charon,
the judge Minos, the fiendish dog Cerberus, the Harpies, the
Centaurs, and many others.^^ It is fascinating to see how skilfully
he converts these classical myths into medieval figures : for example,
Minos is no longer the serene judge, the friend of Zeus, but a
snarling devil who gives sentence by twisting his tail round his
body again and again to show how many circles each sinner must
descend into helL34
Lastly, I have sometimes thought that Dante chose Vergil as
his guide because, like Aeneas, he was himself a great exile.
The two essential classical influences on Dantes Comedy are the
ethical and physical system of Aristotle, and Vergils imagination,
patriotism, and character. But the poem is penetrated with many
kinds of classical influences so deeply that there can be no talk of
mere imitation. The Greco-Roman world is as alive for Dante as
his own, is parallel to it, and is inextricably interwoven with it.
He describes very many great figures of classical myth and history
as inhabitants of hell. He places the noblest in limbo, a heaven
without God, because they lived before the Christian revelation.
In purgatory the seven cardinal sins, although expiated by modern
men and women, are emblematized by sculptures of classical personages
mixed with figures from Jewish and Christian history: for
instance, Nimrod and Niobe, Saul and Arachne, as symbols of
pride; 35 and the guardian of purgatory is neither an ancient
Hebrew, nor a modern Christian, nor an angel, but the Roman
Cato.36 Dante constantly alternates figures and ideas from the
ancient world with others from modern times, and balances
quotations from the Bible with quotations from the classics. The
two most striking of these interwoven pairs are, first, Dantes reply
to Vergils summons: he says he dare not enter the underworld, for
I am not Aeneas, and not Paul

St. Paul, whom a medieval legend made the hero of a descent into
hell. 3 7 And, second, the great moment when Beatrice at last
appears. The crowd of angels cries Benedictus qui venis, Blessed
art thou who comest (in the name of the Lord)^the greeting of
the multitudes to Jesus at his entry into Jerusalem; and then
Manibus date lilia plenis^ Give me, from full hands, lilies^the
4, DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY 79
tribute of Anchises to the spirit of Marcellus in the Aeneid.^^
Again, throughout the poem Dante draws his comparisons from
two chief fields: from his own observation of nature and from
classical poetry and myth. But sometimes, as in his description of
Paolo and Francesca approaching
like doves called by desire, ^ 9
he draws them from nature as observed by classical poets (in this
case from VergiP<^), and thus combines the beauty of reminiscence
with the beauty of vision.^^
Moore has analysed and listed the classical echoes in Dante, not
only in the Comedy but in all his books, so admirably that it is
merely necessary to summarize his work. The principal authors
quoted and copied by Dante are these:
First, Aristotle, whom he knew through the Latin translation
used by St. Thomas Aquinas. There are over 300 references,
covering all the then available books of Aristotle,
except the Poetics,
Next, Vergil, with some 200 references which show a profound
study of the Aeneid, The Bucolics and Georgies Dante knew
less well.
There are about 100 references to Ovid, whose Metamorphoses
were Dantes main source for Greco-Roman mythology.
He may also have known Ovids other booksfor instance,
there are allusions to two of the Heioides in ParadisOy
9. 100-2but not well.
Lucan appears in 50 references or so; Dante could scarcely
admire his hatred of Caesarism, but was impressed by his
powerful imagination.^^
Cicero is quoted about 50 times alsonot his speeches, but
his moral essays. Dante himselD^ said the chief philosophical
influences on him were Ciceros Laelius, On Friendship,
and
Boethius, whom he cites 30 or 40 times.
Lastly, he knew something of Statius. He makes him a
Christian poet, apparently because he inferred Statius had
been secretly converted, and also because of Statius vast
admiration for Vergil. From his Thehaid Dante took several
fine images, one being the forked flame which contains the
souls of Diomede and Ulysses.^^
8o 4. DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY
These are the main authors in Dantes librarytogether, of
course, with the Vulgate, St. Thomas, and the church fathers. He
pays compliments to other poets. For example, Juvenal, when he
arrived in limbo, told Vergil how much Statius admired the Aeneid a thought inspired by
Juvenals own words.^s But it is odd that
the satires of Juvenal and Horace were so little known to Dante;
and unfortunate that Tacitus, whose history he would have
admired, was then virtually lost. On the other hand, it is notable
that he deliberately ignores the late classical writers and the early
Christian poets like Prudentius. It is sometimes said that he prefigured
the Renaissance. So far as that is true, it is justified by the
intensity of his admiration Tor the Greco-Roman world, and by
his knowledge of the true ckssics. He understands that Cicero is
greater than Boethius, that Vergil is greater than Prudentius, and
that Aristotle is the greatest of ancient thinkers. The sages and
poets whom he meets in limbo are in fact most of those whom
subsequent ages have agreed to regard as the supreme minds of
that long and splendid civilization. It is a proof of Dantes vision
that, even through the half-darkness of the Middle Ages, he saw
the brilliance of the classical world, and knew at that distance who
were the lesser lights in it, and who the greater.
5
TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
PETRARCH, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER
The Dark Ages were the victory of barbarism over classical
civilization. The Middle Ages were the epoch during which,
havirig been converted, the barbarians slowly civilized themselves
with the help of the church and of the surviving fragments of
classical culture. The Renaissance meant the enlargement of that
growing civilization and its enrichment by many material and
spiritual benefits, some acquired for the first time, others rediscovered
after a long and almost death-like sleep. One of the
treasures that most enriched us then was classical art and literature only a small fraction of the
original wealth possessed by the
Greeks and Romans, but still inestimable riches: much of Greco-
Roman art, many of the greatest Greek and Roman books, now
emerged from the darkness of nearly a thousand years. The darkness
had fallen last in Italy, and it was appropriate that it should
there be lifted first. The darkness had begun with the separation
of the western and eastern empires and the severance of Roman
from Greek culture ; it was fitting that it should lift again in the
west, when a new and equally terrible Dark Age was invading the
easta Dark Age which in some ways has never yet liftedand
that in the west the real dawn should be heralded by the return
of Greek culture to the lands which had once known it so well. It
was to Italy that Greek returned first, and it was in Italy that the
first of the rediscoveries were made, the first and most stimulating
of all. The men who did most to recapture Greek and retrieve the
rest of Latin were two Italians. They were, however, not purely
Italians ; but Italians who had a second home in France. Thus the
two most highly civilized countries in Europe both shared, through
their sons, in the rebirth of classical civilization. The two were
Francesco Petrarca, customarily called Petrarch in English (1304-
74),^ and Giovanni Boccaccio (i3i3--75).
Petrarch belonged to the generation after Dante. His father was
perpetually exiled from Florence by the same decree, at the same
time, and for the same political offence as Dante himself,^ The
5076 Q
8z 5. TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
relation between Petrarch and Dante is highly significant. Although
both are Italian poets of the same epoch, they differ in so many
ways that the gap between them may be taken to symbolize the
gulf between two stages of culture.
Himself a distinguished writer, Petrarch did not care for Dantes
poetry: partly, perhaps, from jealousy of its unapproachable
loftiness, partly because he claimed to despise books written in
vernacular Italian (even his own), and partly because he found the
Dantean austerity chilling and unsympathetic. In all his letters,
he never mentions Dante by name. When he refers to him in a
letter he calls him 'a fellow-citizen of ours who in point of style is
very popular, and who has certainly chosen a noble theme ;3 and
elsewhere he alludes to Dantes blunt speech and forbidding
manner.^ The greatest proof of his antipathy for Dante is that

although Petrarch himself was the first keen bibliophile^he did

not possess a copy of the Comedy until Boccaccio wrote one for
him and sent it to him in 1359.^ (And yet before this he had written
an ambitious series of poems on a theme partly suggested by
Dante, and on a scope designed to rival the Comedy itself.) He
saw Dante once, when he was eight. The relation between the two
rather resembles that between Vergil and his junior Ovid, who says
Vergil I only saw^ and who spent his life outdoing the elder
master, in a style of greater grace and less depth.
Dante was exiled in middle life and never recovered. He always
yearned to return to the little city-state of Florence. Petrarch was
born in exile, and easily became what Dante hoped to be : a citizen
of the worldtravelling freely and with much enjoyment through
Italy, France, and the Rhineland, having homes in various parts
of France and Italy, staying as guest with numerous nobles and
church dignitaries, but preferring no particular spot. Dante also
was far-travelled^to Paris, and, some think, to Oxford; but it was
the gloomy wandering of a displaced person, and, where Petrarch
looked outwards with pleasure at the changing world, Dante always
looked inward. Similarly, in the number and variety of his friends
Petrarch far surpassed Dante. His correspondence, which was
eventually collected into three sets of over 400 letters in all, is the
first of the many international letter-bags assembled by scholars
like Erasmus, and thus prefigures the world of free exchange of
ideas and literatures in which we were brought up.
Dante had a bookshelf, a large one. But Petrarch had the first
PETRARCH, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER 83
living and growing personal library, in the modern sense. The
ideal which grew up in the Renaissance and has not yet died away,
that of the many-sided humane thinker with a well-stocked head
and a better-stocked library, the ideal personified in Montaigne,
Ronsard, Johnson, Gray, Goethe, Voltaire, Milton, Tennyson,
and many morethat ideal was, in modern times, first and most
stimulatingly embodied in Petrarch. The books which Dante
knew, he knew deeply; but they were not many. Petrarch knew
neither the Bible nor Aristotle so well, but he knew classical
literature much better than Dante, and he knew more of it. For
he discovered much of it, and stimulated others to discover more.
He did not discover it in the sense in which Columbus discovered
America, or Schliemann Troy. The books were there, in libraries,
and still readable. But they were in the same position as out-ofprint
works nowadays, of which only one or two copies exist, in
basements or forgotten dumps. Hardly anyone knew they were
there ; no one read them ; and they were not part of the stream of
culture. 7 What Petrarch did was to find them by personal search,
to publish them by copying them and encouraging others to make
copies, and to popularize them by discussing them with his friends.
For instance, when he was twenty-nine he visited Liege, heard
there were many old books^ sought them out, and found two
hitherto unknown speeches by Cicero. He copied one himself and
made his travelling companion copy the other, although they could
hardly find any decent ink in the whole city.^ Again, in 1345
visited the cathedral library of Verona, and there found a manuscript
containing a vast number of Ciceros personal letters. This
correspondence was quite unknown at the time, and proved to be
so interesting that it encouraged (among other things) the discovery
of the remaining half of the corpus, which Coluccio de
Salutati turned up in 1392.^ When Petrarch found the manuscript
it was falling to pieces. He copied it out in his own hand. With
the help of these letters he plunged into an exhaustive study of the
many-sided character of Cicero, admirable as an artist, stimulating
as a thinker, lovable as a man: the character which through
Petrarch became one of the forces that formed the Renaissance
ideal of humanism. And he imitated them in his own voluminous
and amusing Latin correspondence with scholars and writers
throughout the western world. (One of his most charming ideas
was to address letters to the great dead whom he admired: Homer,
84 5. TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
Cicero, and others. After he found Ciceros correspondence in
Verona, he wrote Cicero to tell him.)
Petrarchs library has been exhaustively described, for it was not
merely a collection but a real cultural achievement.^^ His books
make a striking contrast with Dantes. Both knew Cicero; but
Dante only as a philosophical essayist and rhetorical writer, while
Petrarch knew him as an orator through his speeches, and, through
his letters, as a personal friend. Both knew Vergil well: Petrarch
actually imitated him more closely and less successfully than
Dante, in a Latin epic on Scipio, called AfricaJ^ Dante and other
men of the Middle Ages knew Horace the satyr or satirist; but
Petrarch, himself a lyric poet, quoted the odes of Horace freely.^^
Dante knew little about Latin drama, and thought comedy and
tragedy were forms of narrative. Petrarch was familiar with the
tragedies of Seneca and the comedies of both Terence and Plautus
(at least with four of the eight Plautine plays then known) : he had
some idea of the meaning of drama, and in his youth attempted a
genuine comedy. Dante was aware who Juvenal was, but paid him
less attention than he deserved. Petrarch knew Juvenals satires,
and also those of his predecessor Persius. Dante knew probably no
more than the first four books of Livy. Petrarch knew twentynine,
and never gave up searching for the hundred or so that are
lost: he wrote Livy to tell him of his eagerness to find them.^5
Dante had virtually no Greek. Petrarch tried to learn Greek in
middle age, but failed, because his tutor Barlaam left Avignon.^^
Yet, from his study of Latin authors, he had realized something of
the importance of their Hellenic teachers and predecessors. The
hierarchy of Greek thinkers and poets was far more clear and
precise for him than it was for Dante: and the few Greek writers
mentioned in the Comedy compare poorly with those who appear
in Petrarchs TriumphsJ-^ Much to his grief, Petrarch never
managed to read a book in Greek; but he did search for Greek
manuscripts (he acquired a Homer and some sixteen dialogues of
Plato) and finally, through Boccaccio, got hold of a Latin rendering
of both the Homeric epics. Like a true book-lover, he was found
dead in his library, stooping over a book; and the last large-scale
work he began was to annotate the Latin version of the Odyssey
Finally, Dante thought Aristotle the master of Reason; while
Petrarch thought him a bad stylist and a thinker who was wrong
in matters of great importance.^ ^ It is in Petrarch that we find the
PETRARCH, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER 85
first modern admiration of Aristotles master Plato, whose works
he possessed and yearned to read.
Dante was a devout Christian. He placed classical learning
almost on the same level as sacred learning, but, because it lacked
divine revelation, lower. Petrarch also was a Christian, but less
ardently absorbed in visions of life after death, less passionately
interested in problems of morality and theology. Nevertheless it
would be wrong to see him as foreshadowing, except in the gentlest
hints, the positive paganism of many Renaissance humanists.
Thus, while he loved Cicero more than all other men of the past,
next to him he admired St. Augustine, whom he quotes many
hundreds of times, and whom he introduced as his teacher and
confessor in his Secret, We can, however, date his real interest in
Christian literature to the latter part of his life, when he was about
fifty and we cannot imagine Dante ever comparing his own
attitude to religion (as Petrarch did) to the love of a son who takes
his mother for granted until he hears her attacked.^^
Like Dante, Petrarch wrote both in Latin and in Italian. His
books in both languages are important. But he himself considered
his work in Latin to be more valuable. He was wrong.
His main effort was spent on his Latin epic, Africa^ its hero being
Scipio Africanus and its model Vergils Aeneid, But he made the
mistake which Dante did not, the mistake of so many Renaissance
authors, not excluding Milton. He believed that the more closely
he followed the formal outlines of the classical poet he admired,
and the more exactly each incident or image or speech corresponded
with similar elements in his Latin model, the better his poem must
be. This is an easy mistake to make, but it is disastrous. For it
means that the creative mind cannot work freely, with reference
only to the harmony of subject and form which it is building up.
Everything must be referred, on this theory, to an external
standard; and the author tests his own ideas by asking, not if they
are original, beautiful, or appropriate, but if they are exact copies.
He is producing, not original works of art, but plaster casts.
And yet many great modern writersall those dealt with in this
bookhave copied subjects from the classics or adapted classical
ideas, translated classical phrases or borrowed classical patterns.
Why did they succeed, if Petrarch failed in what looks like a more
careful attempt to do the same thing? (It was not that he wrote
Africa in Latin, for Latin was a living language for him and his
86 5. TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
audience,) It was that the cliief aim of those who succeeded was
to produce something original. Whatever they took from the
classics they used simply as materiallike the material they
acquired from other sources, from their observation of life, their
own fancies, stories from gossip or contemporary journalism,
phrases or ideas struck out by their contemporaries but only halfdeveloped.
Or, if they took over a classical form, they felt quite
free to alter, and usually to expand, it in any way that suited their
material. Those who failed allowed themselves to be benumbed
by the weight of the material, paralysed by the rigidity of the form.
Those who succeededlike Dante, like Shakespearedominated
either classical form or classical material or both, moulded and
blended and changed them through their own creative imagination,
and made a synthesis which, like a chemical compound of
known elements, was nevertheless qualitatively different and
genuinely new. Creative writing, though difficult, is always
satisfying. Imitative writing, because of this conflict between
imagination and external restrictions, is always a repugnant task
for an original mind. Petrarch never published his Africa, worked
on it very slowly, and apparently did not complete it: just as
Ronsard later began a plaster cast of the Aeneid in French and
gave it up after four books, with obvious relief. Imitation is for
hacks, not for good authors.
Petrarchs twelve Latin Eclogues are modelled on Vergils
Bucolics, but they are more of an original work than his epic.
Although far less delicate and sensitive than Vergils poems, they
also are packed with many layers of meaning : the characters are not
only nymphs and shepherds, but Petrarchs own friends, and
contemporary dignitaries, and allegorical personages. Repugnant
as this is to modern taste, it helps to account for the great influence
these poems had in the Renaissance.
For us, his most interesting Latin work is the group of dialogues
he called his Secret, in which he talks to St. Augustine about his
own character. Three worlds meet in this book. Its conception
and its dialogue-form come from Plato, through Ciceroand
through Boethius, whose Lady Philosophy here reappears, on the
same healing mission, as Lady Truth.^3 The choice of St. Augustine
as interlocutor, and the concentration on thoughts of death
and hell, and the hatred Petrarch expresses for the life of this
world, show him as a medieval man: so too, on the other side of
PETRARCH, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER 87
the conflict, does his romantic admiration for Laura, with which
St. Augustine rebukes him. His acute self-examination, his
psychical sensitivity, his self- distrust and worry are modern in so
far as they are not a permanent part of human life.
His other works in Latin, philosophical, poetical, and historical,
are less attractive. The most permanently valuable of all he wrote
in the language he loved best continues to be his correspondence,
where there were few fixed patterns to follow and he himself
supplied all the material out of his rich and flexible mind.
In Italian his finest work is undoubtedly his love-lyrics to Laura,
the Canzoniere^ which inspired so many poets of the Renaissance,
in France, in Italy, in England, in Spain and elsewhere, and much
later were hotly reflected in the music of Liszt.^^ Although several
classical currents flow through their thought, they are in the main
purely modern, for they deal with romantic love, and their patterns
are developed from folk-song.
In a set of Triumphs he endeavoured to rival Dante by revivifying
a long series of the immortal dead, and by glorifying his beloved
Laura after her death as Dante had exalted Beatrice. The poems
describe a succession of triumphal processions modelled on those
of the Roman conquerors: Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time,
Eternity, they follow and surpass one another in a long crescendo
of conquest which ends with Petrarchs aspiration towards heaven
and Laura. The original idea, the Roman triumph, was classical.
Petrarch had no doubt seen it transfigured in Dantes Triumph
of the Churches and he wrote in Dantes metre. However, this
Italian poem fails as his Africa in Latin fails, and for a similar
reason. The Triumphs are too obviously moulded on Dante, and
have left Petrarchs invention little room to expand and live. Also,
the idea, like so many of the ideas of devoted classicists, is static
and therefore tedious. In Dante we are constantly moving. We
are taken down, down through the earths interior; we climb along
the body of Satan, grappling to his hair; we pant upwards on the
mountain of purgatory, and at last ascend into the true heaven,
changing continually with the changing sights we see. In the
Triumphs we stand still, and the procession passes, so far away and
so dignified that we can hardly see more than the labels carried by
each statuesque figure, and almost cry, with Macbeth:
Why do you show me this? . . . Start, eyes!
What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?
88 5. TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
Like Dante, Petrarch was a synthesis of Greece and Rome with
modern Europe. But, although a weaker, he was a more progressive
spirit. He was more modern, by being more classical. He
enriched the life of his time and of his successors by filling it with
newly awakened powers from antiquity. This fact was recognized
in his laureateship (1341). He was the first modern aspirant to the
crown of laurel conferred on distinguished poets. The laurel
coronation was a Greek idea which the Romans had taken over
and formalized. Late in the Middle Ages it was revived (Dante in
exile refused the honour), and Petrarch made it, for a time, real and
important. After a formal examination by King Robert of Naples,
he w^as adjudged worthy of the symbol of immortal fame, and was
crowned with laurel in the heart of Rome.
His wreath meant more than poetic distinction. As a renewal of
a Roman ceremony, the coronation symbolized the revival of the
lofty aspirations and immortal glories of ancient Rome, and the
creation of a new empire of intellectual and aesthetic culture. This
was the empire which spread over half the world in the high
Renaissance, which through many vicissitudes, shrinking here and
advancing there, maintained its power for centuries, and which is
still alive and strong. On the political side, the same ideals were
held by Petrarch*s friend, the Roman revolutionary Cola di Rienzo.
A few years later he too was crowned with laurel, and named
Tribune and Augustus. He dared (according to the popes accusations)
to abandon Christianity and restore the ancient rites of
paganism. He attacked the medieval privileges of the Roman
barons and proclaimed a restored Roman republic. His aim, like
Petrarchs, was to renew the strength of Rome and of the civilization
which had centred upon it, or, as his admirers saw it, to awake
the sleeping princess, to restore her youth, and to become her
bridegroom. In many of these aspirations he had been preceded
by the astonishing emperor Frederick II.^^ The political plans of
both these classically-inspired revolutionaries met an opposition
too durable to overthrow. But the spiritual regeneration which
they helped to initiate was a deeper need than any constitutional or
national reform. It was not the revival of one nation, but the reeducation
of Europe. And, just as Dantes poetry means far more
to the world than his statesmanship, so the laurels of Petrarch, poet
and teacher, are still fresh, while the emperors crown and the
, tribunes wreath have crumbled into dust.^^
PETRARCH, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER 89
BOCCACCIO
Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313, perhaps in Paris, as the
illegitimate son of a French girl and an Italian banker. As Dante
had a sad, hopeless, romantic love for Beatrice, as Petrarch hopelessly
loved Laura and lost her in the 1348 epidemic, so Boccaccio
had a passionate and unhappy love-affair with Maria d'Aquino, the
illegitimate daughter of King Robert of Naples : he is said to have
made it the basis of the first modern European psychological novel,
Fiammetta,
He was Petrarchs friend and pupil ; and like him, he was active
both in Latin and in Italian. The two sides of his life were not
conflicting, but complementary^he was classicist and modern
together. Although he greatly admired Dante, the contrast
between his life and Dantes is even more marked than that
between Dante and Petrarch. For instance, at the age of thirtyfive,
when Dante was lost in the dark wood and emerged through
a vision of eternity, Boccaccio experienced the terrible disaster
known as the Black Death ; but his reaction to it was to produce the
still popular, and still naughty, and perpetually profane Decameron,
This is a group of stories in Italian prose, mainly about adventure,
love, and trickery, told during ten days of holiday {decameron
is meant to be Greek for a ten-day period) by a group of seven
ladies and three gentlemen who have fled from the plague-ridden
city to a delightful carefree country-house. Although realistic, the
Decameron is therefore escapist. There is no classical prototype for
its pattern, the sets of characteristic stories told by a group of
friends or accidental acquaintances (in Platos Symposium they do
not tell stories, but make rival speeches, and in Petronius they chat
at random) ; and it probably stems from the million and one anecdotes
and the infinite leisure and the long caravans and the multitudinous
caravanserais of the Near East. Of the stories themselves,
some have drifted westward from the bazaars and capitals of the
Orient, some have scummed up from the same medieval underworld
as the fabliaux, and others have crystallized from real
incidents of contemporary western European life. The prose style,
however, is not all ordinary and realistic, but is often elevated,
leisurely, harmonious, and complex, with rhythms evidently based
on those of the finest Italian prosateur, Cicero.
The characters of the Decameron frequently imply contempt for
90 5. TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
the Christian church. At the very beginning there is a story about
a Jew who was trying to decide whether he should become a
Christian or not. In order to make up his mind, he visited Rome.
When he came back, he was baptized at once. Why? Because, he
said, he had seen so much vice and corruption in Rome, the centre
of Christianity, that if the Christian religion could possibly survive
and progress as it did, God was obviously supporting the Christian
religion. The extreme cynicism of this story is corroborated by a
number of others about the sexual corruption of monks and nuns.
In Boccaccios other works it is even less easy than in Petrarchs
to separate the classical elements from the non-classical. The fusion
is almost complete.
His most considerable poem is the first Italian epicor rather
the first after Dante: the Theseid or Tale of Theseus {Teseida), It
is in the precise classical form, twelve books^no, to be more exact,
it is in precisely the same number of lines as the Aeneid^ and a
piece of literary gossip says he actually started it sitting in the
shadow of Vergils tomb.^^ It is on a classical subject, the wars of
Theseus; but since they were not sung at length by any extant
classical poet, he was free to adapt most of his story from the French
romancers and to invent the rest.^^ The metre itself, an eight-line
stanza (ABABABCC), is Provengal in origin. Appropriately, this
poem appealed to Chaucers medieval Knight, who drew upon it
for the tale he told the other Canterbury pilgrims. In the same
metre, Boccaccio wrote another romantic-heroic poem, the Filostrata^
which retells the Troilus and Cressida story. This poignant
tale springs from the Trojan war, but, as we have seen, cannot
be traced back beyond the medieval romance of Benoit de Sainte-
Maure.30 (This story too Chaucer took over from Boccaccio.)
Boccaccio was the begetter of the modern novel, by being the
first author who ever wrote a long story in a modern prose vernacular
about contemporary characters. This is Fiammetta, Because
it is in ordinary Italian, and about romantic love, it is a medieval
and non-classical production on the surface. Yet, if it is examined
more carefully, it will be seen to be a blend of modern and classical
artistic devices, and to have a deeply important strain of classical
thought.
For instance, the entire conceptual background is Greco-
Roman. On the very first page we read of Lachesis, the Fate, and
of the teeth that Cadmus sowed. In book 3 , the heroine wonders
PETRARCH, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER 91
if her lover has been drowned (like Leander) or marooned (like
Achimenedes = the Achaemenides of Vergil and Ovid^^) ; and at
the end, desolate and deserted, she consoles herself with the
examples^^ of Inachus his daughter (lo), Byblis, Canace, Myrrha,
Pyramus and Thisbe, Dido, and dozens of other classical lovers,
mostly out of Ovidamong whom Sir Tristram and Lady Isotta
appear rather lonely.
Then, most of the stylistic devices of the book have been absorbed
from classical poetry : carefully and formally built sentences,
long speeches which are almost dramatic monologues, rhetorical
devices such as oaths, conjurations, elaborate comparisons, &c.
God, Christian morality, and the Christian world are not mentioned.
Although the milieu is contemporary, the religion is pagan
:
we hear not of church but of the holy templesV3 and people say
the gods know and let the immortal gods bear witness. 34 When
Fiammetta is dubious about yielding to her lover, the thought of
God, or Christ, or Mary never passes through her mind. Instead,
Venus appears to her, naked under a thin dress, makes a long seductive
speech to her, and persuades her.3s Both the morality and the
strategy of this are inspired by Ovid. In Fiammetta^ as in many
earlier romantic French love-stories, Ovid became a modern.
As a scholar in his time, Boccaccio was second only to Petrarch,
and complemented his work, Petrarch had failed to learn Greek;
but, with the help of the Calabrian Leontius Pilatus, Boccaccio
mastered it. He was the first western European of modern times
to do so ; and he encouraged his tutor to produce the first modern
translation of Homer. (It was a flat literal version in Latin, but it
was usable.) Petrarch had discovered many lost classical books.
Boccaccio continued the search, and found treasures no less
valuableamong them, the lost historian Tacitus. It was Boccaccio
who told his pupils a story which, whether true or not,
shows his deep feeling for buried antiquity, and epitomizes the
difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance:
Being eager to see the library [of Monte Cassino] . , . he . . . besought
one of the monks to do him the favour of opening it. Pointing to a lofty
staircase, the monk answered stifily Go up ; it is already open. Boccaccio
stepped up the staircase with delight, only to find the treasure-house
of learning destitute of door or any kind of fastening, while the grass was
growing on the window-sills and the dust reposing on the books and
92 5. TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
bookshelves. Turning over the manuscripts, he found many rare and
ancient works with whole sheets torn out, or with the margins ruthlessly
clipped. As he left the room, he burst into tears, and, on asking a monk
... to explain the neglect, was told that some of the inmates of the
monastery . . . had torn out whole handfuls of pages and made them into
psalters, which they sold to boys, and had cut off strips of parchment
which they turned into amulets to sell to women.
Like Petrarch, Boccaccio had been pushing forwards, toward
the Renaissance. But after his conversion in 1361, he became once
more a medieval man. He was still a classicist : he wrote nothing
now except Latin, and his books were on scholarly subjects. But
he looked backwards instead of forwards. In 1373 he became the
first professor of the poetry of Dante. And somehow he became
more and more like Petrarch. It is pathetic but charming to see
the two old scholars settling down, towards the end of their lives,
into compiling, translating, and re-reading. Petrarchs last book
was a Latin translation of Boccaccios famous Patient Griselda.
Yet Boccaccio had been a modern man. He was never a pedant
who first accepted the classical patterns and then tried to squeeze
his own imaginative material into them at the risk of distorting it.
He was passionately alive, and wrote books whose amorous energy
and lascivious languor can still be felt. Although he loved Latin
and Greek, although he was far more of a productive scholar than
many twentieth-century classicists, his real importance in a study
of classical influence upon modern European literature is quite
different, and much greater.
He was the first great modern author who rejected Christianity
for paganism. True, he was converted late in life. But in the works
for which he is best known, he had thrown aside Christian doctrine
and Christian morality and turned towards Greco-Roman paganism
as to a better world. The characters of the Decameron recognize
the existence of the church, but despise it. Fiammetta turns her
back on it, and gives herself up to the power of the Olympians.
This is not the first, but a very notable example of a vast and
potent modern reaction towards paganism, away from Christian
morality and theology. There were many earlier instances of it in
the love-poets of twelfth-century France. The reaction is not
merely rejection, but a positive assertion that Greek and Roman
ideas of God and morality are better, freer, more real, because
more closely corresponding to the facts of life in this world; more
PETRARCH, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER 93
positive, less thin, less austere and misanthropic and otherworldly;
happier; more human.
This movement is not the same as that which produced the
Reformation, and in some ways is totally different. Yet its strength
encouraged the Reformation, and in some channels the two ran
parallel. We shall meet it again in the full Renaissance, where
paganism competed with the ideals of Christianity and was often
victorious. It recurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
disguised and distorted in the Battle of the Books. In the Age of
Revolution, it was stronger than ever: Shelley hated the very idea
of Christianity as fervidly as he adored the better aspects of Greek
paganism. In the nineteenth century, the great writers of Europe
can be divided into Christians like Tolstoy, pagans like Nietzsche,
and unwilling, pro-pagan Christians like Arnold. And although,
while the Catholics built neo-Byzantine churches and the Presbyterians
neo-Gothic churches, the nineteenth-century pagans put
up no buildings and no altars for their cult, yet they added a vast
new sanctuary, or asylum, to the modern pagan shrines, one of the
earliest of which was built by Boccaccio, on the still unobliterated
ruins of the old.
CHAUCER
Throughout the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and the early
Renaissance, we can trace, in the rise and fall of national literatures,
the successions of war and peace which made the development of
Europe so difficult and so uneven. Besides wars and crusades,
there were other convulsions quite as grievous : for instance, the
Black Death, which in 1348 killed so many of the friends of both
Petrarch and Boccaccio, including their beloved women, Laura
and Fiammetta. The Danish conquest, first, and then the Norman
conquest had virtually taken Britain out of the current of European
literatureas far as vernacular writing was concerned, although
in Latin she was still able to play a part^while French, and Proven9al,
and Italian literature were building up. Now, in the fourteenth
century, after a brilliant beginning, French literature almost
died away, because France was caught in the Hundred Years war:
with the exception of the patriotic historian Froissart, it became
mediocre. Italian literature had begun its mighty ascent, and
continued it with Petrarch and Boccaccio. Proven9al culture was
almost totally destroyed in the crusade preached against the
94 5. TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
Albigensian heretics by the Roman Catholic church. But after long
uncertainty and strife, modern England was at last coming into
being. Although England too had its plagues and troubles in the
fourteenth century, it developed a quiet serene depth of character
which it has never yet lost, and which was best exemplified, for his
time, in Geoffrey Chaucer.
Geoffrey Chaucer was a well-connected courtier and civil
servant, the first of a long line of British civil servants who have
done much for literature. Born about 1340, he served in France,
visited Italy three times on diplomatic missions, and was M.P. for
Kent, He does not seem to have been a university man, and indeed
there was something amateurish about his learning; but it was
good for his poetry.
Chaucer was the first great English poet who knew Europe.
Part of his power lay in the fact that, taking up European vernacular
influences, he used them to improve the English language and
English literature. The modern tongues he knew were French and
Italian, However, the French influence on him was less important
than the Italian, which so deeply affected many of his successors

Milton, Byron, Browning.

The following poems of Chaucer were due to his knowledge of
French and Italian; but most of them, through French and Italian,
were derived from Greco-Roman literature:
part of a translation of The Romance of the Rose;^^
a long chivalrous romance about the Trojan war, Troilus and
Criseyde, modelled on Boccaccios Filostrato (which was
itself modelled on an Italian plagiarists rewriting of a
French poets adaptation of a late Greek romance), but
much longer than Boccaccios poem.^s This is one of the
few works which guarantee Chaucer a place in the front
rank of English poets;
a vision of history, literature, fame, and unhappy love, called
The House of Fame: unfinished, it was inspired by Dantes
Comedy^ probably also by Boccaccios Vision of LovCy and
certainly by Latin poetry ancient and medieval;
the Knights Tale, greatest of the Canterbur}" stories: from
Boccaccios Theseid, which Chaucer naturalized by omitting
much of the mythology and epic machinery and expanded
by adding much material of his own, to make the story
more expressive of real life.^^
PETRARCH, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER 95
It is odd that Chaucer does not appear to have known the great
contemporary Italian success, Boccaccios Decameron^ although his
Canterbury Tales follow a similar plan. Even when he uses a story
from it, the Patient Griselda of the Clerks Tale, he uses Petrarchs
Latin translation of it, and says so:
I wol yow telle a tale which that I
Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk,
As proved by his wordes and his werk.
He is now deed and nayled in his cheste,
I prey to god so yeve his soule reste!
Fraunceys Petrark, the laureat poete,
Highte this clerk, whos rethoryke sweete
Enlumined al Itaille of poetrye. . .
But besides these direct borrowings Chaucer received many
broader intellectual and emotional suggestions from France and
Italy. The medieval love-romance was one of the strongest formative
influences in his poetry. Through Italy the smiling scepticism
and humanist tolerance of the dawning Renaissance reached him.
But he also knew Dante well, and admired his grandeur. He
actually makes the Wife of Bath quote him by name:
Wei can the wyse poete of Florence,
That highte Dant, speken in this sentence;
Lo in swich maner rym is Dantes tale
:
Ful selde up ryseth by his branches smale
Prowesse of man; for god, of his goodnesse,
Wol that of him we clayme our gentillesse.'^^
Contemporary scholars have pointed out many passages in which
Chaucer imitates Dante, and some of particular interest, in which
he blends effects taken from Dante with effects taken from a Latin
poet."^^ The whole plan of The House of Fame is a mingling of
homage to Vergil with homage to Dante.
Chaucer was not a very deep or intelligent student of the classics.
What he takes from them is always simplified to the point of bareness.
His learning, too, is limited in scope : it is more confined than
Dantes small bookshelf, and its books are not so well thumbed as
those the great exile carried with him. On the other hand, there are
a few books in it which Dante did not know, and a few glimpses of
others which had been unknown throughout the Middle Ages.
Chaucer makes many shocking mistakes, far worse than any of
96 5. TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
the small aberrations that appear in Dante. And, what is more
disconcerting, he appears now and then to pretend to knowledge
which he does not possess. Like all medieval writers, he makes a
great show of quoting his ancient authorities: but sometimes
Chaucers authorities do not exist and are inventions based on his
own misunderstandings. For instance, the Man of Law mentions
the Muses, and then says
Metamorphoseos wot what I mene."^^
This looks like an ignorant allusion to Ovids Metamorphoses^
treated as if the poem were a man, with its name distorted. Perhaps
that is a joke against pedants, lawyers in particular. In that
case, how can Chaucer seriously quote one of Ovids mistresses ?

First folow I Stace, and after him Corinne^4

or has he remembered, very faintly, that Ovid wrote about Corinna
in the Loves} Again and again in Troilus and Criseyde he says he
is retelling the story told by myn auctor Lollius, who wrote an old
book about Troy in Latin ; and in The House ofFame he introduces
Lollius as a real historian. There is no such historian, ancient or
modern, known to the world under that name. A very clever
explanation is that it is a latinization of Boccaccio (== big-mouth),
loll meaning thick-tongued. But since Chaucer never mentions
Boccaccio, although he often copies him, and since he does not
show so much verbal dexterity in translation as this explanation
would assume, something much simpler should be suggested.
The Roman poet Horace wrote to a young friend who was
studying rhetoric, to advise him to read Homer for the moral and
philosophical content of the epics. He began
:
The writer of the Trojan war, Maximus Lollius,
while you practised speaking in Rome, I reread at Praeneste.^s
The boys name was Lollius MaximusMaximus being a complimentary
nickname attached to his family, which meant greatest,
and which Horace playfully emphasized by inverting its usual
order, so that it looked like Mighty Lollius. In Latin it is perfectly
obvious, despite the order, that the writer of the Trojan war was
Homer, whom Horace had been studying in the little country town
of Praeneste. But anyone who knew little of Latin syntax and less
of Greek literature, and who did not realize that Horaces epistles
PETRARCH, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER 97
are letters to his friends with their addressees named in the first line
or so, would easily believe that someone named Lollius was the
greatest writer of the Trojan war.
Whether it was Chaucer who first made this mistake or not we
cannot now tell.^^ Certainly he accepted it and believed it when
he put Lollius on an iron pillar in the House of Fame beside Dares
and Homer.47 Perhaps by the time he wrote Troilus and Criseyde
he may have known better; for then he obviously knew that he
was not translating Lollius, but working from Boccaccio and other
sources nearer and more real. His use of the name was half a joke
and half a fiction: the same kind of fiction that led Guido de
Columnis to pretend he was taking everything from Dares when
he .was really copying Benoit, and Boccaccio to claim that his
Theseid was from a long-forgotten Latin author, instead of being
modelled on Guido, Benoit, and Statius. Ultimately it is the stock
device of the romance-writer^the map of Treasure Island,
Captain Kidds cryptogram found on Sullivans Island near
Charleston, South Carolina, the mysterious old author unknown
to others, the manuscript found in a bottle.
Chaucer made many other mistakes and wrong guesses of this
kind. Like Dante but unlike Petrarch, he believed that tragedy
meant a kind of narrative. The monk on the Canterbury pilgrimage
says
:
. . . first Tragedies wol I telle
Of whiche I have an hundred in my celle.
Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie.
As old bokes maken us memorie.
Of him that stood in greet prosperitee
And is y-fallen out of heigh degree
Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly.
He then adds a gratuitous piece of wrong information
:
And they ben versifyed comunly
Of six feet, which men clepe exametron.
That is, they are not tragedies but epic poems."^^
Chaucer had not read all the authors whom he quotes, and it
would be quite mistaken to list their names as classical influences
on his work. He knew a few Latin writers fairly well, translating
and adapting their books with some understanding and with
genuine love. He had a surface acquaintance with a number of
5076 H
98 5. TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
others. But any knowledge he had of their work was either at
second hand (because their writings were used by someone else
whom he knew), or through excerpts or short summaries in one of
the numerous medieval books of encyclopaedic learning. For him
the world of Greece and Rome was not peopled with many massive
figures, clearly distinct even in the distance, as it was for Dante.
It held four or five great clerks who were his masters; behind
them a multitude of ghosts faintly seen and heard through the
mists of the past ; and, flitting around them, a number of purely
imaginary chimeras like Corinne and myn auctor Lollius.so
The authors whom Chaucer really knew have been reviewed by
various scholars. For the most part, the conclusions reached in
separate studies agree.si
He knew Ovid best, without any comparison. Dryden actually
saw a resemblance between the two poets
:
both of them were well bred, well naturd, amorous, and libertine, at
least in their writings, it may be also in their lives. . . . Both of them
were knowing in astronomy. . . . Both writ with wonderful facility and
clearness. . . . Both of them built on the inventions of other men. . . .
Both of them understood the manners, under which name I comprehend
the passions, and, in a larger sense, the descriptions of persons, and
their very habits
And although Ovid was far more sophisticated (it was not only that
Chaucer affected nciiveU more skilfully) there was indeed a certain
sympathy between them, even to the gloom which enwrapped them
both at the close of their lives. Chaucer began to use Ovids
Metamorphoses as soon as he started writing poetry. His first poem,
The Book of the DuchesSy opens and closes with the story of Ce3rx
and Alcyone from Met. ii. 410-748: although, like the authors of
The Romance of the Rose and other medieval writers using Ovid,
Chaucer cuts out the metamorphosis of the lovers into birds and
makes it only a love-death. His next work. The House of Fame,
was partly suggested by Ovids description of the house of Fame
in Met. iz. 39 f. Even in The Canterbury Tales there is an amusing
passage where the Man of Law boasts that Chaucer has told more
stories of lovers than Ovid himself, and then gives a list revealing
that Ovid was his chief source. ^ 3
Then Chaucer was one of the first modern poets who made
much use of Ovids imaginary love-letters, which are usually called
PETRARCH, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER 99
the Heroides. He mentioned them as the Epistles, in The Legend of
Good Women^ 1465, and summarized most of them in an interesting
passage of The House of Fame,^^ There are many hints, too, in the
letters Ovid wrote for Paris and Helen, which Chaucer used in his
development of the pretty coquette Criseyde.ss He also knew the
Fastis Ovids historical expansion of the Roman calendar: which
Dante did not. His tale of Lucretia in The Legend of Good Women
is taken from Ovids account, and opens with a translation of
Ovids own words from time to time he used Ovid to correct
or amplify Boccaccio. Although he mentions Ovids Art of Love
and Cures for Love,^'^ there is no way of showing whether he had
read either of them.
Next best Chaucer knew Vergil, but apparently only the
Aeneid.^^ He summarizes the story in The House of Fame and
partly in The Legend of Dido, It was an ambitious work, The
House of Fame, In some ways it was his assertion of his own high
mission as a poet. Just as Dante describes how in limbo he was
greeted as an equal by the great classical writers, so Chaucer here
set out to parallel Vergil. In the dream whose story he told, he
saw the temple of Venus with the incidents of the Aeneid graved
on its walls. Just so had Aeneas, at the crucial point of his
wanderings, his first landing in Italy, found the tale of Minos and
Daedalus and Icarusan earlier flight from alien domination into
exile with an earlier landing in Italypictured on the doors of
Apollos prophetic temple at Cumae. Fame herself was modelled
on the description of Rumour in Aeneid, 4; and in The Legend of
Dido the famous love-story is retold. But there Chaucer, as an
amorous poet, made Aeneas fickle instead of a martyr to duty : he
implies that Aeneas visions were invented; he calls him Traitour
and makes poor Dido say that she may be with childa shallower
and more modern interpretation of Vergils story.^^
Less important for his language, but much more important for
his thought, was Boethius. Chaucer translated The Consolation of
Philosophy from the Latin original, with the help of a French
version and an explanatory edition. Although his translation is
not good, it contains many valuable new English words taken
straight over from Latin or through French from Latin. And
Boethiuss book provided the most important part of Chaucers
philosophical thought. (Its influence was strengthened by the
fact that so many of its ideas appear in The Romance of the Rose,)
100 5. TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
In particular, there are two passages concerning fate, or the relation
between mans free will-power and Gods providence, which
come straight from Boethius. There are other such borrowings
of less importance. The finest example of Boethian influence on
Chaucer, however, is not a copy but a real re-thinking of the Romans
thought. This is the noble and very personal poem Truth, or The
Ballad of Good Counsel:
Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse.
Several of the finest lines in this poem are rebirths of immortal
classical thought
:
Her nis non hoom, her nis but wildernesse
:
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stall
Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al. . . .
is a renaissance of the thought of Plato on the difficulty of living a
good life in this bad world^^^the thought elaborated in his condemned
cell over eight centuries later by Boethius, and now, over
eight hundred years farther on, revived in Chaucer. ^3
Next, but far behind the others, comes Statius, the poet of the
Theban war, whom Chaucer knew well and used directly. Pandarus
finds his niece reading the Tomaunce of Thebes right up to
the end of the twelfth book, where the bishop Amphiorax falls
through the ground to helL^'^ Towards the end of Troilus and
Criseyde there is another summary of the Thebaid, longer, with the
Latin added for good measure.^s Although Statius was a Silver
Age poet with a strong sense of his own inferiority to such as
Vergil, he had a vivid imagination, and his poems suggested a
number of striking incidents and decorative epithets to Chaucer.
Apparently from a medieval school anthology, Chaucer knew
the late Latin poet Claudians Rape of Proserpine and two of his
minor works.
Cicero he mentions. He did know the famous Dream of Scipio,
on which (with suggestions from Dante) he based The Parliament
of Fowls but he seems never to have read any more of Ciceros
voluminous works.
That far-travelled and much experienced lady, the Wife of Bath,
cites a distinguished array of philosophical authorities, as
Senek and othere clerkes.^
Sitice there is little trace that Senecas fundamental philosophical
theories meant anything to Chaucer, he probably knew only
PETRARCH, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER lOI
isolated passages through intermediaries. The largest number of
his quotations from Seneca is in The Tale of Melibeus^ but they are
all taken from The Book of Consolation and Counsel by Albertano
of Brescia (1246). Still, there are some quotations from Senecas
moral epistles which do seem to argue that Chaucer had read them
first-hand.^^
Apparently these are all the classical authors whom Chaucer had
read at any length. Others he had glanced at, or glimpsed in
excerpts and commentaries. The most remarkable of these is
Valerius Flaccus, author of an epic on the Argonauts.^o Chaucer
is the first modern writer to mention it. He speaks of it by name
in The Legend of Good Women^ 1 . 1457 ; and he knew what was in it

at least in its first book, for he refers to the list of the Argo's crew
as a tale long y-now. And in the same legend Chaucers description
of the landing of the Argonauts in Lemnos contains one or
two details which seem to come from Valerius Flaccus and no one
else. The difficulty, however, is to conjecture where he had seen
the Argonautica, for the manuscript of the poem was not discovered
until 1416, sixteen years after his death. Shannon makes
a bold attempt to prove that, because some of the Argonautica
manuscripts are written in insular script, one may have been known
in England in Chaucers lifetime; but it is hard to think of Chaucer
as being a more successful research scholar than Petrarch.
Juvenal the satirist he names twice: both times with reference to
the tragic satire 10 (The vanity of human wishes).'^^ One of these
references he took from an explanatory note to Boethius; the other
probably from a similar intermediary.
Other authorsLivy, Lucan, Valerius Maximus, &c.he
mentions without knowing except in the vaguest way. He also
read a good deal of the current Latin poets, historians, and encyclopaedists.
His favourites were Boccaccios Genealogy of the Gods
(he even makes the same mistakes as Boccaccio) and Vincent of
Beauvaiss Mirror of History^ an outline of world history down to
1244, with flowers or memorable quotations from the great
writers of the past.^^ These books were summaries of the knowledge
of the medieval scholars and preparations for the Renaissance.
Chaucer, by knowing not only them but his own original classics,
helped in that preparation.
102 5. TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
In Chaucers life there were three great interests. These were,
in order of importance, contemporary English life; French and
Italian romantic love-poetry; and classical scholarshipchiefly
poetry and myth, and next to them philosophy. Late in his life,
a poor fourth, appeared Christianity. No one would say that his
scholarship helped his bright, clear vision of contemporary life, nor
that it greatly enhanced his appreciation of romantic poetry,
although it gave him more tales of passion to tell. But it improved
his power to express what he observed. It enriched his historical
and legendary knowledge. It suggested imaginative parallels. It
stimulated his imagination to outsoar his own age and country

The House of Fame^ although not wholly successful, is the first

English work to approach Dante. It heightened his own conception
of his art. It gave him a good deal more wisdom than the
confused and shallow folk-beliefs which were otherwise the only
thing available to a courtier who was not a strongly religious man;
and it permitted him to put wiser thoughts in the minds and
mouths of his characters.
The stylistic excellence of classical poetrj^ had a great educational
effect on Chaucer. Literature is a craft, although it can only be
practised to its highest effect by craftsmen who also feel it to be a
spiritual and intellectual release for their energies. Therefore it
can best be learnt through the study of other craftsmen, through
emulation of their achievements, and through conscious or unconscious
adaptation of their methods to ones own material and
age. All the ancient poets whom Chaucer knew were highly
trained. They had behind them generations of experience in the
crafts of developing long, complex, and difficult thoughts; of
arranging speeches; of making vivid descriptions more vivid by
similes; of varying sentences and building up paragraphs; and of
handling large masses of material so as to mould them into poems
of majestic length. Even the letters of the Heroides to their lovers
were rhetorically worked out, and the monologues in the Meta--
morphoses were glittering displays of declamatory fireworks.
Chaucers ability to write long passages of description, elaborate
comparisons, and big speeches was derived from his training in the
classics. It is the same debt, on the formal level, as that owed by
Dante to Vergil. But Chaucer was a smaller, softer man than
Dante : although he was inspired by his models to attempt large
works, he seldom finished them. How much his classical studies
PETRARCH, BOCCACCIO, CHAUCER 103
helped his poetry, nevertheless, can be seen by comparison with
a contemporary English poet who had the same clear vision and a
deeper seriousness, but who had never been exposed to the guiding
and encouraging and clarifying influence of Greco-Latin poetry:
the author of Piers Plowman, It was with Chaucer that classical
learning became a natural part of the greatest English literature.
As soon as the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales opens, Zephyrus
with his sweet breath meets us, as naturally and as pleasantly as
his air visits the British holt and heath.
6
THE RENAISSANCE
TRANSLATION
Classical influence flows into the literature of modern nations
through three main channels. These are:
translation;
imitation;
emulation.
The most obvious channel is translation, although the effects of
the power entering by it are much more various than one might
suppose. Imitation is of two types. Either the modern author
decides that he can write poems in Latin which are as good as those
of Vergil and his other models; or else, much more rarely, he
attempts to write books in his own language on the exact pattern
of the Latin or Greek works he admires. The third stage is
emulation, which impels modem writers to use something, but not
everything, of classical form and material, and to add much of
their own style and subject-matterin the endeavour to produce
something not only as good as the classical masterpieces but
different and new. In this way the real masterpieces are produced
:
the tragedies of Shakespeare and Racine; the satires of Pope;
Dantes Comedy; Paradise Lost,
Translation, that neglected art, is a far more important element
in literature than most of us believe. It does not usually create
great works; but it often helps great works to be created. In the
Renaissance, the age of masterpieces, it was particularly important.
The first literary translation from one language into another was
made about 250 b.c., when the half-Greek half-Roman poet Livius
Andronicus turned Homers Odyssey into Latin for use as a textbook
of Greek poetry and legend. (Traditionally, it was about the
same time that a committee of seventy-two rabbis was translating
certain books of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek for the use of
the Jew^ .scattered beyond Palestine, who were forgetting Hebrew
and Aramaic; but that version was not made for artistic purposes,
6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION 105
and was not such a great milestone in the history of education.)^
The translation made by Livius Andronicus was a serious and
partly successful attempt to re-create a work of art in the framework
of a different language and culture.^ It was the first of many
hundreds of thousands.
To the precedent set by Livius we owe much of our modern
system of education. The Greeks studied no literature but their
own: it was so various, original, and graceful that perhaps they
needed nothing more. But the native Roman literature and Roman
culture were rude and simple: so, from the third century b.c.,
Rome went to school with the Greeks. Ever since then the
intellectual standards of each European nation have closely corresponded
to the importance assumed in its education by the
learning and translation of some foreign cultural language. Roman
literature and Roman thought rose to their noblest when all
educated Romans spoke and wrote Greek as well as Latin. ^ The
poetry of Vergil, the drama of Plautus and Seneca, the oratory and
philosophy of Cicero, were not Roman, but, as we have often called
them, a perfect synthesis which was Greco-Roman. When the
western Roman empire ceased to know Greek, its culture declined
and withered away. But after that, throughout the Dark Ages,
culture was kept alive by the few persons who knew another
language as well as their own: by the monks, priests, and scholars
who understood not only Anglo-Saxon or Irish Gaelic or primitive
French, but Latin too. With the spread of bilingualism through
the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, European culture
deepened and broadened. The Renaissance was largely created by
many interacting groups of men who spoke not only their own
tongue but Latin too, and sometimes Greek. If Copernicus,
Rabelais, Shakespeare, if Queen Elizabeth and Lorenzo de
Medici had not known Latin, if they had not all, with so many
others, enjoyed their use of it and been stimulated by it, we might
dismiss Renaissance latinity as a pedantic affectation. But the
evidence is too strong and unidirectional. The synthesis of Greco-
Romanwith modern European culture in the Renaissance produced
an age of thought and achievement comparable in magnificence to
the earlier synthesis between the spirit of Greece and the energy
of Rome.
Since then the culture of each civilized European has
been largely based on the teaching of some other language in its
io6 6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
schools and the constant flow of translations, imitations, and
emulations into its literature. The other language need not be
Latin or Greek. The Russians profited from learning German.
The Germans profited from learning French. The essential thing
is that the additional language should be the vehicle of a rich
culture, so that it will expand home-keeping minds and prevent
the unconscious assumption that parochialism is a virtue. The
main justification for learning Latin and Greek is that the culture
they open to those who know them is nobler and richer than any
other in our world.
The intellectual importance of translation is so obvious that it is
often overlooked. No language, no nation is sufficient unto itself.
Its mind must be enlarged by the thoughts of other nations, or
else it will warp and shrivel. In English, as in other languages,
many of the greatest ideas we use have been brought in through
translation. The central book of the English-speaking peoples is
a translationalthough it comes as a shock to many to realize that
the Bible was written in Hebrew and Greek, and translated by a
committee of scholars. There are many great books which none
but specialists need read in the original, but which through
translation have added essential ideas to our minds: Euclids
Elements, Descartess Discourse on Method, Marxs Capital,
Tolstoys War and Peace.
The artistic and linguistic importance of translation is almost as
great as its importance in the field of ideas. To begin with, the
practice of translation usually enriches the translators language
with new words. This is because most translations are made from
a language with a copious vocabulary into a poorer language which
must be expanded by the translators courage and inventiveness.
The modern vernacular languagesEnglish, French, Spanish,
&c.grew out of spoken dialects which had little or no written
literatures, were geographically limited, and were used largely for
practical and seldom for intellectual purposes. They were therefore
simple, unimaginative, and poof in comparison with Latin and
Greek. Soon after people began to write in them they set out to
enrich them and make them more expressive. The safest and most
obvious way to do so was to borrow from the literary languf-ge at
their side and bring in Latin words. This enlargement of the
western European languages by importations from Latin and Greek
6 . THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION 107
was one of the most important activities which prepared for the
Renaissance ; and it was largely carried on by translators.
The parent of the French language was a variant of colloquial
Latin. But new transfusions, from literary Latin, appeared in
French as early as the twelfth century, and increased in the
thirteenth. By the fourteenth century there' was a deliberate policy
of borrowing Latin words to increase the scope of French. Contemporary
waiters sometimes give us their reasons for pursuing
this policy. Clearly it was forced upon them as a solution to the^
problem of translating from a rich language into a poor one. Thus
a Lorrainian translator of the Books of Kings writes
:
^ Since the Romance language, and particularly that of Lorraine, is
imperfect, . . . there is nobody, however good a clerk he may be and a
good speaker of Romance, who can translate Latin into Romance . . .
without taking a number of Latin words, such as iniquitas = iniquiteit^
redemptio = redemption^ misericordia == misericorde, . , , Latin has a
number of words that we cannot express properly in Romance, our
tongue is so poor: for instance, one says in Latin erue, eripe, libera me,
for which three words in Latin we have only one word in Romance
:
'deliver me.
The policy was part of the cultural achievement of Charles V, in
whom y/e recognize a precursor of the Renaissance. He cultivated
scholars, got them good benefices, and encouraged them to
translate the classics for his library. The most important of his
proteges was Nicole Oresme {c. 1330-81), whom he made bishop
of Lisieux.5 A careful and skilful translator from Latin into
French, he too complains of the poverty of his own language, and
gives an interesting example suggested by his translations of
Aristotle:
'Among innumerable instances we may use this common proposition:
homo est animal. Homo means "man and woman, which has no equivalent
in French, and animal means anything which has a soul capable of
perception, and there is no word in French which precisely signifies
that.^
To remedy this condition Oresme and others set about latinizing,
andti^even hellenizing, French. The result might have been
disastrous had it not been for two factors: the close natural
relationship between French and Latin, and the good taste of the
io8 6, THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
French people, both then and afterwards. Very early in his career
Pantagruel met a student with less reliable taste, who explained that
he too was making efforts to enrich the language:
<My worshipful lord, my genie is not apt ... to excoriate the cuticle of
our vernacular Gallic, but viceversally I gnave, opere, and by vele and
rames enite to locupletate it with the Latinicome redundance.*7
Then Pantagruel took him by the throat, and his end was terrible.
Many such Latin loans were allowed to lapse, as awkward or
unnecessary, soon after they were made; but very many more
became part of the language and did really locupletate it.
We can distinguish several different channels by which Latin
(and Greek) entered French in the later Middle Ages. These are
typical. Other languages of western Europe made similar borrowings
through some, or all, of the same channels.
Words were taken over from Latin and Greek and naturalized.
These fell into two main classes : abstract nouns, with the adjectives
related to them; and words connected with the higher techniques
and arts of civilization. In the former class come words which now
seem quite natural and indispensable, such as those in -tion:
circulation, decision, decoration, hesitation, position*, those in -ite:
calamite, speciality; those in -ant, -ance, -ent, -ence, such as absent,
arrogant, evidence*, with many others less easy to group, such as
exces, commode, agile, illegal, and abstract verbs like anticiper,
assister, excider, exclure, repliquer, separer. In the latter class are
words now equally well accepted: acte, artiste, democratic, facteur,
medecin, (One odd fact about the history of language is that some
of these words disappeared after their introduction and were
reintroduced into French at the beginning of the sixteenth century
;
or, like compact, in the eighteenth; and a few, like rarefaction, in
the nineteenth.)
Verbal elements were extracted from naturalized Latin words
and adapted to broader uses throughout French: notably the
prefix in- (as in words like incivil, inout), and the terminations -ite
and -ment for abstract nouns.
Quite a number of French words already existing, which had
originally been derived from Latin but had grown away from their
parentage, were corrected so as to conform more exactly with their
derivation. For instance oscur was changed back to obscur; soutil
became subtil, because it came from subtilis; esmer became
6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION 109
estimer. Sometimes both forms survived side by side: conter and
compter,
Greek words were also introduced, although in a much smaller
proportion. Usually they seem to be words which were already
latinized through translations of the church fathers or of the Greek
philosophers : for instance, agonie^ climate fantaisie^ pohme^ police,
theorie, zone, Oresme himself was responsible for bringing in
a large number of important words dealing with politics and
aesthetics : aristocratic, metaphore, sophiste.
Finally, low Latin words infiltrated French^not from the
classical authors but from the current Latin of the law courts and
the church : decapiter, graduel, individu.
The English language had not begun its life entirely devoid of
Greek and Roman influence. Far back in the Dark Ages it drew
in Latin and Greek words to cover activities which were not native
to its peoplereligious, social, politicaland even the names of
foreign foods and drinks. Church and kirk come from the Greek;
so do bishop, monk, priest, and (unless it be Latin) wine. Many
Latin words entered indirectly at the Conquest, through Norman-
French. Then, as the Middle Ages flowed towards the Renaissance,
English began to grow in the same way, and for the same reasons,
as French: very largely under the influence of French. Chaucer
was the chief figure in this process.
He had some Latin, and knew French almost as well as English.
We cannot tell now whether the Latin words naturalized in
English during this period came directly from Latin or at one
remove through French. But the majority seem, from their shape,
to have been imported via France: for instance, the abstract nouns
in -ance and -ence, like ignorance and absence, where the hard Latin
terminations antia, -entia have been softened down by French.
Some words came by both routes. Jespersen quotes the Greco-
Latin machine, which, as its pronunciation shows, came through
French; while its relative machination entered directly from Latin.
(Another relative, mechanical, came from the same Greek root
directly into English via low Latin.) A similar pair is example and
exemplary.
The Latin and Greek words brought into English by Chaucer,
and by his contemporaries and followers, were (like similar
importations into French) chiefly abstract nouns and adjectives
no 6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
or cultural and technical words. They included such abstract
or semi-abstract words as absolute^ convenient^ manifest^ mortal^
position^ sensibleall of which are said to be found for the first
time in Chaucers translation of Boethius, a book that has been
called the foundation of English philosophical prose. ^ And
Chaucer introduced such scholarly words as astrologer^ distil^
erraticy longitiidey nativCy occidental, orator. Hundreds more words
that we use every day were brought in at this time : words as simple
as solid, as useful as poetry, as necessary as existence. It is difScult
to overestimate the importance of the growth English experienced
in the late Middle Ages: it started to become one of the great
culture-languages of the world.
Similarly, Latin verbal elements like -tion and m- were imported
and their use extended. And, as in French, the spelling of Romance
words in English was corrected. For instance, dette was altered to
debt ; but the b of the original Latin debitum could not be inserted
into the pronunciation, and we still pronounce debt in the Middle
English manner derived from Norman-French. The same b was
put into doute in English, to become doubt like the Latin dubitatio:
but the pronunciation remained dout in English and doot in Scots.
The French still call the fourth month avril; it was Avril or Averil
in the early years after the Conquest, but by Chaucers time
became Aprille, with his shoures sote.
Spenser called Chaucer a well of English undefiled. This is
nearly as false as Miltons description of Shakespeare: warbling
native wood-notes wild. There were many medieval English
writers who thought and spoke pure English, as it then was. Some
of them wrote well. None of them did much for the language or for
its literature. The importance of Chaucer was that he became not
only a well of pure English but a channel through which the rich
current of Latin and k sister stream of Greek flowed into England.
Spanish early in the fifteenth century began to undergo a similar
expansion, partly through direct imitation of Latin, partly under
the influence of Italian culture. The importations into Spanish
fall into the same classes as those mentioned above for French and
English. There were abstract words from Latin : ambicion, comen--
dacion, comodidad, servitud, temeridad. There were Greek words
:
idiota, paradoja, pedante. Existing Spanish words were corrected
to make them more like classical Latin: amos became amhos,
6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION iii
veluntad became voluntady Criador became Creador, And sometimes,
as in French and English, both forms survived:
blasfemar and lastimdr colocdr and colgdr
cdlido and cdldo integro and entero.
{Criatura survives too, although Criador has vanished,) The
Spaniards, who love extremes, went farther than either English
or French in adopting not only Greek and Latin words but Greek
and Latin syntactical patterns which could not really be naturalized,
and in authors like Gongora distorted both language and thought.
French, English, and Spanish were the languages which grew
most markedly in strength and suppleness by naturalizing Latin
and Greek words in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
German, Polish, Magyar, and other languages of northern and
eastern Europe, however, lived on virtually untouched by the
movement which was so strong in the west. Of course they had
poets, and prose-writers, who wrote in the vernacular languages
;
and they had numerous authors working mainly or exclusively in
Latin, the international language of culture. The essential point
in which they differed from the western nations was this. They
had few, if any, writers of talent who bridged the gap between their
native cultures and the culture of Greece and Rome; and they had
very few translators. Their authors were either wholly German (or
Polish or Magyar) or else wholly Latin. But in the west many
men like Chaucer and Gower in England, and Inigo Lopez de
Mendoza and Juan de Mena in Spain, wrote their own language,
and at the same time enriched it by transfusions of Greek and
Latin words and verbal patterns and stylistic devices; they translated
from Latin into their own speech; they acted as a living
channel through which the two cultures could actively intermingle,
the older refreshing and strengthening the younger.
This movement, whose outlines have been briefly sketched,
became ever stronger as western Europe moved into the full
Renaissance. Learning became more widely distributed, geographically
and socially. More difScult, more adult books were
more carefully studied. The sense of language became more
delicate. The flow of Latin and Greek words into the western
European languages continued and increased. That continuing
flow of rich energy, after it had been stabilized and refined by the
later application of chosen Greco-Roman stylistic standards, made
Iiz 6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
the rough strong simple dialects of the Dark Ages into the languages
of western Europe and modern America.
Translation has another function, equally valuable and less
obvious. It enriches the style of the translators language. This is
because any distinguished book when translated usually carries
with it many stylistic patterns which the translators language does
not possess. It may, for instance, be written in a form which does
not exist in the new language. When it is translated, the form will
be naturalized. If it is in poetry, its metre may not exist in the new
language, in which case it must be copied, or a satisfactory metre
must be devised to render its effects. Almost certainly it will
contain images which are new, and which can be imported with all
the charm of novelty. And often it will embody fresh, interesting,
and highly developed verbal devices produced by years or generations
of experiment and evolution, which can be copied or adapted
in the recipient language. From the translation, if it be a good one,
these patterns are then imitated by original writers, and soon
become a perfectly native resource.
Thus, Hebrew images have entered English in great numbers
through the translation of the Old Testament.
Blank verse was devised by Italian poets of the Renaissance in
order to render the effect of continuous flow, and the large scope,
of the Latin hexameter and iambic trimeter.
Simply by copying their originals, translators into most of the
modem languages have introduced Greco-Latin turns of style such
as climax, antithesis, apostrophe, &c., which are now a regular part
of modern style, but which scarcely existed in any European
tongue until they became known through translations. One pattern
which has become a great favourite is the tricolon. This was
worked out by the later Greek rhetoricians, and used freely in
Latin prose and poetryabove all others, by Cicero. It is an
arrangement of words or phrases in a group of three. The three
are related, usually expressing different aspects ofthe same thought.
They are balanced in weight and importance. And they usually
work up to a slight climax on the third. Abraham Lincolns
Gettysburg Address contains several such arrangements
:
we cannot dedicate^we cannot consecrate^we cannot hallow

this ground
;
government of the people, by the people, for the people.
6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION 113
Lincoln could not read Ciceros speeches ; but this device, which
was not native to the English language, he had learnt by studying
the prose of baroque writers such as Gibbon, who were steeped in
the cadences of Ciceronian Latin and skilfully reproduced them
in English. Now, of course, the tricolon is constantly used in
English oratory. It is particularly useful because it both seems
natural and is memorable. Another great president, no less an
orator than Lincoln, created a deathless phrase on the same model
when he spoke of one-third of a nation, ill-housed, ill-clad, illnourished.
And yet, natural as it now seems, this pattern was a
Greco-Roman invention just as much as the internal-combustion
engine was a modern western European invention; and in the
same way it is now being used by millions who do not know its
origin.
And even beyond this, it is important that there should be good
translations of good books, because, by their vigour and intensity,
they stimulate even artists who intend to write on other subjects
or in different patterns. That was one of the highest functions of
translation during the Renaissance. If great thoughts can be
communicated^through whatever difficulties and distancesthey
will produce great thoughts. That justifies all translations, even
the bad ones. That was the principle of the Renaissance translators.
The Renaissance was the great age of translation. Almost as
rapidly as unknown classical authors were discovered, they and
their better-known brothers were revealed to the public of western
Europe by vernacular translations. The two chief factors in this
phenomenon were the increasing knowledge of, and interest in,
classical antiquity; and the invention of printing, which extended
the distribution of culture by making self-education easier.
The countries of western Europe differ in the number and value
of the translations they made. The order is, roughly, France first;
then Britain and Germany; then Italy and Spain; and the rest
nowhere. Many talented Italians chose, instead of translating
Latin books into their own tongue, to write original works in
Latin or Italian, or to translate from Greek into Latin. The French
translations were numerous and splendid. The British translators
were vigorous. But they were not really scholarly: they translated
Greek books from Latin versions sometimes, and sometimes
Latin books from French versions; and there was a dashing
5076 I
1 14 6, THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
carelessness about them, the reverse of pedantry, which reminds
us of Shakespeare, the author who never blotted a line and would
not see his own plays through the press. For example, Chapman
boasted of having finished the second twelve books of the Iliad in
less than four months. In Germany, the forces of classical culture
made a far shallower penetration during the Renaissance. There
was much writing in Latin; there were various adaptations of
Roman comedies; there were a number of attempts at making
classical learning accessible through translations; but there was,
in literature, no real productive union between the German
national mind and the art and thought of Greece and Rome. More
Latin books than German books were printed every year until
1691.^ Few of the translations had any literary value, and none
stimulated the production of independent works of art. The small
group of men like Reuchlin who knew Greek were quite isolated,
although they and others in southern and western Germany were
inspired by contact with Italy. The north and east were still sunk
in medieval darkness.^^
We can now survey the Renaissance translations of the chief
works of Greco-Roman literature into modern languages. (Translations
into Latin, though they also were important channels for
the transmission of classical influence, do not fall within the scope
of this book. Nor do most of the fragmentary or unpublished
translations, which had less effect on the general development of
literature.)
EPIC
Homers Iliad was translated into Spanish prose by Juan de
Mena (141 1-56), and a briefer Spanish version was made in 1440.^^
These early translations, however, were like the paraphrases of
medieval times: such too was the French version of the Iliad
(from Vallas Latin translation, with additions from Dares and
Dictys) made by Jean Samxon in 1530. Simon Schaidenreisser,
also working on Latin versions, put the Odyssey into German prose
in 1537. The first serious attempts at a modern verse rendering
were made in France by Hugues Salel, with his 1545 version of
Iliad, i-io, and Jacques Peletier du Mans, who translated Odyssey,
1-2, in 1547. Salels translation was completed by Amadis Jamyn
in 1 577. In England, Axthur Hall (who had no Greek) translated
6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION 115
SaleFs version in 1581; but his work was soon outdone by the
complete rendering made from the Greek by George Chapman,
who produced the Iliad in English verse in 1611, the Odyssey in
1614, and the Hymns in 1616. (He had published a preliminary
translation of Iliads 1-2 and 7~ii, in iS 9^-) '^his version, which
Keats rightly calls loud and bold, was the first complete poetic
translation of Homer in any modern tongue. We hear of Italian
translations of the Odyssey into stanzas by Lodovico Dolce (1573),
and into blank verse, together with the first seven books of
the Iliad^ by Girolamo Bacelli (1581-2); but they created little
impression. In Germany a verse rendering of the Iliad by Johann
Spreng of Augsburg appeared in 1610.
There was a prose translation of Vergils Aeneid in Gaelic before
1400the Imtheachta Mniasa^ in the Book of Ballymote.^^ During
the fifteenth century prose paraphrases began to appearin
French by Guillaume Leroy, in Spanish by Enrique de Villena.
Then about 1 500 the first regular verse translation was produced,
a naive but faithful rendering in rhymed decasyllabic couplets by
the talented French translator Octovien de Saint-Gelais.^^ A few
years later, in 15x5, T. Murner issued a German version of the
thirteen books of the Aeneid\ while in Scotland the energetic
bishop Gawain Douglas had completed a strong, homely, and
vivid translation in rough heroic couplets (1513). Political troubles
kept this work from having any effect at the time, and it remained
unpublished until 1553 ; but four years after it was printed, in 1557,
Surrey published an English version of Aeneid^ 2 and 4, in which
many passages of Douglas were copied almost word for word.^s
(It was in this poem by Surrey that blank verse was used for the
first time in English, probably in imitation of the recently adopted
blank verse used by Italian poets and translators.) Meanwhile
there had been some renderings of parts of the epic in France:
notably Du Bellays version of books 4 (1552) and 6 (i 561) ; and at
last, after thirteen years of work, Desmasures produced a successful
translation of the whole poem in 1560. An Alexandrine translation
of all Vergils works was published in 1582 by two Norman squires,
the brothers Antoine and Robert Le Chevalier dAgneaux. A
translation of the Aeneid in English started by Phaer (books 1-7,
1558) was completed by Twyne in 1573, but it was poor stuff.,
Tassos friend Cristobal de Mesa turned the Aeneid into Spanish,
and the industrious Johann Spreng(d. 1601) made the first German
ii6 6, THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
verse rendering. Annibale Caros Italian version, printed in 1581,
was long famous. And equally famous was Richard Stanyhursts
English hexameter translation of Aeneid^ 1-4 (1583), which has a
strong claim to be the worst translation ever publishedalthough
competition in this field is very heavy. It will be enough to quote
Didos indignant exclamation on being deserted by Aeneas:
Shall a stranger give me the slampam ?
Lucan was turned into French in the fourteenth century for
Charles V. A Spanish prose version of the poet of Cordobaas
the Spaniards proudly called him^was published at Lisbon in
1541 by Martin Laso de Oropesa; but it really belonged to the
medieval tradition of treating him as a historian. In English
Marlowe produced a line-by-line translation of book i (dated 1600,
but entered at Stationers Hall in 1593). A complete English
version was made by Sir A. Gorges in 1614, followed by a more
successful one from T. May, who was secretary and historian of
the Long Parliament, in 1636. The vogue of baroque poetry in
Spain was encouraged against his will by Juan de Jauregui y
Aguilar, who wrote a translation of Lucan which so vividly
reproduced Lucans conceits and distortions that it gave authority
to the affectations of Gdngora and his school.
Versions of Ovids Metamorphoses have been mentioned in our
chapter on the medieval romances.^^ Petrarchs friend Bersuire
or Ber9oir (who died in 1362) wrote a French paraphrase which
long held the field, being even turned into English by Caxton in
1480until Clement Marot translated books i and 2 in 1532, and
Habert the entire poem in 1557. Hieronymus Boner issued a
German translation in 1534; Halberstadts old German paraphrase
of 1210 reappeared in a modernized form in 1 545, to be superseded
by Sprengs verse rendering in 1 564. In English Arthur Golding
made a version rough but fluent (1567), which Shakespeare knew
and used, adding to it the graces of his own imagination.^^
HISTORY
Herodotus was put into Latin by Valla in 1452-7, Rabelais
himself is said to have translated book i while he was a monk, but
his work is lost and he never refers to it. Boiardo (1434-94)
produced an Italian translation, and Pierre Saliat a French one in
1556. Books I and 2 were published in English by B. R. in 1584.
6 . THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION 117
There is a German version by H. Boner (1535) based on the Latin
rendering.
Thucydides also was given a famous Latin interpretation by
Valla (1452), which became the basis for translations into the
modern languages: into French by Claude de Seyssel, bishop of
Marseilles, about 1512; into German by Boner in 1 533 ; into Italian
by Francisco de Soldo Strozzi in 1545; and into English from
SeyssePs version by Thomas Nichols in 1550. A Spanish
translation by Diego Gracian came out in 1564.
Xenophons Anabasis was put into French by de Seyssel in
1504; German by Boner in 1540; Italian by R. Domenichi in 1 548;
Spanish by Gracian in 1552; English by J. Bingham in 1623.
After Plutarchs Parallel Lives had been made accessible in
Latin by Guarino and others in the early fifteenth century, they
too entered modern languages. Twenty-six lives were turned into
Italian by B. Jaconello in 1482; eight into German by H. Boner in
1534 and the rest in 1541 ; Alfonso de Palencia had already translated
them into Spanish in 1491. In French, four were translated
in 1530 by Lazare de Baif, eight by George de Selve, bishop of
Lavaur (who died in 1542), and others by Arnault Chandon, who
followed de Selve, but was to be outdone by a greater man. In
1559 the great French translator Jacques Amyot, who rose from
a professorship at Bourges to be bishop of Auxerre, issued his
magnificent complete version of all the Lives. Montaigne said it
was one of the two chief influences on his thinking, and it held its
place in French literature for hundreds of years.^ Thomas North
turned it into English in 1579, and it then became an equally
strong influence on William Shakespeare.^^
Caesars Memoirs were turned into French for Charles V in the
fourteenth century. His work On the Gallic War was published
in German by M. Ringmann Philesius in 1507. Partial English
versions having been made in 1530 by W. Rastell and 1564 by
John Brend, Golding produced a complete version in 1565.
Sallust (along with Suetonius) had also been translated for
Charles V of France. In the next century he was done into
Spanish^the Spaniards paid much attention to Roman history

by Francisco Vidal de Noya (1493). D. von Pleningen and J.

Vielfeld issued German versions in 1513 and 1530. Meigret made
a new French translation in the middle of the sixteenth century.
In English T. Paynell translated the Catiline (1541), Alexander
ii6 6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
verse rendering. Annibale Caros Italian version, printed in 1581,
was long famous. And equally famous was Richard Stanyhursts
English hexameter translation of Aeneid^ 1-4 (1582), which has a
strong claim to be the worst translation ever publishedalthough
competition in this field is very heavy. It will be enough to quote
Didos indignant exclamation on being deserted by Aeneas:
Shall a stranger give me the slampam ?
Lucan was turned into French in the fourteenth century for
Charles V. A Spanish prose version of the poet of Cordobaas
the Spaniards proudly called him^was published at Lisbon in
1541 by Martin Laso de Oropesa; but it really belonged to the
medieval tradition of treating him as a historian.^^ In English
Marlowe produced a line-by-line translation of book i (dated 1600,
but entered at Stationers Hall in 1593). A complete English
version was made by Sir A. Gorges in 1614, followed by a more
successful one from T. May, who was secretary and historian of
the Long Parliament, in 1626. The vogue of baroque poetry in
Spain was encouraged against his will by Juan de Jauregui y
Aguilar, who wrote a translation of Lucan which so vividly
reproduced Lucans conceits and distortions that it gave authority
to the affectations of Gongora and his schooL^'7
Versions of Ovids Metamorphoses have been mentioned in our
chapter on the medieval romances. Petrarchs friend Bersuire
or Ber9oir (who died in 1362) wrote a French paraphrase which
long held the field, being even turned into English by Caxton in
1480until Clement Marot translated books i and 2 in 1532, and
Habert the entire poem in 1557. Hieronymus Boner issued a
German translation in 1 534; Halberstadts old German paraphrase
of 1210 reappeared in a modernized form in 1545, to be superseded
by Sprengs verse rendering in 1564. In English Arthur Golding
made a version rough but fluent (1567), which Shakespeare knew
and used, adding to it the graces of his own imagination.
HISTORY
Herodotus was put into Latin by Valla in 1452-7. Rabelais
himself is said to have translated book i while he was a monk, but
his work is lost and he never refers to it. Boiardo (1434-94)
produced an Italian translation, and Pierre Saliat a French one in
1556. Books I and 2 were published in English by B. R. in 1584.
6 . THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION 117
There is a German version by H. Boner (1535) based on the Latin
rendering.
Thucydides also was given a famous Latin interpretation by
Valla (1452), which became the basis for translations into the
modern languages: into French by Claude de Seyssel, bishop of
Marseilles, about 1512 ; into German by Boner in 1 533 ; into Italian
by Francisco de Soldo Strozzi in 1545; and into English from
SeysseFs version by Thomas Nichols in 1550. A Spanish
translation by Diego Gracian came out in 1564.
Xenophons Anabasis was put into French by de Seyssel in
1504; German by Boner in 1540; Italian by R. Domenichi in 1548;
Spanish by Gracian in 1552; English by J. Bingham in 1623.
After Plutarchs Parallel Lives had been made accessible in
Latin by Guarino and others in the early fifteenth century, they
too entered modern languages. Twenty-six lives were turned into
Italian by B. Jaconello in 1482; eight into German by H. Boner in
1534 and the rest in 1541 ; Alfonso de Palencia had already translated
them into Spanish in 1491. In French, four were translated
in 1530 by Lazare de Baif, eight by George de Selve, bishop of
Lavaur (who died in 1542), and others by Arnault Chandon, who
followed de Selve, but was to be outdone by a greater man. In
1559 the great French translator Jacques Amyot, who rose from
a professorship at Bourges to be bishop of Auxerre, issued his
magnificent complete version of all the Lives. Montaigne said it
was one of the two chief influences on his thinking, and it held its
place in French literature for hundreds of years.^ Thomas North
turned it into English in 1579, and it then became an equally
strong influence on William Shakespeare.^^
Caesars Memoirs were turned into French for Charles V in the
fourteenth century. His work On the Gallic War was published
in German by M. Ringmann Philesius in 1507. Partial English
versions having been made in 1530 by W. Rastell and 1564 by
John Brend, Golding produced a complete version in 1565.
Sallust (along with Suetonius) had also been translated for
Charles V of France. In the next century he was done into
Spanish^the Spaniards paid much attention to Roman history

by Francisco Vidal de Noya (1493). D. von Pleningen and J.

Vielfeld issued German versions in 1513 and 1530, Meigret made
a new French translation in the middle of the sixteenth century.
In English T. Paynell translated the Catiline (1541), Alexander
ii8 6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
Barclay the Jugurtha (1520-3, reissued 1557), and Thomas Heywood
both the monographs in 1608.
Livy, so far as he was known, was translated quite early.
Boccaccio is reported to have made a version of the books then
extant; and Petrarchs friend Bersuire produced a French rendei'-
ing which was not superseded until 1583. In Spanish a very
influential translation was made by Pedro Lopez de Ayala,
Chancellor of Castile (1332-1407). B. Schofferlin and J. Wittig
translated all the books then known into German in 1505; their
translation was reissued, with a rendering of the newly discovered
books, by N. Carbach in 1523. The first complete English version
was by the vigorous and learned Philemon Holland in 1600.
Tacitus, that difficult author, was put into German by Micyllus
in 1535. In French the Annals were rendered by fitienne de la
Planche (1-5, 1 548) and Claude Fauchet (i 1-16, 1582). In English
Sir Henry Savile translated Agricola and the Histories (1591),
and R. Grenewey Germany and the Annals (1598).
In fact, history was probably the single most important field of
translation during the Renaissance^which emphasizes one type of
classical influence we are sometimes inclined to take for granted
:
the perspective of past events, the political experience, and the
wealth of story laid open to us by the still unequalled historians of
antiquity.
PHILOSOPHY
Plato was less often translated than he deserved. However, there
were many Latin versions, the greatest being a complete set made
by Ficino in 1482 for the Medici. The first English translation
appeared in 1592 (de Mornays Axiochus, a dubious work). Renderings
of separate dialogues were made in French: the Lysis by
Bonaventure des Periers about 1541, the Crito in 1547 by P. du
Val, the Ion by Richard le Blanc in 1 546, The Defence of Socrates
by F. Hotman in 1 549. Then the distinguished humanist Loys
Le Roy began to issue a very valuable set of translations of more
important dialogues: Timaeus (1551), Phaedo (1553,) The Symposium
(1559), Republic (published in 1600). We are told
that in 1546 Etienne Dolet was burned for publishing a version
of Hipparchus and Axiochus which attributed to Plato a disbelief
in the immortality of the souL^^ This must be one of the most
drastic pxmishments for mistranslation ever recorded.
6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION 119
Aristotles Politics had early been translated by Nicolas
Oresme, whose version was printed in i486 and superseded by that
of Loys Le Roy in 1 568. The first Italian translation was published
by A. Bruccioli in 1547; 7- D. turned the book into English from
Le Roys French version in 1598.
Aristotles Ethics were also translated into French under
Charles V, and then again in the sixteenth century by Le Roy.
Carlos de Viana made a Spanish version late in the fifteenth century.
J. Wylkinsons English translation (1547) is from a thirdhand
medieval Italian version based on Brunetto Latinis work.
Plutarchs Moral Essays were always favourites, for their
combination of charm, scholarship, and worldly wisdom. They
were often translated separately: Sir Thomas Elyots version of
On Education (c. 1530) is an example. Wyat used Budes Latin
version to produce a translation of the essay On Peace of Mind in
15^8; Wyer the printer turned out an English rendering of
Erasmuss Latin translation of the essay On Preserving Health
about 1530; and Blundeville translated four between 1558 and
1561. Complete versions were issued in German by M. Herr and
H. von Eppendorf in 1535, and by W. Xylander (completed
by Jonas Lochinger) in 1580; in French by Amyot in 1572

another of his essential translations; and in English by Holland

in 1603.
Ciceros little dialogues On Friendship {Laelius) and On Old
Age {Cato Maior) were widely popular. Laurent Premierfait, who
died in 1418, turned them into French. The former was translated
into English before 1460 by John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester,
whose version was printed by Caxton in 1481 along with a translation
of On Old Age made from Premierfaits French version
(probably by Botoner). They were both included in a collection
of translations called The German Cicero^ by Johann, Freiherr zu
Schwarzenberg (1534), which also contained the Tusculan Discussions;
Jean Colin turned them into French again in I5379;
John Harington (father of the poet) translated On Friendship from
the French version in 1550; R. Whittington On Old Age about
1535 ; and Thomas Newton did both in 1577. Ciceros big treatise
On Duties had been anonymously translated into German as early
as 1488, and again in 1531 by Schwarzenberg. Whittington made
a poor English version of it in 1540, and Nicolas Grimald a good
one in 1553. The Tusculan Discussions were put into French by
120 6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
tienneDolet(i-3, i542)and into English by John Dolman in 1561.
Schaidenreisser turned the Paradoxes into German in i 53 ^>
Whittington into English in iS4o> Thomas Newton again in
1569, together with one of Ciceros finest works, the fragmentary
Dream of Scipio,
Senecas Letters and ^moral treatises on moral subjects were
usually read in Latin^their popularity being increased by
Erasmuss fine edition in 1 5 1 5. However, we hear of a fourteenthcentury
French version and of a German compendium by Michael ^
Herr (1536). Dietrich von Pleningen translated the Consolation to
Marcia into German in 1519. The treatise On Benefits was
Englished in 1 577 by Arthur Golding, the translator of Ovid, and
all Senecas prose works by Lodge in 1614.
DRAMA
Translations of drama were surprisingly patchy and infrequent.
A grave disservice to literature was done by the Renaissance
translators who neglected the Greek playwrights. Aeschylus and
Aristophanes were scarcely ever turned into modern languages,
Sophocles and Euripides poorly and incompletely. The Roman
comedians and the tragedies of Seneca were very much better
treated. The reasons for the neglect of Greek drama were, first,
the extreme difficulty of its thought and language; second, the
superior attraction of the flashier Seneca; third, the existence of
handy Latin translations, such as those by Erasmus and Buchanan;
and fourth, the fact that anyone who could read Greek and write
poetry usually preferred to spend his efforts not on translating but
on emulating the classical poets.
Sophocles Plectra was turned into Spanish as Revenge for
Agamemnon by Feman Perez de Oliva (c. 1525), and into pretty
heavy French in 1537 by Lazare de Baif, whose son Jean-Antoine
published his own version of Antigone in 1 573 Alamannis rather
free Italian rendering of Antigone was issued in 1533, and in 1581
Thomas Watson produced a translation into English.
The most notable translations of Euripides were the Italian
ones made between 1545 and 1551 by Lodovico Dolce: Hecuba,
Medea, Iphigenia at Aulis, and The Phoenician Women. Hecuba
was put into Spanish by Fernan Perez de Oliva in 1528 and in 1544
into French by Bochetel and Amyot.^^ In 1549 Thomas Sebillet
6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION 121
produced a French version of Iphigenia at Aults exactly twice as
long as the original. No other Greek play appeared in French for
120 years. In German the Strasbourg humanists issued a fair
number of translations of Greek drama from 1604 onwards; and
there was one sixteenth-century translation, Michael Babsts
Iphigenia at Aulis. Very few English versions of Greek plays were
made during the Renaissance. Peele is said to have translated one
of the Euripidean plays on Iphigenia while he was at college, but
it is lost. The only published translation was a rendering of The
Phoenician Women put out in 1566 by Francis Kinwelmersh and
George Gascoigne, who took it from Dolces Italian and called it
Jocasta,
Aristophanes easiest and most popular play, Plutus, was turned
into French about 1550 by Ronsard (to be acted by his friends at
the College de Coqueret) and into Spanish in 1577 by Pedro
Simon de Abril.^s
Plautus was a favourite. The court poets of Ferrara were
translating his comedies as early as i486, and scores of Italian
versions appeared later. An early translation of his Amphitryon
into Spanish prose was produced in 1515 by Francisco Lopez de
Villalobos. The Brothers Menaechmus was Englished by W. W.
in 1595, possibly to the benefit of Shakespeares Comedy ofErrors;^^
and it had long before been turned into German, along with The
BacchideSy by the German scholar Albrecht von Eyb. (He died
in 147s, but the translations were not published until 1511.) A
German version of The Pot Comedy was made by Joachim Greff
in 1535, of Stichus by C. Freyssleben in 1539, of The Brothers
Menaechmus by Jonas Bitner in 1570, and there were numerous
others. Many playwrights, beginning with the Italians, produced
modrneizations and adaptations of Plautine comedies.^^
Terence, although less popular as a dramatist, was easier, politer,
and more edifying: so he was translated early and often. A French
prose rendering by Guillaume Rippe and one in verse^ by
Gilles Cybille were published together about 1500. The Eunuch
was turned into German as early as i486 by Hans Nythart. In
1499 a complete German Terence in prose appeared at
Strasbourg, possibly made by the Alsatian humanists Brant and
Locher. It was followed by another prose translation by Valentin
Boltz in 1539, by Johannes Bischoffs rhymed version in 1566, and
by many versions of single plays. Complete translations appeared
122 6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
in French, by C. Estienne, J. Bourlier, and Anon, in 1566; in
Spanish, by Pedro Simon de Abril, in 1577; and in English, by
the Puritan divine Richard Bernard, in 1598.
The earliest dramatic translation of Seneca was a version of
Medea^ Thyestes^ and The Trojan Women (with fragments of others)
made in Catalan by Antonio Vilaragut. It can be placed not far
from 1400; and we hear of a complete translation of Seneca^s
tragedies into Spanish in the fifteenth century. The most influential
vernacular dramatic translation of the period was certainly the
English version of the Ten Tragedies^ produced by six different
translators between 1559 and 1581.^^ As well as a regular translation
made by Dolce in Italy about 1550, there were many versions
specially written for stage presentation. There appear to have
been none in German. In France Charles Toutain produced the
first Senecan translation with his Agamemnon (1557). This was
followed by another Agamemnon (Le Duchat, 1561), an important
series made by Roland Brisset {The Madness of Hercules^ Thyestes^
Agamemnon^ and the bogus Octavia) in 1590, and finally by a
complete set of the tragedies translated by Benoit Bauduyn (i629).3o
ORATORY
Oratory also was ill represented in translations during the
Renaissance. Much public speaking was still being done in Latin for instance, we hear of Queen
Elizabeth delivering a fiery
extempore speech in fluent Latin to the envoys of Spain. It was
a little later, during the baroque period, that modern oratory really
developedusing classical originals and translations as its models.
Demosthenes Olynthiacs were put into French in 1551 by
Loys Le Roy, and into English in 1570 by T. Wilson, who
designed them to be read as propaganda against the aggressions
of Philip of Spain.3 i Boner produced a German version of the
Philippics in 1543, while Loys Le Roy published his French
Philippics and Olynthiacs together in 1575.
Isocrates was not really an orator, but a political philosopher.
However, his ideas were set out in the form of speeches or letters,
polished to a rhetorical brilliance. Three of these works were
particularly popular in the Renaissance. To Nicocles is an address
by Isocrates himself to one of his princely pupils, and discusses
the duties of the monarch. It was translated into German by
6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION 133
J. Altenstaig in 1517 and into English by Sir Thomas Elyot in
1531.32 To Demonicm, an essay on practical morality, was put
into German in 1519 by W. Pirckheimer, and into English in 1557
by Bury, and, following him, by Nuttall in 1585. Nicocles, an
address by the young prince to his subjects on the principles of
government, was turned into French by L. Meigret in 1 544. Loys
Le Roy produced a French translation of all three in 1551, and
T. Forrest an English one, working on a Latin version, in 1580.
Ten of Ciceros speeches were rendered into French by
Macault in 1548. R. Sherry did the speech for Marcellus into
English in 1555 (C. Bruno had put it into German in 1542), and
T. Drant the little speech for Archias in 1571. Centuries earlier,
Brunetto Latini had turned the speeches for Marcellus, Ligarius,
and King Deiotarus into Italian.
SMALLER WORKS
Smaller works, being easier to publish and appreciate, were
frequently translated.
Aristotles Poetics^ which is not only incomplete but forbiddingly
difScult, was scarcely known until the sixteenth century.
Thenceforward it was often edited, translated into Latin, and
excerpted, but seldom put into modern languages. The earliest
Italian version was issued in Florence by Bernardo Segni in 1 549,
and was followed by a translation with commentary by Lodovico
Castelvetro (Vienna, 1 570). In France the Pleiade appear to have
known the book only through the Italian critics; there was no
direct translation during the Renaissance. Ascham and Sidney
quote it in England, and in 1605 Ben Jonson is said to have made
a version of itcertainly he knew its doctrines well. But the
general public throughout Europe, having scarcely any translations
available, did not.
Theocritus was put into Italian by the talented Annibale Caro
(1507-66). Six of the idylls appeared anonymously in English in
1588.
Lucian, with his polite but cynical wit, was a favourite of the
Renaissance. About 1495 Lapaccini rendered one of his Dialogues
of the Dead into musical Italian verse. He was the most popular
Greek author in Germany, where at least eleven translators worked
on him during the period 1450-1550.23 Thirty of his dialogues
were turned into French by Tory in 1529. In England, Rastell
124 6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
(d. 1536) produced a translation of Menippus^ also called The
Necromancy, while Elyot translated The Cynic before 1535 and
A. 0/ the Toxaris in 1565.
The Greek romancers were very popular too. Annibale Caro
put Daphnis and Chloe into Italian, and Amyot in 1559 made a
superb French translation which A. Day turned into rather
clumsy English in 1587. Amyot also translated the Aethiopica in
1547. James Sandford turned some of this romance into English
in 1567, and in 1568-9 Thomas Underdown produced a complete
version, based on a Latin translation by the Pole Stanislas
Warshewiczki.
Ciceros correspondence with his friends was put into French
by the unfortunate Dolet (1542) and F. de Belleforest (1566).
Vergils Bucolics were freely paraphrased in Spanish, with the
addition of much medieval philosophical and religious doctrine,
by Juan del Enzina (1492-6), and translated into octaves, along
with the Georgies, by Cristobal de Mesa about 1600. Bernardo
Pulci had written an elegant Italian version in 1481. The earliest
French translation of the Bucolics and Georgies, by Michel
Guillaume de Tours (1516 and 1519), contained pious expositions
like some of the medieval versions of Ovid.^^ Clement Marot
translated Bucolics 1 in 1532, and Richard le Blanc completed the
set in 1555 ; he had translated the Georgies in 1554. The Bucolics
were put into German by Stephan Riccius and into English by
George Turberville in 1567; while Abraham Fleming issued an
English rendering of both Bucolics and Georgies in 1589. The
great Spanish poet Luis de Leon {c, 1 527-91) made fine translations
of the Bucolics and of the first two books of the Georgies; while
Giovanni Rucellais adaptation of Georgies, 4, The Bees, finished
in 1524, began a long succession of didactic poems in Italian.
About twenty of Horaces odes were turned into Spanish by
Luis de Leon.^s It has always been splendid practice for young
poets to try their skill on translating these little lyrics, so tightly
packed with thought, so iridescent with subtle shades of emotion,
so delicate in their use of language. Many, many individual
translations appeared in every western tongue: witness Miltons
remarkable version of the Pyrrha ode, Carm. i, 5.36 Still, they are
so complex and so reflective that Renaissance versions of the
complete collection are relatively few. There were none in English
or German. In French they appeared in a complete translation
6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION 125
of Horaces works by Mondot in 1579, and in Italian Giorgino
issued a version in 1595. Horaces longest Letter (Ep. 2. 3, usually
called The Art of Poetry) was a very important formative factor
in Renaissance literary theory and was often translated. Dolce
produced an Italian version in 1535; it was paraphrased in an
influential Italian critical work by Robortelli in 1 548 ;
it was put
into French by Grandichan in 1541 and by Peletier du Mans
in 1544; into Spanish in 1 592 by Luis de Zapata; and into English,
along with the other Letters and the Satires, by T. Drant in 1567.
The Satires appeared in Italian, by Dolce, in 1559 ; and in French,
by Habert, in 1549. Dolce did the Letters in the same year and
G. T. P. translated them into French in 1584.
Ovids minor works came out in French in 1 500-9. In English,
translations of the Heraides were produced by Turberville in 1567,
of the Tristia by the appropriately named Thomas Churchyard
in 1572, and of the Loves by Christopher Marlowe himself in
about 1597.
The obscure but memorable satirist Persius is still a severe test
of a translators ingenuity and taste. Renaissance versions were
very few. There were two in French: by Abel Foulon in i 544)
by Guillaume Durand in 1575. An Italian translation by Antonio
Vallone was published at Naples in 1576. No others appeared in
the sixteenth century; but it is worth mentioning a good effort by
Barten Holyday, issued in England in 1616.
An abridged French version of Plinys Natural History by
Pierre de Changi came out in 1551, and an English version by
T. A. in 1566^which perhaps inspired Shakespeare with the
travel-tales that Othello told to Desdemona in a pliant hour.37
Clement Marot (1496-1544) translated Martials epigrams into
French, but they are so easy to read that translations were scarcely
necessary in the Renaissance.
Juvenal was translated into Italian by G. Summaripa in 1475.
The tenth satire was put into Spanish by Geronimo de Villegas
in 1515 and into English by W. B. in 1617; in 1544 Michel
dAmboyse issued 8, 10, ii, and 13 in French.
Apuleiuss Metamorphoses were rendered into Italian by Boiardo,
who died in 1494; into French by Guillaume Michel and German
by Johann Sieder ; and in 1566 into English by Thomas Adlington,
whose translation, though less brilliant than the original, is still
readable and enjoyable.
126 6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
During the Middle Ages, each of the European countries in the
west had two literatures. They had books written and songs sung
in their own dialects or languages ; and they had Latin literature
old and new. Thus there were separate national literatures, and
there was an international literature^both constantly growing.
Sometimes the two interpenetrated. When they did, the
synthesis could be a nobler creation than any purely national or
purely Latin work of its age. Such was Dantes Comedy. As the
Renaissance approached, they interpenetrated more often and
more deeply. The contacts which had been rare and difficult
became easy, delightful, fertile. New ideas poured into the national
literatures ; new patterns were learned and utilized and developed
;
the ardently competitive spirit of the men of the Renaissance was
challenged, and their greedy intellectual appetite was fed, by newly
revealed books in Latin and Greek, greater than any their fathers
had written, but not (they felt) greater than they themselves could
write.
The inspiration they drew from these books was sometimes
direct, as when Montaigne digested Senecas essays and made
Senecas thoughts into part of his own mind. Sometimes it acted
remotely, by intensifying the nobility of their work and subtilizing
their art. A Renaissance comedy on contemporary persons and
themes is far more comically complicated than anything the Middle
Ages ever conceived, because its author has enjoyed, at first or
second hand, the intricacies of Plautus. But, more and more often
during and since the Renaissance, writers who wish to live in
both worlds and make the best of both, find that translations of
classical books will serve them well. The current flows between the
two worlds more and more richly. Amyot translates the Greek
biographer and moralist Plutarch into French. Montaigne seizes
on the translation and lives with it the rest of his life. North turns
Amyots translation into English. Shakespeare changes it into
CoriolanuSy Antony and CleopatrUy Julius Caesar. Great books, in
Miltons words, are the life-blood of a master spirit. Through
translations the energy of that life-blood can be given to other
spirits, and can make some of them as great, or greater.
7
THE RENAISSANCE
DRAMA
I
N the Middle Ages there were various types of rude popular
plays and religious pageants, and an occasional half-realized
drama in Latin on classical or biblical subjects, for the church, the
learned, and sometimes the nobles. But it is little likely that any
of these would ever have grown up to the full power of the modern
theatre without the new impulses provided by the Renaissance,
and in particular by the rediscovery of classical drama in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The modern stage was created
by the impact of Greco-Roman drama on Renaissance life.
It owes the following debts to the pla5rwrights of Greece and
Rome.
(a) The conception of drama as a fine art. The plays of the
Middle Ages had been performed either by amateurs or by strolling
players of low culture and status: touchingly human as their
efforts were, they scarcely even deserve to be called a craft. The
improvement in the prestige and skill of actors and writers came
only when they tried to rise to the heights attained by classical
drama. Renaissance drama was an aristocratic art. It began in the
ducal palaces of Italy. It developed in the royal courts, the noblemens
houses, the great schools, and the colleges of western
Europe. During its development it was written predominantly for
audiences who had an exceptional education and a lively understanding
of Greek and Latin culture. They had high critical
standards. Even their clowns had to be learned or to pretend
learning. The establishment of these high standards, and the
increasingly numerous contemporary discussions of the principles
of criticism, made it impossible, during the Renaissance, to continue
producing the rude old farces and the naive old religious
spectacles on the customary low level. It was necessary to equal
not only the skill but the dignity of the ancients, for whom the poet
was not a mountebank but a teacher, a legislator, almost a priest.
(6) The realization of drama as a type of literature. As we have
seen, neither Dante nor Chaucer nor their contemporaries understood
the essential difference between drama and narrative.^ This
128 7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA
vagueness about the real character of the great literary patterns was
characteristic of the Middle Ages and helps to account for the
formlessness of much medieval literature. (Even the old-fashioned
inscription on Shakespeares bust at Stratford compares him to
Nestor, Socrates, and Vergil.) It was not until nearly 1500 that
scholars had gone far enough ahead to make out the general
structure of drama, and to put translations and imitations of
classical plays on the stage in Italy and France ; and only then, with
experiment and experience, did the full potentialities of the drama
start to make themselves plain. Then, by testing, and discarding,
or imitating, or adapting the patterns used by the Greeks and
Romans, the Renaissance pla}rwrights and critics established the
genera which have ever since been called by their Greek names
:
drama, comedy, tragedy. Some of them tried to go too far, and
specialize and classicize too much. In Poloniuss introduction of
the players Shakespeare satirizes his contemporaries who were
ready not only to play the four recognized types of drama (three of
them classical) but to mix them to the customers own taste:
The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history,
pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical-comicairhistorical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited
: Seneca cannot be too heavy nor Plautus too light.^
But still, until the essential character of the type of literature we
call drama was understood, with all its possible varieties, the real
beauties of tragedy and comedy could not be achieved.^
This must not be taken to mean that drama reached perfection
in the Renaissance when it copied Roman and Greek comedy and
tragedy. No : it culminated when, in each of the western countries,
it met and mingled with the spirit of the nation, and helped that
spirit to express itself more eloquently. In Italy, after many
ambitious but unsuccessful attempts, it reached its nature in
opera, which was a well-thought-out attempt to reincarnate Greek
tragedy. In France it failed in the sixteenth century and came to
fruition later, in the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, in the
comedies and near-tragedies of Moliere. In England and Spain
there was scarcely any classicizing drama which was successful.
But the English and Spanish dramatists assimilated much of the
classical drama, and added their own imagination to it, reshaped
its characters, its humour, and its conventions to suit their peoples,
7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA 129
and left the rest. The magnificent result was Marlowe, Lope de
Vega, Webster, Calderdn, Shakespeare.
(c) The theatre-building and the principles of dramatic production.
The Middle Ages had no theatres. What plays they had were
given on temporary platforms, or on floats, or in buildings
meant for other purposes. There is only one late exception: the
Fraternity of the Passion had the Hotel de Bourgogne in Paris for
their mystery plays.^ But permanent theatres were built in the
Renaissance, for the first time since the fall of Rome: partly to
accommodate the audiences, which had grown immensely larger
and more demanding since the drama had improved, s and partly
to provide a Greco-Roman setting for so many plays done on
Greco-Roman subjects or on Greco-Roman principles. At first
no one knew how to build a theatre. There were various amateurish
attempts, which grew a little more elaborate with experience. But
in 1484 the first edition of the Roman architect Vitruvius was
printed, and producers, playwrights, architects, and illustrators at
once began to try to reconstruct the splendid buildings he described.
During the high Renaissance the problem of theatrical
design was not fully solved. When Shakespeare began his career
the finest theatre in London was the Swan, which a Dutch visitor
sketched because it looked so like a Roman amphitheatre.^ But
from his sketch it is clearly a hybrid. It is a cross between a
medieval inn-yard and a Renaissance conception of a Greco-
Roman stage.. Like King Lear, it is a synthesis of classical and
medieval. But after further experiment and further realization of
the meaning of classical design, the modern theatre was constructed.
Mr. Allardyce Nicoll, in his admirable book The
Development of the Theatre, picks the Olympic Theatre at Vicenza
as the point at which, in 1580, the possibilities of modern stage
construction were fully realized on classical models.^ It was
started by the famous classicist architect Palladio, and, although its
stage was evidently far too ornate for modern (or for Greek) taste,
it explored such essentials of theatrical design as permanence,
dignity, symmetry, and long-receding perspective. These discoveries
were elaborated during the baroque age. The work of the
baroque architects and theatrical producers, with their renewed
and strengthened emphasis on Greek and Roman art, is responsible
for the fact that most of the great theatres in the world, from the
Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires to the Scala in Milan, from the
S076 K
130 7, THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA
Residenz in Munich to the Opera of Paris and New York and
London, are re-created Greek and Roman theatreseven to the
semicircular auditorium, the arch above the stage, the side-pillars,
the decorative garlands of fruit and symmetrical wreaths of
flowers, the sculptured masks of Comedy and Tragedy, the busts
and medallion portraits of great writers and actors, the staircases,
vaults, and colunms, the noble draperies, the statues of poets, of
Muses, of the god of poetry, Apollo himself.
{d) The structure of modern drama comes to us from Greece
via Rome: in particular, the following elements are classical
importations.
First, the progor^ns of qurjplays, which last from two to three
hours, and seldom mu<3T more or less. We now accept this as
natural ; but it is not. The Middle Ages ran to short plays, interludes
and the like; the Spaniards love brief zarzuelas
\
in the early
days of moving pictures there were hundreds of ten-minute
farces; and the Japanese have raised tabloid drama to a high art
in their No plays. Extreme length also appeared in the Middle
Ages, with cycles of miracle plays which took a whole day to
perform. This goes even further in the serial dramas of the East
(e.g. the kabuki plays of Japan) which continue for weeks at a time,
and in the serials of the early movies, which, like comic strips, are
designed to provide interminable excitement. We get our sense of
proportion, in drama as in so much else, from the Greeks.
We also get the symmetrical division intoJJbxeL.four. or (usually
in the Renaissance) five acts,^ch embodying a major part of the
action. This too was an invention of the Greeks, who punctuated
the plot with choral songs and dances, although the performance
was continuous^like a modem film rather than a modern play.
Tlie choms was anotk^lJGreekTiwen^^ All modern choruses
are its direct descendants: from the narrative Choms of Our Town
to the explanatory Choms of Henry F, who opens the play with a
noble appeal to the imagination of the audience:
O! for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention;
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene;
from the pretty girls of musical comedy to the troubled Russian
people of Boris Godunov.
7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA 13
1
The idea of having an intricate, plot was Greek and Roman in
origin and in transmission to us : a dramatic story built on strongly
marked and complex characters, on conflicts between individual
people and collisions of spiritual forces, and on the mounting
suspense produced by the increasing intellectual complexity and
emotional tension of such a plot.
Modern^draimtic verse, which has produced so many of the
sublimest moments..of our theatre, was created to rival the eloqupice^_^
eek^ The verse of the medieval
plays was more like lyric, or farce, or doggerel; and the early
emulations of classical drama were written in completely unsuitable
metres, s Probably it was the actual imitation of the chief
metre of Greek and Roman tragedya 12-syllable iambic line

that produced modern blank verse, Italian and English. ^

(e) No less important than all these was the fact that Greek and
Roman drama, when rediscovered, provided high standards to
admire, to compete with, and if possible to outdo. The response
to this formidable challenge was Renaissance and baroque drama.
The classical playwrights whose works survived (in pitifully
small numbers) to influence modern drama were these
(a) Athenian tragedians of the fifth century b.c. :
Aeschylus (525-456), seven of whose plays remain;
Sophocles (495-406), seven of whose plays remain;
Euripides (?48i-4o6), nineteen of whose plays remain.
{b) An Athenian comedian of the same age
Aristophanes (?444-38o), who has left eleven plays.
(c) Roman comedians, working on material, characters, and
styles largely created by the Athenian Menander and his
colleagues of the fourth and third centuries B.c. (the works
of these men are almost wholly lost)
Plautus (?254-i 84), of whom we have twenty plays;
Terence (?i95-i59), who left six.
{d) A Roman tragedians
Seneca (?4 b.c.-a.d. 65), writing on Greek m3rths and
models in an extreme style of his own, and possibly not
for stage-performance we have nine of his plays and a
contemporary imitation on a contemporary subject, Neros
destruction of his wife Octavia.
132 7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA
As Shakespeare saw, and made Polonius say, the chief classical
stimuli acting upon Renaissance drama were not the Greeks but
the Romans Seneca and Plautus.^^ Almost equally influential (in
forming critical standards) were Aristotles Poetics and Horaces
Art of Poetry. After these came Terence, and then Euripides
and Sophocles. The much greater difficulty of the language of
Greek tragedy, in which the style of Euripides is the simplest,
probably accounts for its otherwise inexplicable neglect, and for
the general lack of interest in the greatest and most difficult of all,
Aeschylus.^3 The neglect of Aristophanes may be explained by
the oddity of his form, the extreme topicality and indecency of his
humour, and the complexity of his language. Rabelais had a copy
of his works ; but, although he closely resembled Aristophanes in
wit and language, there are very few traces that he actually quoted
or imitated himM But Plautus is far more straightforward; and
when twelve of his lost plays were discovered and brought to
Rome in 1429,^5 the discovery encouraged Italian playwrights to
imitate him.
It was Seneca in particular who stimulated and instructed the
Renaissance dramatists of Italy and England. From him they took
certain characters, attitudes, and devices which, although partly
obsolete on the stage to-day, were new and valuable then. For
example, the ambitious Jfuthless tyrant,, best exemplified in
Shakespeares Richard III. He is an eternal figure. Fie was created
in drama by the Greeks ; but he was intensified into diabolism by
Seneca, eagerly taken up by the Italians because their own cities
produced so many of his type, and copied both from Rome and
from Italy by the horrified but interested English poets. The
ghost of a monarch calling on his kin to avenge his murder, and
thereby bringing on new crimes and horrors, appears in Greek
drama as early as the Oresteia of Aeschylus; Seneca used such
phantoms frequently and violently; Italy, with its passion for
vendetta, took the revengeful ghost from Seneca, and the English
from them both. The ghost seems silly nowadays : even in Queen
Elizabeths reign Lodge said its miserable calls for revenge sounded
like an oyster-wife but we cannot despise the lendings which
Shakespeare changed into the perturbed spirits of Banquo,
Caesar, and King Hamlet.
It was partly to recent history in Italy and England, but even
more to Seneca, that the Renaissance playwrights owed their
7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA 133
passion for the darker sides of life: for witchcraft and the supernatural
(as in Macbeth), for madness impending or actual {Hamlet,
The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, King Lear), for the
display of torture, mutilation, and corpses {King Lear, Titus
Andronicus, Orbecche, The Duchess of Malfi), and for murder
committed and multiplied before the eyes of the audience. Finally,
it was Seneca, strengthening the energy of their own souls, who
stimulated the Elizabethan dramatists to the tremendous outbursts
of pride and passion, half heroic and half insane, in which they
raise cavalieros higher than the clouds,
And with the cannon break the frame of heaven,
Batter the shining palace of the sun,
And shiver all the starry firmament.^
^
The wellhead of modern drama is Italy. The Italians first felt
the stimulus of classical drama, and under it they produced the
earliest modern comedies, tragedies, operas, pastoral plays, and
dramatic criticisms. It turn, they stimulated the French, the
English, and, less directly, the Spaniards. The best way to see how
their stimulating influence spread outwards is to survey the firsts
in each field^translations, imitations, and original modern plays
emulating the classics.
Translations of Latin and Greek plays were being acted in Italy
from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards. The first
comedy to be acted in translation was The Brothers Menaechmus
of Plautus, done by Niccolo da Correggio for the Duke of Ferrara
in i486. (The noble house of Ferrara did more than any other
family, and more than most European nations, for the development
of the modern theatre.) Tragedy took longer to develop. We
hear of performances of Senecan tragedies in Italian about 1 509,
and of an Italian version of Sophocles Antigone by Luigi Alamanni
which was acted in 1533.
In France poets and scholars began, in the latter half of the
fifteenth century, to translate classical plays both from the original
and out of Italian adaptations; but they were not acted. Instead,
we hear of men like the brilliant Scottish scholar George Buchanan
producing Latin versions of Greek dramas. The turning-point
came in 1548. In that year Henri II and Catherine de Medici
were sumptuously entertained at Lyons by Ippolito dEste,
134 7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA
cardinal of Ferrara, who showed them a comedy in modern Italian
prose adapted from a Latin play, performed by skilful actors and
beautiful actresses. (It was an adaptation of The Brothers Menaechmus
called Calandriacalandro means booby^and written in
1513 by Bernardo Dovizi, who became Cardinal Bibbiena.) Five
months later Joachim Du Bellay brought out The Defence and
Ennoblement of the French Language^ calling among other things for
the production of comedies and tragedies on the classical model to
emulate the ancients, instead of medieval farces and morality plays
;
and soon the modern French drama was launched.^9 (In 1^67
another member of the Pleiade, Jean-Antoine de Baif, produced
a modernization of Plautus The Boastful Soldiery called The HerOy
which is still readable.)
In Britain, although there were productions of Latin plays in the
original at schools and colleges, we rarely hear of the production
of such plays in translation. In Spain there was an adaptation of
Sophocles Electra made by Fernan Perez de Oliva in 15^8, and
called Revenge for Agamemnony and a version of Plautus The
Brothers Menaechmus (called Los Menemnos or Los Menecmos) by
Juan de Timoneda in 1559, which was entirely modernized and set
in contemporary Seville : but it is improbable that they were ever
produced. In Portugal, Camoens wrote a good translation and
adaptation of Plautus Amphitryony apparently for performance at
a festival in the university of Coimbra between 1540 and 1550.
Some time later, in the early years of the seventeenth century, a
group of humanists working at Strasbourg began to produce a
number of classical plays (including several Greek tragedies) in the
original and in German translations.
Imitations of classical drama in Latin were really a step closer
to genuine Renaissance drama, since they were original plays on
original subjects. The most remarkable was the earliest. This was
Eccerinis (c. 1315), a tragic poem on the life of the fiendish Ezzelino
da Romano, who became tyrant of Padua in 1:^37. It was specially
written for the city of Padua as propaganda against future attempts
to seize power there. The author^who was richly rewarded^was
Albertino Mussato (1261-1329), a pupil of Lovato de Lovati, the
first modem scholar who understood the metres of Senecas
tragedies. Eccerinis is like a classical drama in having five acts, a
choms, dialogue, and dramatic metres; but it is very short, and
7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA 13s
was not conceived as a drama for performance on the stage.
Mussato himself, with a confusion which we have seen in his
contemporary Dante, compared it to the Aeneid and the Thehaid,
and intended it to be read rather than acted. Still, it was for its
time a work of bold and admirable originality.^^^
Later, particularly with the great improvement in classical
education at schools and colleges, Latin plays were written and
acted all over Europe. In Germany they were the commonest
form of high drama. George Buchanan wrote some of great
distinction, in which his pupil, Montaigne (aged 12), acted. Latin
tragedies on biblical subjects were particularly popular. In
Poland, too, Jesuit teachers wrote a considerable number for their
pupils to act.2i
As for the fact that such plays were written in Latin, it must be
remembered that in many European countries there was no choice
between Latin and a fully developed national language, but rather
between Latin and one or other local dialect. As J. S. Kennard
points out,
humanism embraced the several districts of Italy in a common culture,
effacing the distinctions of dialect, and bringing the separate elements
of the nation to a consciousness of intellectual unity. . . . Divided as
Venetians, as Florentines, as Neapolitans, as Lombards, and as Romans,
the members of the Italian community recognized their identity in the
spiritual city they had reconquered from the past. The whole nation
possessed the Latin poets as a common heritage ; and on the ground of
Plautus, Florentines and Neapolitans could understand each other.'^^
If for the whole nation we read !all educated men and women,
that is true and important: although, in the instinctive nationalism
of to-day, we assume that any national language is more alive and
more powerful than an international language, like Latin, which
covers many centuries and many realms of thought.
Emulation of classical drama in modem languages was the
essential starting-point of the modem theatre. The chief stages in
its earliest development were marked by the following plays.
The earliest dramatic production on a classical theme in a
modern language was Orpheus. This is a slender but moving
piece, half pastoral drama, half opera, on the tragic love and tragic
death of the musician Orpheus. It was written for the court of
Mantua in 1471, by the brilliant young Angelo Ambrogini of
136 7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA
Montepulciano, called Politian.^^ Although there is some action
on the stage, and much dramatic tension, the metres are almost
wholly lyrical. Similar works followed it: such as Correggios
Cephalus, a dramatization of the story from Ovid, in ottava rima
and lyrical metres, produced at Ferrara in 1487 ; and dramatizations
of tales from the Decameron in the same light graceful forms.
The earliest original comedy in the modern manner was Lodovico
Ariostos The Casket Comedy (Cassariaj, written in 1498 and played
(at Ferrara, of course) in 1508. It was adapted from several
classical comedies: The Casket Comedy^ The Ghost Comedy
y
and
The Little Carthaginian of Plautus, and The Self-punisher of
Terence; but it also embodied some satire on contemporary
personalities. Others soon followed^indeed Mantovanos Formicone
was actually produced before The Casket Comedy, Ariostos
The Masqueraders {Gli Suppositi), written in 1502-3 and acted in
1509, was based on Plautus The Prisoners and Terences The
Eunuch. In 1566 George Gascoigne translated it into English to
be played at Grays Inn and Trinity College, Oxford, under the
imaginative title of Supposes. In this shape it provided material
for Shakespeares The Taming of the Shrew. However, Italian
comedy went sour with the plays of Machiavelli and Aretino, who
took the structure, plot-line, and characters of classical comedy,
modernized them, and added dirt derived partly from the medieval
fabliaux and partly from their own experience and imagination.24
Not quite the earliest, but the first influential tragedy in a
modern language was SophonisbUy by Giovan Giorgio Trissino
(1515), This is a dramatization of the story of the African queen
told by Livy (28-30), and imitates Greek models, in particular the
Antigone of Sophocles and the Alcestis of Euripides. Its particular
originality lies in the facts that it is not on remote myth but on
factual history; that it is in blank verse; and that it is an early
effort to exploit the emotions mentioned by Aristotle as essential
for a tragedy^pity and terror. The author was strongly conscious
of the epoch-making character of his work: we shall shortly meet
him again as the writer of the first modem epic in classical style.
Unfortunately, although an original writer, he was not a great one.^s
Although published in 1515, Sophonisha was not acted until
many years later. The first original modem tragedy which made
a wide impression and founded a school was Orbecche (1541), by
Giovanni Battista Giraldi, called Cinthioa historical tragedy on
7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA 137
the feuds within the Persian royal family, and the earliest to put
on the stage the sexual crimes and bloody murders which the
Renaissance audiences so much adored. Audiences wept ; women
fainted ; it was a tremendous success.^^
In French the first tragedy was Jodelles Captive Cleopatra^
produced in 1552, and written on the model of Senecas tragedies
although boasting Greek drama as its predecessor and claiming
to sing in French the tragedy of Greece.^7
Its metres were ten-syllable iambic couplets, alexandrine couplets,
and lyrical choruses. It was stately but dull.
Produced on the same day, the first French comedy, Jodelles
Eugene^ was really a descendant of medieval farce, in its octosyllabic
metre, its farcical fabliau-like subject, and its manner

except for its full-length, five-act scale, its setting (in the street
outside the homes of the main characters), and a few reminiscences
of Plautus and Terence. Subsequent French comedies were
equally unclassical. The true nature of French comedy was only
to be realized much later, in a different age of classicism, by Jean-
Baptiste Moli^re.
The first English tragedy was Sackyille and Nortons Gorhoduc
(or Ferrex and Porrex)^ played at the Temple in 1562. It is in
blank verse. It does not observe the laws of unity^which had
scarcely yet been invented or disseminated^but it is on a theme
allied to that of the fratricidal civil war between the sons of
Oedipus; and it contains Greek devices acquired through Seneca,
such as the Furies and the messenger describing off-stage calamities.
The story is localized in an earlier region of classical influence ^the mythology of Trojan
Britain.^^
Long before this, a few years earlier than 1500, English audiences
had seen the interlude called Fulgens and Lucres (or Lucrece), a
love-story evidently inspired by Renaissance fantasy on Roman
republican history, in which a good plebeian and a voluptuous
patrician compete for the hand of a virtuous maiden; This had
a funny sub-plot; and in fact the English comic spirit, which had
been obstreperously active in the medieval plays, now gradually
clothed itself in plots of Greco-Roman intricacy and in grotesque
characters derived from Greek and Roman story or drama. An
early attempt of this type was Thersites {c, 1537), a coarse farce
adapted from a Latin original written by the French Renaissance
138 1. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA
scholar Ravisius Textor, and based on the comic vulgarian in
Homers Iliad^whom Shakespeare was later to make the clown
of Troilus and Cressida,^'^ Such also W2is Jack Juggler {c, 1560), a
wytte and very playsent Enterlued rudely adapted from Plautus
Amphitryon,
The first full-scale English comedy was Ralph RoisterDoister^
written about 1553 by Nicolas Udall for a cast of schoolboys who
evidently knew their Plautus, Its main character is a braggart like
Thersites, modelled on Plautus boastful soldier {Miles gloriosus),
who was himself drawn from the swaggering foreign legionnaires
of the successors of Alexander the Great. Attached to him there
is a typical Plautine parasite called Merrygreek. The complexity
of the plot and its layout in acts are classical in origin, and a
number of the best jokes come from Plautus ; but the rest is genuine
energetic native humour.
Spanish drama grew, like the national drama of other countries,
out of the grave religious pageants of the Middle Ages and the
crude little conversational pieces of the fairs and festivals, sometimes
countrified and sometimes farcical. The Shakespeare of
Spain, Lope de Vega, composed some of these latter trifles in his
youth. Then, about 1590, almost exactly in the same year as
Shakespeare, he began his real work. He himself well described
his relation to classical drama. In his New Art of Making Comedies
he said that before starting to write he locked up all the rules,
banished Plautus and Terence, and then constructed his plays by
popular standards. The result was that he and his chief successor
Calderon produced the greatest wealth of drama with which any
modern country, during the Renaissance, was enriched. It has,
however, made less impression on other nations than the Renaissance
drama of England.^i From the classical stage it appears to
have taken the complex intrigues and the clash of character, and
the knowledge that (even locked up) there were classical masterpieces
to outdo. What Lope did not take over was the fine taste
and richness of poetic thought which enable a play to be created,
not only for the day that dawns as the last lines are written, but for
the world beyond and for other times.
Other types of drama were taking shape in the Renaissance, or
were contributing their own force and brilliance to the growing
modem theatre.
7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA 139
Masques, for instance, were being produced with increasing
splendour at almost all the Renaissance courts ; and, as Professor
Allardyce Nicoll points out, greatly influenced the development
of theatrical scenery and dramaturgy. The most famous for
English readers is Miltons ComuSy produced at Ludlow Castle
in 1634. It is much morg than a mere masque. It is also a pastoral
play : the Attendant Spirit disguises himself as a shepherd called
Thyrsis,
Whose artful strains have oft delayed
The huddling brook to hear his madrigal,
And sweetened every musk-rose of the dale, 3 3
and at the end the river Severn is personified as a Greek nymph
with a Latin name. But Miltons thought, even in his twenties,
was so rich that he infused into his little drama many other
elements. The dramatic scene where Comus is put to flight is
modelled on the conquest of Circe (Comus mother) by Odysseus
in Odyssey
y
10. 274 f. ; and there are long discussions of ethical
questions, modelled on Plato, fromwhom Milton actually translates
an important passage. 34
Pastoral drama was a peculiar creation of the Renaissance, a new
synthesis of existing classical elements* 35 5 The characters were
idealized shepherds and shepherdesses (the types created by
Theocritus and etherialized by Vergil) with the nature-spirits
Pan, Diana, satyrs, fauns, and nymplxs. The introduction of
hopeless love into Arcadia was really an invention of Vergirs36 but
was made more complex in the Renaissance. In several of Vergils
Bucolics two characters speak, and dispute, and compete, so much
so that the poems were actually staged in the theatre of Augustan
Rome.3 7 The rediscovery of classical drama suggested to modern
playwrights that they might create complete plays on the romantic
love-themes appropriate for pastoral characters, with the charming
costumes, music, and scenery of Arcadia. The earliest play in a
vernacular language on a secular subject, Politians Orpheus
y
was
set in pastoral surroundings, and its subordinate characters
included shepherds and a satyr. This idea was doubtless suggested
partly by the fact that Orpheus was associated with wild nature,
and partly by the legend which said Eurydice died from a snakebite
received while she was running away from the passionate
shepherd Aristaeus.38 Pastoral plays continued to develop as an
independent genre ; but they also contributed something to dramas
140 7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA
like Shakespeares As You Like It, while they became, because of
their lyrical music and imaginative settings, a remote ancestor of
modern opera.
The earliest large-scale pastoral drama was Beccaris The SdcrL
fice, produced (at Ferrara) in 1555. This set the pattern which
many pastoral dramas were to follow^the assortment of illmatched
lovers. A loves B, B loves C, C loves D, andD is vowed to
chastity; E loves F and his love is returned, but they are forbidden
by a cruel kinsman to marry. (Beccari solved the latter problem
by changing the kinsman into a boar.)
The two supreme masterpieces of the pastoral drama are Torquato
Tassos Amyntas (Aminta, in Italian), produced at Ferrara
in 1573, and the much longer Faithful Shepherd, by Battista
Guarini, produced in 1590. These are extremely complex dramas
of love and adventure. Aminta is not (as he has since become)
a girl but a nephew of Pan, bearing the Macedonian name Amyntas
which Theocritus had introduced into his idylls. He loves Dianas
niece Sylvia, who hates men and loves only hunting. Even when
a satyr strips her naked and binds her with her own hair to a tree,
with the most reprehensible intentions, and when Amyntas frees
her at the last moment, she is not grateful ; she goes on hunting
;
she melts only after Amyntas commits suicide by throwing himself
over a cliff^but fortunately he is saved by a bush which breaks
his fall. Guarinis play, which was intended to outdo Amyntas,
is much more complicated. All action takes place off stage, and is
reported and then commented upon in song or declamation. The
poetry of Amyntas is exquisitely, poignantly beautiful, and has well
been compared to music and to Renaissance painting.^o The
Faithful Shepherd was imitated all over Europe, and was more often
translated into foreign languages than any other work of Italian
literature.
According to one theory, there is another direct descendant of
the Greek and Roman theatre. This is the popular farce, which
survived (particularly in Italy) through the tradition carried on by
strolling players, through puppet shows, and through such institutions
as the fools kept by monarchs and noblemen. In particular, it
is suggested that certain stock characters have come straight down
from the Roman comedians: for instance, the fool who combines
shrewdness with folly, and looks deformed or ridiculous ; he wears
7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA 141
a cocks comb or is bald-headed. Certainly there is much in
common between the Italian commedia delV arte and the spirit
of the comedies of Plautus, enough to make us believe that the
same funny people, and funny gestures, and funny situations, may
well have continued to please sixty generations of Italian audiences.
The most famous of such survivals known to modern spectators is
Mr. Punch, the Pulcinella of the Italian comedies.^^
Opera also was coming gradually into life. It was created by
classical scholars who loved the drama, and who knew that in
Greek tragedies music was an essential part of the production.
They tried therefore, by interweaving musical accompaniment
with dramatic declamation and lyrical comment, to heighten the
emotion of the entire piece. One of their chief problems was to
decide whether the Greeks set the dramatic speeches and arguments
to music as well as the choruses. This is, of course, a perennial
problem in opera: the baroque composers solved it by using
recitative, soaring up to an occasional aria, and Wagner by what
he called 'song-speech. (It should be remembered that Wagner
thought he was emulating Greek tragedy, and, while composing
The Ring of the NibelungSy wrote music all morning and read the
Athenian dramatists all afternoon.)
The first experimental opera was produced at Florence in 1594.
This was DaphnCy by Ottavio Rinuccini, with music by Peri and
Caccini: a dramatization of the story in Ovid, which tells how
Apollo killed the dreadful dragon Python, and then, shot by Cupids
jealous arrow, fell in love with the obdurate Daphne, who at last
became the laurel-tree.^^ (I do not know whether the authors were
aware that one of the most famous pieces of music in ancient
Greece was a programme-piece depicting the conflict between
Apollo and the Python.)^^ The essential novelty of this production
and of Eurydicey which succeeded it in 1600, was the fusion of two
apparently incompatible elements, the spoken comedy of the
theatre and the lyrical melody of chamber-music. Plays with
incidental music were not new, but the great departure made by
the authors of Daphne and Eurydice was to construct a magic
circle of unbroken musical sound from the beginning of the story
to its end.44 That magic, which raises so many of us into a higher
world with the first notes of the overture to Don Giovanni or the
prelude to Das Rheingoldy was first made by men who were endeavouring
to re-create the original beauty and power of Greek drama.
142 7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA
A few years after this, the first great operatic composer, Monteverdi,
entered history with a setting of the immortal legend of
the immortal musician, Orpheus, He was the first to realize the
possibilities of opera on the grand scale, for earlier operatic productions
had been designed for a small room and an intimate
audience of friends. Modern opera and modern verse-drama are
the two children of Greek tragedy, and they constantly aspire
towards one another.
Modern standards of dramatic criticism were being built up
through the Renaissance, partly by experiments in new forms, and
partly by study and discussion of Greco-Roman literary theory

represented chiefly by Aristotles Poetics^ Horaces Art of Poetry,

and, much less influentially, by Longinuss essay On the Sublime,
Much of Renaissance drama was created by the lofty standards
of Renaissance critics, who, in spite of their frequent pedantry,
would not tolerate slovenly work.
Joel Spingam, in his valuable History of Literary Criticism in the
Renaissance^ has traced the development of the theory of the Three
Unities into a code of literary law. The only rule that Aristutle
lays down is the sensible one that in poetry the story must deal
with one action,^^ As for time, he says thatas a matter of fact
tragedy endeavours to keep within a single circuit of the sun, one
twenty-four-hour period, or something near it; although the
early tragedies did not.^^ According to Spingam, the first critic
to make this a definite mle was Cinthio (p. 136 above), who was
professor of philosophy and rhetoric at Ferrara. He laid down this
rule in his Lectures on Comedy and Tragedy (c, 1545); and then
Robortelli, in his 1 548 edition of Aristotles Poetics^ explained that
Aristotle really meant twelve hours (because people are asleep at
night) ; and Segni, in his translation of the Poetics (1549), countered
by saying that, since many highly dramatic events take place at
night, the period meant was twenty-four hours. Pedantic as all
this sounds, it was an attempt, not to impose classical rules on a
brilliant and original modem drama, but to improve a faltering
and often feeble modem drama by pointing out that it would
achieve its best effects by concentration, rather than by hanging
out a sign marked thirty years later before each act.
The unity of place was added by Castelvetro in his 1570 edition
of the Poetics. He too gave a sensible reason for it, although he
did not say that Aristotle had laid it down. He said Aristotle
7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA i43
insisted on verisimilitude. The action of the play must seem
probable. It will not seem probable if the scene is constantly
being changed to another part of the field^ or Bohemia. A desert
part of the Country near the Sea\ Trissino also, in his Poetice
(1563), contrasts the practice of the Unities with the sloppiness
of ignorant poets. Therefore the doctrine of the Three Unities
was useful for the time at which it was created. It was an attempt
to strengthen and discipline the haphazard and amateurish methods
of contemporary dramatists^not simply in order to copy the
ancients, but in order to make drama more intense, more realistic,
and more truly dramatic.
Modern drama works in four different media: the stage and the
opera, the cinema and the radio. The second two are extensions
of the two first, differentiated mainly by the physical and mechanical
conditions of production and transmission. The essential first
pair were created in the Renaissance, not by the mechanical
reproduction of classical material, but by the creative adaptation
of classical forms, with all their potentialities unrealized by
medieval dramatists, and the challenge of classical masterpieces,
previously misunderstood or unknown.
8
THE RENAISSANCE
EPIC
ONLY one poem which could be called^ epic in grandeur was
written in a vernacular language during the Middle Ages:
Dante's Comedy, which in form is unlike any previous epic, and
indeed any previous poem in the world. We have traced the debt
which Dante owed, and most nobly acknowledged, to Vergil. The
debt of the Renaissance epics to classical poetry is more obvious,
and goes no less deep.
Epics in Latin, such as Petrarch's Africa, are not to be considered
here. The vernacular epics of the Renaissance which interest us
fall into four classes, according to their subject-matter and the
type of classical influence working in them.
The first class is easily disposed of : direct imitation of classical
epic. This is represented: only by The Franciad {La Franciade) by
Pierre de Ronsard (1524-85), four books of an unfinished poem
published in 1572. This was designed to be a plaster cast of the
Aeneid. It was to tell how, just as Aeneas escaped from Troy to
found Rome, so a hero of even higher descent, Astyanax, son of
Hector (now called Francus or Francion), survived the fall of
Troy, reached Gaul, founded the city of Paris (named after his
brother), and established the beginnings of modern France. It is
in decasyllabic couplets, much too short for the French language
and the ambitious subject. A romantic love-affair between Francus
and a Cretan princess was introduced. The poem was a total
failure: Ronsard could not even finish it.^
Next come epics on contemporary heroic adventures, mainly or
wholly written in the classical manner. The greatest of these is
The Sons of Lusus (i.e. the Portuguese, Os Lusiadas), published in
1 572 by Luis de Camoens (i 524-80). This tells the story of Vasco
da Gama's exploration of east Africa and the East Indies : Camoens
himself had been one of the earliest explorers of the Far East. His
poem is luxuriously classical in style, incident, and background.^
Much simpler is The Poem of Araucania {La Araucand), by
Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga, one of the Conquistadores of South
America (1533-94). He began to publish it in 1569 and produced
8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC 145
the complete edition in 1590. It tells in thirty-seven cantos,
partly poetry, partly doggerel, how the resistance of the Chilean
Indians was broken by the Spanish invaders. ^ This is the first
important book written in America. (The author, who was well
connected at the Spanish court, rather like Chaucer but on a
higher level, was court-martialled and sent home from Chile,
after just escaping execution: he took his revenge by leaving his
commanding officer almost entirely out of the poem.) It had a
tremendous success and was much imitated. When the curate and
the barber were going over Don Quixotes library and throwing
out the trash, they kept La Araucana^ saying it was one of the best
three heroic poems in Spanish.^ There are, of course, others of
its type: for instance, La Dragontea by Lope de Vega, telling
of the last voyage and death of that devilish dragon, Sir Francis
Drake . . .
The third class contains romantic epics of medieval chivalry, with
considerable classical influence. These are a blend of three chief
ingredients: complex chronicles of knightly adventure long ago,
romantic love-stories in the manner which began in the Middle
Ages and continued through the Renaissance, and Greco-Roman
enrichments of all kinds, from the trivial to the essential. The best
known is The Madness of Roland {Orlando Furioso) published in
1516 by Lodovico Ariosto (1474-1533)a huge and delightful
phantasmagoria telling of the adventures in love and war of Roland
and other champions, in a period roughly identifiable as that which
saw the invasion of France by the Saracens and their defeat by
Charles Martel. ^ It was a continuation and improvement of an
unfinished Roland in Love {Orlando Innamorato) by Matteo Maria
Boiardo, Count Scandiano (1434-94). The plot and its treatment
are '%ildly unhistorical. Orlando (in whom few could recognize
Hmodland, the grim warden of the Breton marches) goes mad
through his hopeless love for Angelica, daughter of the Grand
Khan of Cathay. He recovers only when the sorcerer Astolfo
visits the moon, riding on a winged horse and guided by St. John
the author of the Apocalypse, and brings back a bottle containing
his common sense. The lost wits of many people are stored in the
moon. Astolfo had not thought lunacy had undone so many. He
examined them bottle after bottle for Rolands,
and then the wizard recognized it, since
it bore the label: rolakds sanity.^
146 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC
To rival Ariosto in art and to surpass him in seriousness,
Edmund Spenser ( ? 1552-99) started The Faerie Queene. Six books
and a fragment remain. He intended twelve books, each telling the
story of one chivalrous adventure connected with Arthurs Round
Table, and exemplifying one moral virtue. In form and in type of
subject his poem follows Ariosto, but its moral tone and many of
its subsidiary features were modelled on Homer and Vergil. *7
Boccaccios Theseidy whose manner is medieval although its
subject is Greek, is an earlier, less developed example of this type.
Two poems of this group are in a sub-class by themselves. The
greater is The Liberation of Jerusalem by Torquato Tasso (1544-
95), a magnificent poem which was finished in 1575 , published
without the authors sanction in 1581, and reissued, after he had
revised and spoilt it, in 1593.^ It relates the story of the first
Crusade (1095) in highly romantic terms, concentrating on the
devils attempts to hinder the Crusaders from capturing Jerusalem,
his chief assistant being a charming witch, Armida. This is an
almost unrecognizably different story from that soberly told by
Gibbon^ and his authorities. Externally this poem resembles
Ariostos, but it is different in one essential point. Constantly, and
quite seriously, it introduces Christian doctrine and the Christian
supernatural.
In this it had a predecessor, once famous. This was The
Liberation of Italy from the Goths {La Italia liberata da Gotti), by
Giovan Giorgio Trissino(i478-i55o), apoem in twenty-seven books
of blank verse describing, much in the style of medieval romance
but with Christian and classical trimmings, how the eastern
Roman emperor Justinian attacked the Goths who dominated
Italy in the sixth century, and defeated them.^o It is often said
that this epic is a failure because it adheres rigidly to the rules of
Aristotle. It is indeed a failure. But that is not because it observes
any particular set of rules. The principles suggested by Aristotle
for epic are not numerous or rigid enough, even if misapplied, to
cranap any writer. The poem fails, like Trissinos tragedy Sophonisba,
simply because its author is a bad poet : his verses are flat, his
plot boringly arranged, and his imagination feeble.^^ Still, it was
once famous as the first modem epic in the classical manner, and
its very title symbolized the chief current of the Renaissance.
These two poems make a bridge to the fourth and last class of
Renaissance epic: Christian religious epics, on subjects from Jewish
8 . THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC 147
and Christian history and myth, but arranged almost wholly in the
classical manner. These are Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained,
published in 1667 and 1671 by John Milton (1608-74), telling, in
twelve and four books of blank verse respectively, the majestic
stories of the fall of man and of the temptation of Jesus in the
wilderness.
Classical influence in these poems, in every one of them, is
all-pervading. It is not predominant in them all; but it is one of
the main presuppositions without which they caimot be understood.
In several of them medieval ideals are quite as strong, or
stronger. Elsewhere in the Renaissance we can trace the survival
of medieval habits of thought : for example, in the splendid suits
of armour designed for nobles and kings (often with Greco-Roman
designs on them) long after the practical usefulness of armour was
over, and in some of the anachronistic festivals at which they were
worn. Milton himself at first thought of writing on Arthurian
themes. But, relatively weak or relatively strong, classical thought
and imagination penetrates all the Renaissance epics. Even the
simplest, La Araucana, cannot be properly appreciated by anyone
who knows nothing of Greco-Roman literature ; while, in order to
understand all of Milton, one must be a classical scholar.
It is interesting to trace how this influence varies from one poem
to another in importance, strength, and penetration.
The subjects of only two poems are classical. These are The
Franciad, which is a failure, and The Theseid, which is medieval
in manner. Apparently it is impossible for a modem poet to write
a good classical epic in the classical manner. The failure of
Petrarchs Africa confirms this.
In structure, some of the poems have the typical medieval
pattern, wandering, intricate, voluminous. But Paradise Lost is in
twelve booksthe same number as the Aeneideach semiindependent
and all carefully balanced. The Sons of Lusus, again,
is in ten books; and The Faerie Queene was planned in twelve.
These poems are classical in stmcture; and even The Madness of
Roland, although rambling, has more symmetry and order than
a real medieval gallimaufry like The Romance of the Rose.
An essential part of epic is the supernatural, which gives the
heroic deeds their spiritual background. We find that in the epics
148 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC
on contemporary subjects Greco-Roman mythology provides
practically all the supernatural element. Thus, one of the grandest
conceptions in The Sons of Lusus is the spirit of the stormy Cape
of Good Hope, who appears as a gigantic genie of cloud and storm
to Vasco da Gama as he sails towards India. His name is Adamastor,
Unconquerable. He explains that he was once a Titan, and
that he was changed into a mountain (apparently Table Mountain)
for trying to seduce Thetis, the sea.^^ Again, in The Poem of
Araucania, the Indian sorcerer Fiton, who conjures up a vision
of the battle of Lepanto for the narrators benefit, invokes such
classical demons as Cerberus, Orcus, and Pluto ; he lives in a cave
copied from the witchs cave in Lucan 6, and has a collection of
snakes copied from the ophiology in Lucan 9 : cerastes, hemorrois,
&C.15
On the other hand, in the romantic epics, most of the supernatural
element is provided by medieval fantasies : magic, sorcerers,
enchanted objects such as helmets and swords, fabulous animals
such as flying hippogrifts.^^ But classical mythology is blended
with it to provide important ancillary material. (This blend of
medieval and Greco-Roman is a deliberate device all through these
poems.) For instance, hell as described in The Faerie Queene is
almost wholly the Greek and Roman underworld. In 1.5 Sansfoy,
the dead paynim, is taken down through the same scenes and past
the same figures as those described in the Aeneid (Tityus, Tantalus,
&c.) and is cured by the god Aesculapius.^^ And in The Liberation
of Jerusalem^ 4, there is a similarly classical hell, with harpies,
hydra. Python, Scylla, Gorgons, and allalthough the enchanters,
witches, and fiends of the poem are quite medieval. Then most
of the subordinate deities in these poems are creations of Greek
and Roman fancy. In The Faerie Queene^ 1.6, Una is freed from
the ravisher Sansloy by a passing group of fauns and satyrs.
(Satyrs appear often in Spensers epic, and sometimes engage in
remarkably satyric activities.) When a bad spirit is called in, it is
usually a classical spirit. Both in The Madness of Roland and in
The Liberation of Jerusalem strife has to be kindled in one of the
opposing armies. In the former it is done by Discordia, the spirit
of Strife who caused the Trojan war; in the latter by the fury
Alecto, who did the same job in Vergils Aeneid, 7. Some taste of
the gay confusion of Ariosto can be got from the fact that Discordia
was dispatched by the archangel Michael, and en route met
8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC 149
Jealousy, accompanied by a tiny dwarf sent by the beautiful
Doralice to the king of Sarza; and something of Tassos grandeur
can be gathered from the fact that Alectos appearance is made
more terrifying than in Vergilshe comes as a headless trunk,
holding in her hand a head from which her voice proceeds.^
^
Again, Circe, with her magic palace and her habit of changing
unwary guests to animals, reappears as Armida in Tasso, and as
Acrasia (personifying Incontinence, and named by Aristotle) in
Spenser. But again Tasso adds something: he borrows Ovids
technique of metamorphosis, and makes her change the knights
into something which they physically resemble: fish, with the
scales corresponding to their glistening plate-armour.
In the Christian epics practically all the supernatural element is
provided by God, Jesus, the angels, and the devils. But their actions,
and even their appearance, are largely described in terms invented
by the classical epic poets. For instance, when Miltons archangel
Michael' comes to expel Adam and Eve from Paradise, he is in full
uniform, wearing a military vest of purple, dyed by the Greek
goddess of the rainbow:
Iris had dipt the woof.^o

And when Raphael flies down to warn Adam of the tempters

visit, he is, like the biblical seraphs, wearing six wings ; but two of
them are on his feet, like those of Hermes/Mercury, to whom he is
then compared
:
Like Maias son he stood.
In the early books of the Old Testament and now and again in the
gospels, angels are sometimes sent to intervene in human affairs.
On this pattern, Christian epic writers constantly make angels
carry messages from God to man, and assist nr hinder the chief
characters. But their interventions are so elaborate and systematic
that they more closely resemble the minor deities of classical epic.
Thus, at the beginning of The Liberation of Jerusalem God sends
Gabriel to ask Godfrey de Bouillon why he is not taking action
against the paynims; and at the beginning of The Liberation of
Italy God dispatches the angel Onerio (disguised as the pope) to
stir up Justinian against the Goths. Again, in one of the duels in
The Liberation of Jerusalem God sends a guardian angel to interpose
an invisible diamond shield between Raymond and the sword
ISO 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC
of Argantes, much as the deities in the Iliad and the Aeneid
safeguard their favourites Jerusalem, 7*99 ^ devilish
phantom persuades one of the pagans to break the truce in the
same way as Athene persuades Pandaros to break the truce in
Iliad, 4.68 f. Occasionally the devils are equated with the Olympian
deities. The architect of Pandemonium in Paradise Lost is
Vulcan; and in Paradise Regained Belial is identified with the
various deities of Greek myth who seduced women in disguise.^^
The debate of the devils in The Liberation of Jerusalem, 4, and
Paradise Lost, 2, is like the debates of the gods in so many classical
epics, and is vastly unlike the behaviour of devils as conceived by
the Middle Ages (for instance in Dante, Inferno, 21).^^ In Paradise
Lost there is a terrible battle between the angels and the devils.
It is copied from the battle of the gods in Iliad, 20~i ; the overthrow
of Satan is modelled on the overthrow of Ares; and the
climax in which the angels tear up mountains and throw them on
the devils, with jaculation dire, is adapted from the war of the
Titans against the Olympians in Hesiods Theogonyi^^
Miltons God himself does things which were done, not by
Jehovah, but by Zeus and Jupiter. Thus, when Satan first
approached Eden he was stopped by Gabriel and his angelic
squadron, and there would have been a battle,
had not soon
The Eternal, to prevent such horrid fray,
Hung forth in Heaven his golden scales, yet seen
Betwixt Astraea and the Scorpion sign.
Wherein all things created first he weighed . . .
In these he put two weights,
The sequel each of parting and of fight
:
The latter quick up flew, and kicked the beam.
Jehovah never did this; but Zeus did it for Achilles and Hector in
the Iliad, and Jupiter for Aeneas and Turnus in the Aeneid, and
Milton has added the reference to the use of the scales in the work
of creation.^^ Even in that great work as described by Milton,
when God decided to create man and this earth, he did not do so
simply, as in the Bible
:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. . .
.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he
him; male and female created he them.27
8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC 151
No: like Zeus and Jupiter, he took an oath:
so was his will
Pronounced among the Gods, and by an oath
That shook heavens whole circumference, confirmed.2
^
That Milton, thinking of the angels, should use the word Gods
here and elsewhere shows how completely he conceived his
divinities in the image of the Olympian pantheon.
Throughout all these poems the culture of Greece and Rome
provides a noble background. There are many aspects of this.
Modem history (however fabulous) is conceived as a continuation
of Greco-Roman history, the Dark Ages being curtailed or
forgotten. {Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are exceptions
here, for Milton has a profound sense of the perspective of ancient
and biblical history.) For instance, at the end of The Madness of
Roland the nuptial tent of Ruggiero is described. It was woven
by Cassandra as a gift for Hector, and, since she was a prophetess,
it showed all the descendants of Priam, ending with Ruggiero
himself. Similarly, its history was a continuous chain: it was
captured by Menelaus at the fall of Troy, taken to Egypt and
given to Proteus in exchange for Helen, inherited by Cleopatra,
and taken from her by the Romans, from whom it now descended
to Ruggieroand the description ends with a quotation of Caesars
famous epigram I came, I saw, I conquered. Again, in The Sons
of Lusus the Portuguese explorers are described by Jupiter as
adding new worlds to those discovered by Ulysses, Antenor, and
Aeneas'. 30 Paridell in The Faerie Queene gives a summary of the
story of the Aeneid leading up to the story of Aeneas descendant
Bmte, who founded Troynovant in Britain.^i
The deeds of modern heroes are constantly compared to those
of Greek and Roman epic and legend. Thus, in Paradise Lost
Satan was
in bulk as huge
As whom the fables name of monstrous size,
Titanian, or Earth-born, that warred on Jove,
Briareos or Typhon, whom the den
By ancient Tarsus held. . . .32
The valiant Indians in The Poem ofAraucania are said to be braver
than the self-devoting Decii and many other Greek and Roman
152 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC
heroes ; and the sack of Concepcion is called worse than the sack
of Troy. 3 3 In The Madness of Roland^ Grifon at the siege of Paris
inflicts wounds which might have come from the hand of Hector,
and (in a noble line which Ariosto borrowed from Petrarch) looks
like
Horatius alone against all Tuscany. 3^
Nature is usually described in classical termssometimes very
inappropriately. The great ordeal in The Poem of Araucania
where the Indian chief Caupolican holds up a huge log for twentyfour
hours is timed by the appearances of Tithonus lady (Aurora)
and the sun-god Apollo.^s In The Sons of Lusus the Portuguese
conquest of the sea is symbolized in an ebullient Rubens revel
when all Vasco da Gamas sailors marry Nereids, in happy islands
which are probably the Azores. 3 ^ When there is a storm, in The
Faerie Queene,
angry Jove an hideous storm of rain
Did pour into his lemans lap.37
Striking scenes are compared with beauties known from classical
poetry. Even the garden of Eden, in Paradise Losty is so presented
:
the garden where, since Milton could not keep out the lovely
Greek nature-spirits,
universal Pan,
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance,
Led on the eternal Spring. Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers,
Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis
Was gatheredwhich cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the worldnor that sweet grove
Of Daphne, by Orontes and the inspired
Castalian spring, might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive. . . .3^
Pandemonium, built by the devils, is specially said to be like a
Greek temple ;39 and in The Liberation of Jerusalem Armidas
palace has golden doors decorated with pictures which show the
triumph of Love, embodied in Hercules and lole, Antony and
Cleopatra.^
In all these epics, many, many episodes from Greco-Roman
heroic poetry are imitated and adapted. Here is one striking
8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC i53
example. Early in The Faerie Queene the Red-Cross Knight plucks
a branch from a tree,
out of whose rift there came
Small drops of gory blood, that trickled down the same.
The tree speaks to him, and says it is a human being, bewitched
;
and we recognize a haunting fancy of VergiFs, which Dante took
up and, in the grove of suicides, made far more terrible.^^
Some of these adaptations are of the greatest artistic and
spiritual importance. Such, for instance, are evocations of the
heroic dead, and prophecies of the great unborn. In The Liberation
ofJerusalem Rinaldo is given a suit of armour showing the exploits
of his ancestors fighting the Goths; and later, the archangel
Michael appears to Godfrey at a grave crisis, and shows him the
spirits of the dead crusaders and the angels of heaven all fighting
on his side. The first of these ideas is adapted from the divinely
made armour of Aeneas in the Aeneid, and the second from the
battles of the gods in the Iliad: Tasso has made the latter more
sublime than its original.^^ Xhe Poem of Araucania a magician
conjures up a vision of the battle of Lepanto, so that Ercilla may
see it although he is on duty in Chile, at the other side of the
world; in The Sons of Lusus a prophetic nymph describes the
future history of the East Indies: both scenes are reworked from
the underworld visit which gives Aeneas his long glimpse into the
Roman future.^^ There are similar visions in The Madness of
Roland and The Faerie Queene, The ghost of Merlin prophesies to
the beautiful Bradamante that, with Ruggiero, she will have a long
and glorious line of descendants, culminating in the family of Este,
Ariostos patrons ; and Spenser makes Merlin foretell the coming
centuries of British history to Britomart. The grandest of all such
prophecies is in Paradise Lost, where one angel reveals the whole
temporal past of the universe to Adam, and another the whole
future, as far as the Day of Judgement.^
Again, both heroic adventures and grand crowd-scenes are often
imitated from Vergil and Homer and others. In The Madness of
Roland King Norandin rescues his wife from a cattle-keeping
ogre by putting on a goatskin and crawling on all fours among
the animals^the stratagem devised by Odysseus in the cave of
the Cyclops.45 In the same poem the rescue of Angelica from the
sea-monster is inspired by the tale of Perseus and Andromeda in
Ovids Metamorphoses: indeed, Ingress picture of the episode
154 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC
emphasizes the similarity The Madness of Roland ends with a
crucial duel between Ruggiero and the paynim champion Rodomonte
as the Aeneid ends with the duel between Aeneas and
Turnus.47 Even the final sentences of the two poems are almost
the same; but the modern author introduces a characteristic
difference of tone. When Turnus received the death-blow,
his limbs slackened and grew cold,
and with a groan his life fled grieving to the dark.^s
So the poem ends, not as it might in triumph and peace, but in the
hopeless sorrow for young life cut shortjust as the pageant of
mighty Romans yet unborn, in Aeneid^ 6, ended with the sad
phantom of young Marcellus, who was to have such promise and
to die before his time. But The Madness of Roland ends when
Ruggiero, much less reluctantly, gives Rodomonte the death-blow,
not once, but twice and thrice, and then
loosened from the body colder than ice,
cursing and damning fled the angry soul
that was in life so proud and so disdainful.^^
The pagan knight does not grieve, but blasphemes. The victory
is complete^not marred by the inevitable waste of life which, for
Vergil, makes triumph into tragedy, but enhanced by the strength
and bravura of the defeated champion. Sympathy for him? No,
there is none, any more than in the original poem of Roland
:
Pagans are wrong, and Christian men are right Iso
So, instead of ending on a tremulous minor chord, Ariostos poem
finishes on a bold major flourish of trumpets, like the sweep of
black plumes, haughty and orgulous.
So many of the crowd-scenes in these epics are inspired by
Greek and Roman epic poetry and history that it is impossible to
treat them in a general survey. Like the Greeks of Iliad, 23, and
the Trojans of Aeneid, 5, the victorious Indians in La Amucana,
10, hold elaborate games, with prizes formally awarded. The great
formal debates of gods, heroes, or devils (note 24) and the catalogues
of warriors derive from Homer and Vergil. The ambassador in
Tasso who says he has both peace and war in the folds of his
cloak, and asks which he shall shake out, is modelled on a real
Roman : none less than Quintus Fabius Maximus, on the momentous
embassy to Carthage before the second Punic war.^i
8 . THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC 155
Homeric similes, in all their elaboration, occur in every one of
these poems. Sometimes the actual comparison is borrowed from
Homer or Vergilas when Ariosto compares Rodomonte, glittering
and dangerous in his armour, to a snake gleaming in its new
skin. 52 Sometimes the poets have used their own experience or
imaginationas when Ercilla compares an Indian army surrounding
a few Christians to an alligator swallowing up fish,^^ or when
Milton likens Satan flying through hell (Satan, who later appears
as vast as an island mountain) to an entire fleet, which far off at sea
Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds
Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles
Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring
Their spicy drugs ; they on the trading flood
Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape
Ply stemming nightly toward the Pole.54
Several of the most vivid characters of Renaissance epic are
imitated from, or partly inspired by, the figures of Greco-Roman
epic. For example, the warrior girl, beautiful, virginal, agile,
strong, and valiant, who fights on the wrong side, performs
prodigies of bravery, is defeated (and usually killed), but inspires
passionate love and regret in one of the opposing heroes. Clorinda
in The Liberation of Jerusalem, Bradamante in The Madness of
Roland are such heroines, and their younger sister is Spensers
Britomart. Although women soldiers like Joan of Arc and Caterina
Sforza existed in real life, the model for these formidable girls was
the Amazon queen Hippolyta, whom Theseus conquered, and
whose virgin girdle he captured; and that other bare-breasted
Amazon, Penthesilea, slain by Achilles ; and Vergils own imitation,
Camilla. 5 5 Other fantasies were blended to make the modem
Valkyries, but most of them were classical in origin. Tassos
Clorinda, for instance, was the white daughter of a negro queen a compensatory fantasy from the
late Greek romance of Heliodoms
; she was suckled by a tigressas Romulus and Remus were
suckled by a she-wolf; and she was carried over a raging river first
by her foster-father and then by miraculous winds and watersas
Camilla, tied to a spear, was thrown across by her father in the
Aeneid.^^
Several of these poems also invoke one or more of the Greek
Muses. (Such invocations appear as early as Dante himself.)57
In important passages the poets remember that the Muses were
IS6 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC
pagan deities, and justify the invocation by Christianizing them,
like that of Tasso
who dost not with soon-fallen bays
adorn thy forehead on Mount Helicon,
but high in heaven among the blessed choirs
hast of immortal stars a golden crown.s
8
The assumption on which the Christian epics are based is that,
other things being equal, they will be superior to the epics of
Greece and Rome because their subject, through the revelation of
Jesus Christ, has been exalted to a far higher level: it is an
argument
Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;^^
and the spirit which inspires the poets is therefore not an earthly
but a heavenly Muse.
And, by the more intense of these poets, many memorable
utterances from Greek and Roman poetry are translated or
imitated. Today many readers find this hard to understand. They
believe that the poet who echoes a phrase from Vergil or Ovid is
lacking in originality; that he cannot think of things for his characters
to say, and must go to the ancients and borrow their words.
This may be true of minor poets and hack writers, but it is very far
from true of great creative writers like Milton and Dante. The
truth is that quotation of beautiful words deepens the meaning,
and adds a new beauty, the beauty of reminiscence. For instance,
in Paradise Lost the first words spoken by Satan are his address
to Beelzebub, as they lie vanquished in hell:
If thou beest he^but Oh how fallen! how changed
From him!^who, in the happy realms of light,
Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine
Myriads, though bright. . .
.<^0
This is a deliberate quotation of the words in which Aeneas
described the ghost of Hector:
Ah, how he looked! how changed from his old self,
the Hector who brought back Achilles armour!^^
8 . THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC 157
It is a poignant phrase in the Aeneid. Miltons translation of it
has the same piercing sadness, and has the additional charm of
reminiscence : for the reader who knows Vergil feels another chord
vibrating in his heart as he recognizes the words.
But the meaning also is enriched. When Milton uses the words
in which Vergil described Hectors ghost, he is telling us that Satan
and Beelzebub, though fallen, are still powerful heroic figures ; but
that Beelzebub, once clothed with transcendent brightness, now
bears frightful wounds received in the rebellion against God-just
as Hectors phantom appeared with its hair matted with dust and
blood, and its face indescribably mutilated by being dragged
around Troy behind the victors chariot. And so, without any
more direct description, merely by the brief allusion to the hero
doomed to perpetual exile and visited on the night of danger by
the ghost of his dead friend, he makes us feel the atmosphere of
anguish, and foreboding, and defeat.
Similarly, when T. S. Eliot wishes to describe a rich and
beautiful woman, he writes
:
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble . . .,
v/hich is a reminiscence of Shakespeares superb description of
Cleopatra
:
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water. . .
Thus, in half a sentence, he not only delights his readers by
causing them to remember a phrase and a picture of great beauty,
but evokes all the loveliness and luxuriousness of the woman he is
describing.
It is a difficult art, the art of evocative quotation. The theory
held by the romantics that all good writing was entirely original
threw it into disrepute. It has been further discredited by the
misapplication of scholarship and the decline in classical knowledge
(on which see c. 21) : for readers do not like to think that, in order
to appreciate poetry, they themselves ought to have read as much
as the poet himself. Also, they feel, with justice, that hunting
down allusions and imitations destroys the life of poetry,
changing it from a living thing into an artificial tissue of copied
colours and stolen patches. Still, it remains true that the reader
158 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC
who knows and can recognize these evocations without trouble
gains a richer pleasure and a fuller understanding of the subject
than the reader who cannot. Compared with the classically
educated reader of Miltonor for that matter of Shelley or Eliot ^the reader who has never
interested himself in the classics is
like a child reading Dickens Tor the story, without understanding
the larger significances that are clear to every adult.
Further, it is an art that is often misused. In Tasso, Godfrey
tells the Egyptian envoy that the Crusaders are not afraid to be
killed in battle for the Holy Sepulchre:
Yes, we may die, but not die unavenged
which is an allusion to the last words of Dido in the Aeneid.^^
Pathetic, no doubt ; but quite inappropriate that, in a speech where
the Christian heroes offer their lives to the Cross, there should be
a reminiscence of the pagan princess killing herself for love. Tasso
is not a pedant, but far too many inferior poets have also used
classical imitation and allusion as props to support an inadequate
structure of imagination, or as a display of learning designed to
ornament the commonplace.
Yet, when properly employed, the art is magically powerful. It
may be compared with the art of imagery. When a poet describes
a soldier standing alone against heavy odds, and preparing to
counter-attack, he will not lessen the clarity of his picture, but
add something to it, if he compares the solitary fighter to a fierce
and noble animal, a lion or wild boar, surrounded by hunters and
hounds, yet not helpless or frightened but filled with rage and
strength and the exultation of combat, pausing only to find the
best point of attack before, with burning eyes, taut muscles, and
resistless energy, it charges. In just the same way, five words of
apt allusion will, for the alert reader, evoke a scene more vividly,
bring out all the force of an event, ennoble both the poet and his
creations.
When emulating classical poetry, it is impossible not to envy the
strength and flexibility of the Greek and Latin languages. Therefore
all these poets, in varying degrees, broadened their style by
introducing new words and types of phrase modelled on Latin,
and to some extent on Greek. Portuguese critics (according to
Mr. Aubrey BelF^) kold that real poetic diction in their language
8 . THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC 159
begins with Camoens, because he raised the language to a fuller
power by introducing many latinisms. This is true of the others,
in varying degrees : of Milton, in a special sense.
What Milton did in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained was to
create a new style to fit the subject "unattempted yet in prose or
rhyme. It was intended to be grand; to be evocative; and to be
sonorous^three different aspects of sublimity, differing only in
the means by which sublimity is achieved. The closest parallel
to him in this is Vergil, who, feeling that the Latin language was
painfully poor and stiff compared with Greek, elaborated its
syntax, enlarged its vocabulary, and refined its rhythms until it
produced in his hands an effect scarcely less rich than that of
Greek poetry. Just as Milton quotes many Latin and Greek poets
(although remarkably little from the Bible), so Vergil quoted
Ennius and Lucretius and even his contemporaries and immediate
predecessors in Latin poetry, and translated or adapted
innumerable beauties from the Greek. As Milton introduced
Latin syntax into English, so Vergil introduced grecisms into
Latin; andjust as many English critics accuse Milton of barbarizing
the language, so Vergil was accused of distorting the Latin tongue
by unnecessary affectations. It is worth recalling that Milton was
a musician : any writer who really understands and practises music
will tend to work over his style and elaborate it in detail inconceivable
to an unmusical person. It is strange, though, and perhaps
in the last analysis it is a proof of the failure of his method, that so
few of his phrases (in comparison with those of Shakespeare or
even of Pope) have become part of the English language.
One of his strangest devices is to use existing English words, not
in their current sense, but in the sense which their Latin root
possesses. Strange, certainly, and to an etymologist interesting;
but to others rather pedantry than poetry. For instance: the
bridge between hell and the earth was built
by wondrous art
Pontifical . .
.
not bishop-like, nor pope-like, nor pompous, but bridgebuilding,
literally.^5 At the beginning, Satan asks why the fallen
angels should be allowed to
Lie thus astonished on the oblivious pool
^which does not mean lie surprised on the forgetful lake, but lie
i6o 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC
attoniti, Thunder-struck, on the pool which causes forgetfulness.^^
Or when a speaker, in the evil days before the Flood, preached of
religion, truth, and peace,
him old and young
Exploded . . .
i.e. ^hissed off, not blew into pieces. Sometimes these distortions
of English are literal transferences from the Greek or
Latin, as when the army of rebellious angels bristled with
shields
Various, with boastful argument portrayed . . ,
not dispute, or even challenge, but subject, as in Vergils
Aeneidfi^
Not only the original Latin root-meanings of English words are
substituted for their acquired meanings, but latinisms in syntax
delay and distort the thought. The Romans disliked using abstract
nouns, which in Latin were vague and heavy ; they would
rather say from the city founded than from the foundation of the
city. So Milton calls his poem Paradise Lost, although it is not
about Paradise after it had been lost, but about the loss of Paradise.
For this he had models in Orlando Furioso (which we have translated
The Madness of Roland) and Gerusalemme Liberata (
== The
Liberation ofJerusalem). And so he says:
the Archangel paused
Betwixt the world destroyed and world restored^
^between telling of the destruction and describing the restoration
of the world. This is intelligible enough, but what does it mean to
anyone except a practising teacher of Latin (with the licet plus
subjunctive idiom in his head) when Belial asks
Who knows,
Let this be good, whether our angry foe
Can give it?'
This habit of Miltons differs in an important point from his
other displays of learning. They are made in order to bring in as
many as possible of the riches of the spirit, to express the grandeur
of his subject by showing that it illuminates many different levels
of art and history. But to use a word in only its Latin sense cuts
out part of its meaning, and the most important part. The effect
8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC i6i
is not richness but obscurity. In language Milton sometimes
stepped over the narrow and almost imperceptible boundary which
divides wealth from ostentation, eloquence from pedantry, art
from technique. This is exactly the mistake that Dante did not
make, the danger he avoided and signalized by calling his poem a
humble Comedy, It is the mistake of the poet who is obscure, not
because of the intensity of his thought and the variety of meanings
he is evoking, but because he wishes to be dignified through
obscurity. In this, Milton was not a Renaissance artist but a
baroque artist. Much contrapuntal music, ending with Bachs
Art of the Fugue^ suffers from the same defect. The weakness of
the fugue, and of linguistic cleverness such as Miltons, is that it
appeals to only a few levels in the human mind. The epic, like the
symphony, addresses all the spirit of man.
In spite of all their debt to the classics, the great epic poets
of the Renaissance were not copyists. Their poems are all unlike
one another, and unlike the epics of Greece and Rome. To write
a work of heroic grandeur needs such strength of mind that
one cannot succeed in it without being vigorously original and
completely individual.
But, as well as strength, epic poetry needs richness. If it is to
have its maximum effect, it must have sumptuously varied imagination
or deep philosophical content, or both. It must stretch far
back into the past and look forward into the future. It must work
upon many emotions, use many arts, contain the achievements of
many ages and nations, in order to reflect the energies and complexities
of human life. All these poets recognized this. They felt
the authority of Greco-Roman myth, they knew the excellence of
Greco-Roman poetry, they realized that the world of Greece and
Rome, so far from being dead, was much of the living past of which
our world is a continuation, and therefore they enriched their own
work by emphasizing that continuity. Where they failed it was
because they went back into the past and forgot the presentlike
Ronsard, or like Milton studding his poetry with verbal fossils.
Where they succeeded it was by using the multiple radiance of the
classical past to deepen the bright single light of the present, and
thus, with the power given only to great imaginative writers,
illuminating the whole majestic spectacle of mans destiny.
5076 M
9
THE RENAISSANCE
PASTORAL AND ROMANCE
PASTORAL and romance are two styles of literature which,
although allied and sometimes combined, have different origins,
different histories, different methods, and different purposes. For
instance, the ideal of the pastoral is uneventful country life, 'easy
live and quiet die, while the ideal of romantic fiction is wild and
unpredictable adventure, becoming more and more unlifelike in its
very length and complexity. Nevertheless, the two have their
similarities. At bottom there are deep psychological links between
them. And they combined to produce many books which had a
great success, once towards the end of Greco-Roman civilization
and again during the Renaissance. They are still being combined
to-day.
Pastoralpoetry and drama (seldom plain prose) evoke the happy
life of shepherds, cowboys, and goatherds on farms in the country.
Ploughmen and field-workers are not introduced, because their
life is too laborious and sordid. Nymphs, satyrs, and other flora
and fauna also appear, to express the intense and beautiful aliveness
of wild nature. Pastoral life is characterized by: simple lovemaking,
folk-music (especially singing and piping), purity of
morals, simplicity of manners, healthy diet, plain clothing, and an
unspoilt way of living, in strong contrast to the anxiety and corruption
of existence in great cities and royal courts. The coarseness
of country life is neither emphasized nor concealed, but is offset
by its essential purity.
The ^pe of literature was invented by the poets of one of the
earliest great metropolitan cities of the world, Alexandria; and, it
is believed, specifically by Theocritus, an admirable poet of whom
little is known, except that he was bom about 305 B.c. and lived
at the courts of Alexandria and Syracuse.^ His bucolic idylls^
were mostly placed in Sicily : their characters spoke the local Doric
dialect of Greek, with its broad as and os. As well as the charm
of their subject, Theocritus poems are marked by the exquisite
music of their sounds and rhythmsa music which, like the sound
9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE 163
of a brook or the glow of sunlight through leaves, transfigures even
ordinary thought and commonplace figures with an unforgettable,
inimitable loveliness.
The great new departure adopted by most subsequent pastoral
writers was made by Vergil in his Bucolics^ published in 39 B.c.^
A number of them were direct copies of Theocritus, with exact
translations of his Greek verse into Latin. What was originalas
always in Vergil^was the additions he made to his model. Some of
his poems were placed (like Theocritus) in the Sicilian countryside;
one or two in his own home-country of northern Italy; but
two (7 and 10) were placed in Arcadia. Vergil was the discoverer
of Arcadia, the idealized land of country life, where youth is
eternal, love is sweetest of all things even though cruel, music
comes to the lips of every herdsman, and the kind spirits of the
country-side bless even the unhappiest lover with their sympathy.
In reality, Arcadia was a harsh hill-country in the centre of the
Peloponnese: it was known to the rest of Greece chiefly for the
very ancient and often very barbarous customs that survived in it
long after they had died elsewhere. We hear hints of human
sacrifice, and of werewolves.^ But Vergil chose it because (unlike
Sicily) it was distant and unknown and unspoilt; and because
Pan^with his love of flocks, and nymphs, and music (the untutored
music of pan-pipes, not the complex lyre-music of Apollo
and his choir, the Nine)^was specifically the god of Arcadia.^
It was in this unreal land of escape that Vergil placed his friend
Gallus, a poet and an unhappy lover, to receive consolation from
the wild scenery of woodland and caves, from music, and from
the divinities of art and nature.
Romance is the modern name for a long story of love and
adventure in prose. The first known to us were written in Greek,
under the Roman empire.^ Such stories were probably told for
centuries before any were written down; but they seem to have
entered literature in the early centuries of the Christian era, when
literary stylists took them up as vehicles for the display of elaborate
rhetoric, dazzling epigram, and brilliant invention. (Apparently
it is to the same period that the original forgeries of the Trojan
history by Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan belong,
although they were more distinguished for cleverness than for
grace.)7 A number of these stories survive. There must have
1 64 9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE
been hundreds. They are immensely long and, unless the reader
decides to believe them, immensely tedious ; but if given belief they
are delightful. Their main elements are
:
the long separation of two young lovers
;
their unflinching fidelity through temptation and trial, and
the miraculous preservation of the girFs chastity;
a tremendously intricate plot, containing many subordinate
stories within other stories
;
exciting incidents governed not by choice but by chance

kidnappings, shipwrecks, sudden attacks by savages and

wild beasts, unexpected inheritance of great wealth and
rank;
travel to distant and exotic lands
;
mistaken and concealed identity: many characters disguise
themselves, and even disguise their true sex, girls often
masquerading as boys ; and the true birth and parentage of
hero and heroine are nearly always unknown until the very
end;
a highly elegant style, with much speechifying, and many
elaborate descriptions of natural beauties and works of art.
The Greek romances which were best known in the Renaissance
are:
(a) Aethiopica, by a Syrian author called Heliodorus: the
adventures of two lovers^the daughter of the queen of
Ethiopia, and a Thessalian descended from the hero
Achillesin Egypt, Greece, and the eastern Mediterranean
generally. This was translated into French by Amyot in
1547, and into English by Underdown in 1569.
(i) Clitophon and Leucippe^ by Achilles Tatius: the adventures
of another nobly descended pair in Tyre, Sidon, Byzantium,
and Egypt. This was translated into Latin in 1554; into
Italian in 1560; into French in 1568; and into English by
Burtons brother (in a version which was suppressed) in 1597.
(c) Daphnis and Chloey by Longus: the adventures of two
foundlings among the shepherds and peasants of the island
of Lesbos. It was translated into French by Amyot in 1559,
and from Amyots French into poor English by Day in 15S7.
The first two are adventure-stories pure and simple, with the loveaffair
a continuous thread running through them. Daphnis and
9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE 165
Chloe is an important departure from the pattern, for it is a successful
combination of stirring romantic adventure with pastoral
atmosphere and charm.
Now although the pastoral, with shepherds and nymphs singing
exquisitely and loving innocently in a sweet country-side, seems
to us tedious and unreal, and although the romances with their
absurd melodrama and stilted speeches and exaggerated emotions
are practically unreadable, they are not intrinsically worthless.
Both serve a real purpose. They are obsolete because the purpose
is now served by something else. They are not high literature, as
tragedy or epic is high literature, employing all the mind and all
the soul. They are escape-literature, they are wish-fulfilment.
And, as such, they fulfilled (both in their day and in the Renaissance)
the useful function of idealizing aspects of life which might
have been gross, and adding poetic fantasy to what is often dull
or harsh prose. They are meant for the young, or for those who
wish they were still young. All the leading characters in them are
about eighteen years old, and think almost exclusively about their
emotions. No one plans his life, or works towards a distant end,
or follows out a long-term career. The hero and heroine are
buffeted about by events without deserving itas young people
always feel that they themselves are buffetedand yet no irremediable
damage happens to them, they are united while they are still
fair and young and ardent and chaste. In these, as in modern
romantic stories, the Cinderella myth is one of the chief fantasies
:
a typical wish-fulfilment pattern, in which one does not have to
work for success or wealth, but is miraculously endowed with it
by a fairy godmother and the sudden passion of a prince. (A
pathetic note in the Aethiopica, which tells us something about the
author and the audience he expected, is that the heroine, although
the daughter of coloured parents, is miraculously born white.)
Even the style reflects youth: for the commonest devices are
antithesis and oxymoron. Ever5rthing in youth is black or white,
and these devices represent violent contrast and paradoxical combination
of opposites. The idealistic tone of the romances often
had a real effect. Many a young man exposed to vice in the roaring
metropolitan cities of the late Roman empire, or the corrupt courts
of the Renaissance and baroque era, was drawn for a time to think
more highly of love, by imagining himself to be the faithful
shepherd and his beloved the pure clean Chloe. The manners of
1 66 9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE
all the chief characters, even the shepherds, are intensely courtly
:
no one speaks gross rustic patois, everyone has fine feelings, and
speaks gracefully, and behaves noblybecause youth has sensitive
emotions.
The same yearning is satisfied to-day by fantasies about other
milieux and by different social customs. Instead of reading about
nymphs and shepherds in Arcadia, we read about idyllic peasants
or idealized countrymen outside our own megapolitan cities : sometimes
we even create them and support them. The Swiss; the
Indians of the south-western United States; the Bavarians (with
their wonderful Passion Play); Steinbecks drunken but angelic
paesanos; seely Sussex; salty Vermont; the pawky Highlanders;
the cowboys of Wyoming; and the fishers of the Aran Islandsall
these, and many more, and the modem works of art made out of
them by Giono, Ramuz, Silone, Bartok, Rebecca West, Selma
Lagerlof, Grant Wood, Villa-Lobos, Chavez, Grieg, many more,
and the innumerable converted farm-houses and rebuilt cottages
and primitive pictures and mstic furniture which we covetall
are the products of a real need, which is becoming more poignantly
felt as city life becomes more complex, difficult, and unnatural.
Pastoral dreaming has produced some very great things. We need
only think of Beethovens Sixth Symphony. We need only remember
that Jesus, although he was a townsman and an artisan, called
himself a shepherd.^
Greek and Roman pastoral and romance had so many important
incarnations, together and apart, during the Renaissance that we
can point out only the chief works they produced. Even before
the Renaissance the pastoral spirit appeared. The medieval French
play of Robin and Marion (by Adam de la Halle, ji. 1250) is a
shepherd-story; so is the pretty fourteenth-century poem, Le Dit
de Franc Gontier^ by Philippe de Vitri (who was, however, a friend
of the classical scholar Petrarch). Robin and Marion has been
plausibly derived from the pastourelles, little dialogues in which
a minstrel courts a shepherdess: there were many of these gay
little things, invented by the Proven9al poets, and not directly
built on classical models. ^ But it was with the rediscovery and
imitation of the Latin pastoral poets, and the publication of the
Greek romances, that the two styles were really reborn in modern
literature.
9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE 167
Boccaccios Admetus (Ameto, c. 1341) is the very first vernacular
reappearance of either ideal. It is a blend of pastoral poetry with
allegory of an uncomfortably lofty type. A rude countryman is
converted from physical love to spiritual adoration by hearing the
several songs and stories of seven lovely nymphs, who prove to be
the seven cardinal virtues. Crude as this contrast is, it contains
the essential idealism of the pastoral. And Admetus set one pattern
which was followed, in varying proportions, by all the other
Renaissance works of its kind^the blend of prose narrative with
verse interludes which raise the simple story into the realm of
imaginative emotion.
Richer, more elaborately written, and more successful in its
international effect, was the Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazaro. The
author was the son of Spanish immigrants into Italy (his name is
a doublet of Salazar) : born in Naples, he spent his youth in the
beautiful valley of San Giuliano near Florence, and devoted much
of his life to his monarch Frederick of Aragon, whose exile in
France he shared. His Arcadia circulated in manuscript before
1481 and was published in 1504. It is in twelve chapters of prose
separated by twelve eclogues in lyrical metres. It tells how an
unhappy lover goes away to Arcadia (like Gallus in Vergils
Bucolics) to escape from his misery, is temporarily diverted by the
idyllic country-life of the people and by other tales of love, and, at
last, is conveyed back to Naples by a subterranean journey, to find
his beloved lady dead. Arcadia is a very complex and rich pastoral,
enlarged by reminiscences of the heroic poem, the romance, and
even the philosophical dialogue. Its model in modern literature
is Boccaccios Admetus; but the allegorizing of Boccaccio has
been dropped, and instead many vivid details of rural life and
landscape have been inserted from Homer, Theocritus, Vergil,
Ovid, Tibullus, Nemesianus, and other classical authors, as well
as from personal observation. In Sannazaros pretty Italian prose
they all sound natural enough, and the literary reminiscences
blend with the other harmonies of his dream. (For instance, when
the shepherds hold games, two of them wrestle. Neither can throw
the other. At last one challenges his opponent Lift me, or let me
lift you^for a decisive fall. Quite a natural and vivid detail ; but
Sannazaro has copied it directly from the match between Odysseus
and Ajax in Homer.)^^ Arcadia had an enormous success: it was
translated into French in 1^44 and into Spanish in 1549, and ofteri
i68 9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE
imitated. Its rich wealth of description and allusion made it the
most complete manual of pastoral life that could possibly be
imagined^^^
Even more successful was Diana^ by Jorge de Montemayor or
Montemdr (1520-61), a Portuguese who, after visiting Italy and
seeing the popularity of Arcadia, went to Spain in the suite of a
royal bride and wrote his own book there : his premature death left
it unfinished, but it was none the less popular. (Notice that, just
like the original Greek and Roman pastoral idylls, the Renaissance
pastorals and pastoral romances were nearly all written by
courtiers.) Montemayor was not such a learned man as Sannazaro,
but he took most of the pastoral setting and a number of incidents
in his book from Arcadia. What he emphasized above everything
else was love. Although shepherdesses are mentioned in Arcadia,
they do not appear. Diana is full of shepherdesses, real or disguised,
nymphs, and other enchanting creatures. Its chief novelty
is that it is a continuous story, with a central thread of loveinterest
and a number of subordinate love-stories, making a vastly
more elaborate fiction than any of its predecessors. It is really, like
Daphnis and Chloe, a romance with a pastoral setting; but it
contains more adventures and much less psychological analysis
than Longuss sensitive story. Its complex intrigues, its lofty tone
and the amorous sensibility of its characters, made it famous
throughout western Europe. Shakespeare used one of its stories
in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and probably thought of it when
he disguised Viola in Twelfth Night. Cervantes attempted to rival
it in his Galatea : in Don Quixote he first saved it (a little mutilated)
from the burning of the books, and then made the knight turn
from the profession of arms to imitate it
:
T will buy a flock of sheep, and everything that is fit for the pastoral
life; and so, calling myself the shepherd Quixotis, and thee the shepherd
Pansino, we will range the woods, the hills, and the meadows, singing
and versifying. . . . Love will inspire us with a theme and wit, and
Apollo with harmonious lays. So shall we become famous, not only
while we live, but make our loves as eternal as our songs.
And so the sixteenth-century Spanish idealist, having once adapted
his name to sound like a medieval knight, now proposes to change
it again to sound like a Greek shepherd : and not a mere shepherd,
but a poet like Gallus and Vergil, under the patronage of the
Greco-Roman god Apollo.
9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE 169
We have already seen that in Boccaccios love-story Fiammetta
there is a marked avoidance of Christian sentiment, and a deliberate
substitution of pagan morality and pagan religion^ The same
applies to all these pastoral books : the Christian religion, its creed
and its church, are never mentioned. Even when the characters
are quite contemporary and the story (as it becomes now and then)
autobiographical, only Greco-Roman deities appear : and they are
not stage properties, but powerful spirits, who are sincerely worshipped
and can protect their votaries. Their hierarchy, however,
is unlike that of Olympus. Venus, the goddess of love. Pan, the
god of wild nature and animal husbandry, and Diana, goddess of
hunting, of the moon, and of virginity, are far more prominent
than any others. This was not merely a fad, or a wish for dramatic
propriety. It was a genuine rejection of the austere and otherworldly
Christian ideals, and an assertion of the power of this
world and human passions, as personified in those Greek figures
who were called immortal because the spirits they hypostatized
lived on for ever in the heart of man.
Other types of long adventurous stories were being written in
various countries of western Europe during the Renaissance. Some
of them owed nothing whatever to classical influence : for instance,
the picaresque tale {Lazarillo de Tomes) and the romance of
medieval chivalry {Amadis de Gaula^ i.e. Amadis of Wales
a
belated Spanish revival of the Arthurian legends). These too
were currents which flowed into modern fiction ; but the influence
of Greek romance and pastoral was quite as powerful. In Renaissance
England it is represented, among others, by Sir Philip
Sidneys unfinished book dedicated to his sister. The Countess
of Pembroke's Arcadia, This is a long, complex, and gracefully
written story of love and chivalrous adventure set in the Greek
land of Arcadia. It is sometimes said that Sidney took nothing but
the name from Sannazaros Arcadia\ but he also borrowed, and
slightly altered, a number of vivid and charming details such as
the statue of Venus suckling the baby Aeneas.^^ However, he
owed more to Montemayors Diana. He imitated the form of
some of Sannazaros poems,^^ but he translated some of Montemayors;
and on Diana he designed the complicated network of
plots and sub-plots and the disguises ofsome ofhis main characters.
In addition, he enriched these imitations by his own classical
reading, being especially indebted to Longuss Daphnis and Chloe.
170 9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE
His Arcadia is a far less restful place than Vergils or Sannazaros.
There is a great deal of terrifying danger and bloody fighting.
Hands are struck off, heads roll on the ground, the clash of armour
harmonizes grimly with the groans of the dying. The jousts and
battles come from his own chivalrous imagination, stimulated by
tales like Amadis and The Madness ofRoland, But other adventures,
such as kidnappings and pirate-raids, are imitated directly from
the Greek romances, which abound in them. Thus, in The Countess
of Pembroke's Arcadia the two Greek currents of Arcadian pastoral
and romantic adventure have blended in a new proportion, along
with other elements of fantasy, to make a story which is one of the
sources of modem fiction. ^7
In France the most successful pastoral romance was Astraea
(AstreCy the name of the spirit of Justice, who left earth at the end
of the Golden Age to become the Virgin in the zodiac), by
Honore dUrfe. Published in 1607, it was tremendously popular
for many years. Like those of Diana^ its characters are not real
shepherds and shepherdesses, but ladies and gentlemen, who have
adopted shepherds clothes for the reason (psychologically true,
even if improbable in the plot) that they wish to live more quietly
and pleasantly {vivre plus doucement). The scene and period are
fifth-century Gaul at the time of the barbarian invasions ; and the
characters have a vast number of complicated chivalrous adventures
in the noblest medieval manner. But long afterwards another
French author recombined romance and pastoral, with less
emphasis on aristocratic sentiments and more upon the inherent
goodness of man and nature. One of the leading novels of the
eighteenth century, Bernardin de Saint-Pierres Paul and Virginia
(1789), told the story of a young couple who, in settings of
idealistic beauty, had a series of romantic adventures culminating
in the triumph of pure love. This book once more proved that
men distant in time can be, as Spengler said, contemporaries ; for
it was modelled on Longuss Daphnis and ChloCy and obviously
both Saint-Pierre and his friend Rousseau were profoundly
sympathetic to the ideals Longus had expressed.
The pastoral ideal had many other expressions, apart from its
blend with romance. In fact, it was very much more influential in
Renaissance and baroque European literature than it ever was in
Rome and Greece. It is ^arcely necessary to describe in detail the
9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE 171
numerous collections of bucolic poems that were written, both in
Latin and in the various national tongues, in emulation of the
ancients. The most famous in Renaissance Latin were those by
the Italian humanist, Baptista Mantuanus. Shakespeare makes his
pedantic schoolmaster quote them in Love's Labour's Lost and
praise the author by name.^^ In Spanish Garcilaso de la Vega
(1503-36) wrote several long, sweet, melancholy eclogues
adapted both from Vergils Bucolics and from Sannazaros Arcadia,
In France the first pastorals of the Renaissance were written by
Clement Marot (1496-1544), who sang of peasants with French
names in a French setting, but under the protection of the god
Pan. His successor and conqueror Ronsard began with a free
translation of Theocritus, ii {Cyclops in Love), and proceeded to
six melodious eclogues partly drawn from Vergil, Vergils
imitator Calpurnius, and Sannazaro (who had been turned into
French by Ronsards friend Jean Martin in 1544). Some of them
at least are dramatic enough to be performed as little masques at
festivals. True to the traditions of French aristocracy, he dressed
his shepherds in court clothes, and (like dUrfe later) assured his
audience:
These are not shepherds out of country stock
who for a pittance drive afield their flock,
but shepherds of high line and noble race.^^
In English the most distinguished pastoral poem of the Renaissance
was Spensers Shepherd's Calendar (1579). Although it was
given out as a re-creation in English of the themes and manner of
Greco-Roman pastoral, modern research has shown that Spenser
depended much less on Theocritus and Vergil than on Renaissance
pastoral writers in France and Italy. Several of his poems on the
months are simply free adaptations of eclogues by Marot and
Mantuanus, while most of the classical reminiscences come
through Politian, Tasso, and the leading poets of the Pleiade, Baif,
Du Bellay, and Ronsard.^ For much of his language and metre
Spenser went back to Chaucer. The names of his shepherds^

Cuddie, Hobbinol, Piers, Colinare native English, but are far

more homely and less melodious than the Doric names of
Theocritus singing herdsmen; and less melodious, alas, is his
verse.
Still, some of the sweetest and most sincere songs in all English
172 9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE
literature were written in the pastoral convention. It is scarcely
a convention. It is really more natural for a young lover to imagine
himself as a wanderer through the country-side,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals,
than as a merchant in the city or a diplomat in the court ; and he
is less happy in dreaming of his sweetheart as a housewife keeping
the furniture and the children clean than as a girl who, wearing
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle,
A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull,
is the quintessence of all the beauties of eternal spring and kind
Nature.^^ The English poets of the Renaissance poured out
hundreds of pastoral songs, which united their genuine love of the
classics to their equally genuine love of youth and beauty and the
country-side.
Pastoral poems and stories are not, as is sometimes assumed,
completely empty and artificial. Very often they contain characterizations
of the author and his friends under a thin disguise,
and stories of their lives and loves. Theocritus began this; his
seventh idyll contains himself, under the name of Simichidas, and
(probably) his friend Leonidas of Tarentum, bearing the name
which has since become famous in pastoralLycidas. Vergil is
his own Tityrus, while his friends Gallus and Varius and his
enemies Bavius and Maevius appear in his Bucolics without even
the disguise of a rustic name.^^ Vergil also introduced allusions to
important incidents in his own life, such as his recovery of his
father's estates through the favour of Octavian.^s Sannazaro's own
unhappy love is thought to have inspired the close of his Arcadia,
which also takes his hero to his own favourite city, Naples.
Similarly, Montemayors Diana stops with a journey to Coimbra,
and to the castle of Montemor o Velio, the author's birthplace.
D'Urfe includes many stories of contemporary court intrigue in
Astraea. Tasso puts both his friends and himself, and perhaps
his hopeless love for Leonora d'Este, into Amyntas. Two generations
after Spenser, a young English poet of even nobler promise
9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE 173
symbolized the two sides of his own nature in two lonely rhapsodies,
which, starting from Greek myth and pastoral idyll,
wandered far into the realms of music and philosophy. They were
Miltons UAllegro and II Penseroso?^
Sometimes, again, the personal element in pastoral issues in
satire against persons and causes of which the author disapproves.
Vergils reference to his rivals Bavius and Maevius is brief but
bitter. It follows a similar attack in Theocritus. However, in the
Renaissance pastoral, aesthetic criticism is less common than
ecclesiastical criticism. We have already pointed out that Jesus
called himself a shepherd. For the same reason, Christian clergymen
are called pastors ( = shepherds), and the bishop carries a
shepherds crook. It is therefore quite easy to criticize abuses of
the church in a pastoral poem. Petrarch did so in his Latin
eclogues, one of which introduces St. Peter himself under the
attractive name of Pamphilus. Mantuanus continued the idea, and
Spenser brought it into the Shepherd's Calendar. St. Peter appears
again in Miltons Lycidas., to utter a formidable denunciation of
bad pastors
:
Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheep-hook, or have learnt aught else the least
That to the faithful herdmans art belongs 1^5
A few lines before, Milton complains that such unworthy ones
Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold

an image which, long afterwards, he remembered, and turned into

an epic simile, and applied to the enemy of mankind
:
So clomb this first grand Thief into Gods fold
:
So since into his Church lewd hirelings climb
Autobiography takes a nobler turn in the pastoral elegy, in
which poets mourn the premature death of their friends, and, to
emphasize the youth and freshness of the dead, depict them in
a wild woodland setting, lamented by shepherds, huntsmen, and
nature-spirits. The origin of this pattern is Theocritus lament
for Daphnis who died for love {Buc. i) and the anonymous Greek
elegy on the later pastoral poet Bion. During the Renaissance the
pattern spread all over western Europe. In English the earhest
pastoral elegies are Spensers Daphnaida (1591) and Astrophel
174 9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE
(1595), the latter being a tribute to Sir Philip Sidney. The three
greatest English pastoral elegies are Milton^s Lycidas, written in
1637 friend King, Shelleys Adonais (1821) for poor Keats,
and Arnolds Thyrsis (1866), inspired by the death of Clough.^^
And one of the most famous poems in the English language,
although not a lament for any single person, is a blend of pastoral
idealism and elegiac melancholy: Grays Elegy in a Country
Churchyard,
The pastoral convention also produced drama. It was natural
that the singing contests of shepherds, the dialogues based on
flyting or mutual abuse, and the occasional love-conversations
should suggest dramatic treatment. We have seen that Vergils
Bucolics were recited in the theatre.^s One of the first modem
dramas, Politians Orpheus^ placed the tragic tale of Orpheus and
Eurydice within a Vergilian pastoral frame we hear of many
* dramatic eclogues recited by two or more speakers in Italian
festivals during the early sixteenth century and in 1554, at
Ferrara, the first regular full-scale pastoral drama was produced,
Beccaris The Sacrijice?'^ This fashion too spread from Italy to
other countries. In France the first such work was The Shades
by Nicolas Filleul, a five-act drama produced in 1566, about
a loving shepherd and a cmel shepherdess, paralleled by a loving
satyr and a cmel naiad, with a choms of amorous phantoms.3^ Two
of the most popular plays ever written belong to this genre : Tassos
Amyntas, first acted in 1573, and Guarinis The Faithful Shepherd^
issued in 1590 with even greater success.33 Despite the artifice
of the interlocking love-stories which compose their plots, their
youthfulness gives them charm, and the verse of Tasso and Guarini
is often so enchantingly melodious that it almost sings. In several
of Shakespeare^s comedies there are pastoral elements; and a
number of regular pastoral dramas appeared in England during
the first half of the seventeenth century. 34 The poetry in Fletchers
imitation of Guarini, The Faithful Shepherdess {c, 1610), is full of
delicate and charming bmsh-work ; and Jonsons The Sad Shepherd
(published incomplete in 1640) ought to have been finished, for it
contains a fine native set of English pastoral figures.
Huntsmen as well as herdsmen always played a part in pastoral
poetry. They too live close to nature, they prefer animals to people,
they pray for Pans favour. In Vergils tenth bucolic poem the
lovelorn Gallus hopes to cure the sickness of love by hunting the
9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE 175
wild boar among the craggy Arcadian highlands. The hero of
Boccaccio^s Admetus is not a cowherd but a hunter ; and several
of the pastoral books of the Renaissance introduced huntresses and
huntsmen as prominent characters. In Italy cattle did not regularly
pasture on low-lying fields, but up on the hill-sides and among the
woods, so that it was easy to think of the forest as the common
home of hunters and herds. Also, herding was a commoners
occupation, hunting a noblemans. Tasso and other authors of
Italian pastoral plays therefore often called their pieces favole
boschereccie^ tales of the woods, so that they would cover both
activities. So when Jonson decided to make the characters of his
pastoral not Greco-Roman herds but native English woodsmen,
he could easily go one step further and choose the gallant outlaw
hunters, Robin Wood (alias Hood) and his merry men. The same
change appears in Shakespeares As You Like It, where the exiled
duke and his companions take to the maquis and become huntsmen
;35 while honest shepherds like Corin and Audrey, although
part of the same sylvan society, are inferior to them.
Miltons masque of Comus (1634), which has been mentioned in
another connexion, 3 6 proves together with his other poems in this
vein that he was one of the worlds greatest pastoral poets. Allied
to pastoral drama and pastoral masque is pastoral opera, which
began comparatively earlyas early as Rinuccinis Daphne (i 594).
The first sacred opera was in the pastoral manner: Eumelio, produced
in 1606 by the church composer Agostino Agazzari.^s
The advantage of pastoral opera was that folk-melodies and
folk-rhythms could be introduced into it. It could therefore
re-emphasize natural emotion and simple expression when conventional
operatic style became too grand and florid. Among the
most famous and charming are Handels Ads and Galatea and
Bachs Peasant Cantata and Phoebus and Pan, The framework of
Glucks beautiful Orpheus and Eurydice (first produced 1762),
which was designed to be a return to natural expression in opera,
is pastoral, and it ends with an Arcadian merrymaking. Glucks
friend, the child of Nature, Rousseau, produced The Village Soothsayer
and began Daphnis and Chloe with the same artistic purpose.
During the nineteenth and twentieth century the pastoral opera
followed Rousseaus lead, and left imaginary Arcadias for the real
(though still a little distant) countryside, where it created Smetanas
The Bartered Bride, Mascagnis Rustic Chivalry, Vaughan
176 9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE
Williamss Hugh the Drover^ and most recently Rodgers and
Hammersteins Oklahoma! And yet Arcadia itself has never died.
Among the most remarkable of modern ballet suites is Ravels
music for the immortal loves of Daphnis and Chloe.
The ideals of Arcadia were perfectly real and active for several
hundred years^particularly during the baroque age, when the
social life of the upper classes tended to be intolerably formal and
hypocritical, and when the art created for them was too often
pompous and exaggerated. Dresden-china shepherdesses and
Marie-Antoinettes toy farm in the Petit Trianon look childishly
artificial to us now ; but they were closer to reality than the enormous
operas about Xerxes and the enormous mural paintings
representing His Serene Highness as Augustus or Hercules.
Arcadia meant an escape to purer air, out of the gloomy solemnity
of courts and churches. Its most remarkable avatar was in Italy.
Queen Christina of Sweden, after abdicating and becoming a
convert to Roman Catholicism, settled in Rome and gathered
round her a number of friends with ideals similar to h^rs. In 1690,
a year after her death, they founded a society to keep her memory
and her ideals alive. It was called Arcadia ; its arms were a panpipe
garlanded with laurel and pine; its home was a Tarrhasian
grove on the Janiculum, one of the seven hills of Rome ; and its
leading members took the names of Greek shepherds. Dozens of
Arcadian societies were formed on its model both in Italy and
elsewhere, and produced vast quantities of lyric poetry. Hauvette
sums up the result in the acid phrase, 'a long bleating resounded
from the Alps to Sicily but a society which endeavoured to
encourage art and insisted on natural feeling in poetry cannot be
dismissed as wholly ridiculous.^o
The pastoral tradition continued through the era of revolution
(when it produced the graceful Bucolics of Andre Chenier) into
the nineteenth century, where Matthew Arnold and many others
gave it new life. That it is still alive in modern poetry and art is
shown by Mallarmes Afternoon of a Faun^^^ by Debussys Prelude
expressing the poem in exquisite music, and by Nijinskys
memorable ballet on the same theme. A recent group of paintings
by the energetic experimentalist Picasso includes a Joy of Life
(1947), in which a centaur and a faun play Greek clarinets to a
dancing, cymbal-clashing nymph, while two young kidlings skip
beside her with ridiculous but charming gaiety. Sometimes, as in
9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL AND ROMANCE 177
Goethes delightful love-song set to Wolfs even more delightful
music,42 nothing survives of the tradition of Sicily and Arcady
except the flute, the shepherd names (Damon, Chloe, Phyllis, or
Ophelia), and the love of nature. But even then the essential
genius of Greece and of poetry still burns clear: the power to
idealize the simple, the happy, the natural, the real.
5076 N
lO
RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE
RABELAIS
I
IKE many other great French writers, Rabelais is far from being
^ the cool, well-balanced, classical figure which is the accepted
ideal of French literature. On the contrary, he is difficult to understand
and difficult to admire. Those who enjoy his vigour are
repelled by his pedantry ; those who like his idealism hate his coarseness
; those who prize his humour seldom prize all of it, or else ignore
his seriousness : everyone feels that, although much is there, something
is lacking^yet what it is that Rabelais lacks is not easy to say.
The difficulty which his readers feel is based on a lack of harmony
between conflicting factors in Rabelaiss book; and it is evident
that, since more than most writers he is a one-book man, the disharmony
reflects a profound conflict in his own character and life.
We have observed the same type of conflict in other Renaissance
writers, and it exists in many important figures who do not come
within the scope of this book: for instance, Leonardo da Vinci and
Queen Elizabeth. The chief difference between the later Renaissance
(with the baroque age which succeeded it) and the early
Renaissance is that in the later Renaissance form and matter,
character and style, are more completely interpenetrated, while in
the earlier period there are many conflicts and wastages. Doubt
and insecurity, experiment and divagation, are notable by their
absence in such baroque figures as Moli^re, Rubens, Dryden,
Corneille, Purcell, and Titian. There were, of course, even in the
opening of the Renaissance, many well-balanced characters such
as Lorenzo de Medici; but on the whole the age brought in
changes too violent for most men to experience without doubt and
difficulty and frequent error.
This conflict has no very obscure psychological cause. Like
some modem neuroses, it was due to the divergence of stimuli
acting on sensitive people. The word Renaissance means Tebirth
;
but in fact only Greco-Roman culture and its concomitant spiritual
activities were reborn, while all the rest of the Renaissance period
was marked not so much by rebirth as by sudden change and
abolition and substitution of ideas and systems already long
10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE 179
established and very powerful. The Renaissance was a spiritual
revolution : a civil war in which both sides were strong and determined.
Often that civil war was waged within one mans soul.
We see it in Shakespeares work, whether it takes the form of the
passionate debate of some of the Sonnets or of Hamlets excited
despair. It is imaged in the suicidal incompleteness of Leonardos
art. It appears in the madness of poor Tasso. On some souls
whose strength was less than their sensitivity the conflict produced
a numbing effect, and issued in that inexplicable melancholy,
which is less often a persistent taedium vitae than a manic depression
alternating aimless violence with motionless gloom. In others
it evoked desperate courage, wild daring, a gallantry whose chief
purpose was not the achievement of an external end but selfassertion
and self-display, as in Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Richard
Grenville, and Cyrano de Bergerac. But the strongest men of the
early Renaissance were able, partly by psychical insight, partly by
sheer strength of will, but chiefly because of the immense optimism
produced by the Renaissance, to dominate the conflict, and to
compel its conflicting elements to meet in great works of art to
which, despite disharmony and incongruity, all the spiritual
enemies contribute one common quality, energy.
Before we examine Rabelaiss life and his book we must summarize
the main conflicts which, like volcanoes in one of the great
ages of geological formation, were boiling and erupting throughout
the early Renaissance. They were these
:
I . The conflict between the Catholic and the Protestant forms of
Christianity. (Here it is odd to observe that the division was
deepened by some of the liberal elements within the Catholic
church, who sided rather with the classical pagans than with the
primitive Christians : for the priest who closed his breviary and
opened his Cicero, in order to improve his style, was thereby
diminishing the prestige of Mother Church.) There is reason to
believe that this conflict affected the life and work of William
Shakespeare, whose greatest characters, even when they live in
Christian milieux, are very far from being devout Christians.^ It
is even more visible in the life of the converted Catholic Donne,
whose Pseudo^Martyr and Ignatius his Conclave, aimed at converting
or convincing the members of his own former church, are
practically contemporary with his Biathanatos, aimed at proving
that suicide is not inevitably sinful.
i8o 10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE
2. Akin to this was the conflict within the Roman church
between the liberals and the conservatives: the liberals were unwilling
to leave the Catholic communion entirely, but refused to
subscribe to all its doctrines, and often made some significant
gesture of revolt or renunciation at critical times. This is one of
the main conflicts within the life of Rabelais : it appears also in the
career of Erasmus, who refused the sacraments on his death-bed
although he was an ordained priest.
3. There was also the conflict between the upper class and the
self-assertive middle class. In England, for instance, the university
wits were mostly not rich mens sons but ambitious boys from the
bourgeois class, striving to enter or conquer the aristocratic clique.
Not many Renaissance figures believed it possible to overthrow
the entire social structure, or even to force the oligarchy to behave
more liberally. But many of the greatest works of the period are
disguised symbols of hatred for the oligarchs and the wish to
dominate them. Marlowes tragedies seethe with the lust for
power. Shakespeares greatest plays all deal with rebels: Hamlet
with the legitimate heir, expelled by a less intellectual, more
energetic ruler ; Othello with the greatest servant of a state of which
his colour forbade him to be more than a servant; Macbeth with
a usurper^not a deliberate, Italianate, Machiavellian usurper, but
a sorely tempted man of feeling ; King Lear with a rightful monarch
dethroned and impotent.
4. As the age of scientific exploration, the early Renaissance was
split by the conflict between science and its two enemies : superstition
on the one hand, and the authority of traditional philosophy
and theology on the other. Galileo is the classical example, but
there are many others. It should, however, be noted that much of
the new scientific spirit was based on, and authorized by, the new
knowledge of the Greco-Roman classics. Just as Renaissance
architecture and Renaissance scenography received their great
stimulus from the study of Vitruvius, so one of the two great
impulses that founded modem medicine and zoology was the
study^by philologists even more than by scientistsof the works
of Greek and Roman scientific writers.^ Rabelais himself lectured
on the text of Hippocrates and Galen to a large audience at Montpellier;
and in 1532 he published an edition of Hippocrates
Aphorisms and Galens Art of Medicine. To say this is not to
underestimate the essential part played in Renaissance medicine
10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE i8i
by experiment and discovery; Rabelais knew, and boasted of
knowing, a great deal of anatomy; but he started towards his
anatomical knowledge from the rediscovery of the classics. The
comic over-emphasis with which medical descriptions are elaborated
and medical authorities cited and multiplied in Gargantua
and Pantagruel shows that for Rabelais medicine with its new
discoveries was not an ordinary activity to be accepted and used
like commercial law, but an exciting proof of the power of the
newly awakened human mind.^
5. Containing the social and scientific conflicts, but transcending
them, was the conflict between authority and individuality.
This was far from new^witness those great medieval personalities
Reynard the Fox and Tyl Ulenspiegel^but now it increased in
violence. Some of the greatest documents for it are Machiavellis
The Prince^ in which the individual politico is shown how to
succeed by ignoring all moral, social, and religious restraints on
his own action; Montaignes Essays, in which the humanist,
writing his own autobiography, declares the superior importance
of his own personality (however inconsistent it may be) to any
conventional or philosophical system; and Rabelaiss Gargantua
and Pantagruel, where the only authority recognized is that of the
huge philosopher-kings, who rule by an unquestionable and unapproachable
greatness of body and mind, while every other
authority, from holy church to court and university, except only
the authority of science and learning, is questioned, outwitted,
lampooned, befooled.
Most of these conflicts can be traced in the life and work of
Francois Rabelais even more clearly than in those of other Renaissance
authors. Bom towards the close of the fifteenth century,
he entered a Franciscan monastery early in life; but he found the
ignorance and simplicity enjoined by St. Francis irksome, and
began to study the classics for himself, with such energy that the
authorities tried to stop him. His books were seized, and he and
his friends were put under restraint. In 1524, by special licence
from Pope Clement VII, he became a Benedictine, transferring his
allegiance to the order which had long stood for culture and learning.
But this too was not free enough. Next he attached himself to
a prince of the church who liked learned men. Then for a time
we lose track of him. He appears to have become a wanderer,
iSz 10, RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE
giving up the Benedictines garb for that of a secular priest. At
last, finding his true career, he emerged as a physician and teacher
of Greek and modern medical doctrines. Even in that position he
had conflicts, with the Lyons hospital (for taking absence without
leave), with the Sorbonne (for publishing irreverent remarks about
its doctors), and with the monks (for making fun of them and their
orders). He died in 1553, still fighting and still laughing.
His book describes the adventures and encounters of two giant
kings, father and son, living in an idealized France more or less
contemporary, and vitalized by all the currents of humour, energy,
travel, pleasure, satire, intellectual enterprise, art, and learning
which flowed through the Renaissance. Both the kings, Gargantua
and Pantagmel, are borrowed from medieval heroic poetry
and fairy-tales. Gargantua comes out of a cheap little book sold
at fairs, The Great and Inestimable Chronicles of the Great and
Enormous Giant Gargantua^ published in Lyons in 1532, and
spiritually an ancestor of to-days Superman. Pantagruel is his
son, better educated and more modem. The name, according to
Plattard, comes from a mystery-play where a special devil called
Panthagmel was allotted to dmnkards, to keep them for ever
thirsty.4 The exploits of the two giants, and their court and their
attendants, are inspired by the comic Italian epics of medieval
prowess such as Luigi Pulcis Morgante (1483), which are also
creations of the naive popular fairy imagination that produced
Gargantua before Rabelais transformed him.^ There are other
Renaissance tales based on medieval themes, such as The Madness of
Roland. They all have something cheerfully immature about
them; but Rabelaiss book is quite literally the most childish of all
Renaissance works. It is a long wish-fulfilment i not in all realms
of life (not in sex, for example), but in mosteating, drinking,
physical energy, travel, fighting, practical joking, talking, learning,
thinking, and imagining. In this it reflects the enormous expansion
of self-confidence, the love of mans natural functions, which
characterized the Renaissance: it should be compared with the
insatiable appetites of such anti-ascetics as Benvenuto Cellini.
And yet to write a long book full of perfectly impossible wishfulfilments
is a sign of curious spiritual disharmony; and to put a
contemporary Utopia full of bold philosophical thought into the
framework of a childish fairy-story shows that Rabelais stood with
one foot in the Renaissance and the other in the Middle Ages.
10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE 183
A similar incongruity appears in the content of the book, for its
two most prominent features are {a) a considerable amount of
classical learning and up-to-date scientific and philosophical
thought, and (b) an equally large amount of dirty jokes. Most of
the dirt is unclassical in origin. It comes out of the spiritual underworld
which was part of the Middle Ages, which is documented in
the fabliaux, which appears again and again in Chaucers Canterbury
Tales^ and which is essentially anti-cultural, opposed to the spirit
of the Renaissance. These contrasts could be further developed
;
but our particular interest is the nature of Rabelaiss classical
learning and its effect on his work.
Although the main characters and the general scheme of his
book are medieval in origin, the subordinate characters are often
classical in name, and many of the principal themes are classical
in character. For example, Gargantuas tutor is Ponocrates, which
means Power through Hard Work; the page who reads aloud to
him is called Anagnostes (= Reader) ; his nimble squire is
Gymnast (= Athlete) ; his eloquent and good-natured courtier is
Eudemon (= Happy) ; his steward is Philotimus (= Lover of
Honour) ; and the angry king who makes war on him is Picrochole
(== Bitter Bile).^ The ideal abbey which he founds is called
Thelema, a Greek word meaning will, because its motto is
DO WHAT YOU wiLL.^ Similarly, Pantagruel (who makes everyone
thirsty) conquers the Dipsodes (= Thirsty People, a word Rabelais
found in Hippocrates) ; his own nation is the Amaurots (= Obscure),
who are obscure because they live in Utopia (= Nowhere).
His tutor is Epistemon (== Knowledgeable), and his favourite
courtier Panurge, whose name means Clever Rascal.^
One of the most important classical themes in Rabelais is the
humanistic education which is given by Ponocrates to the young
Gargantua after he has had a simple, natural, beastly, and unprofitable
education : see Gargantua^ 21-4. The description of his
curriculum^which was perhaps inspired by that of the great
educator Vittorino da Feltre^^is an essential document for anyone
who wishes to study the re-emergence of classical ideals in the
Renaissance. Not only does Gargantua become a philosopherking,
the hope of Plato, but he is educated in a manner befitting
a descendant of Plato, and ultimately endows a community which
partly resembles that of the Guards in The Republic. Even the
style of the letter on education which he sends to his son
i84 10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE
{Pantagruel^ 2. 8) is deliberately classical, with rich Ciceronian
periods, careful antitheses, rhetorical questions, and triple
climaxes.^o It is true that, in the actual routine followed by Gargantua,
there are odd survivals from the Middle Ages : for instance,
he never writes his lessons (apart from practising calligraphy) but
learns everything orally and memorizes a great deal. But the
gargantuan appetite for education, for learning all languages, for
reading all the great books and assimilating all the useful sciences,
is characteristic of the Renaissance. It is also characteristic of
Rabelais himself, and was a reaction against the early limitation
of his studies. In fact, since the whole war between the aggressive
king Picrochole and Gargantua and his father Grandgousier is
described as taking place on the estates of Rabelaiss own family,
since the names of Gargantuas fortresses are those of Rabelaiss
family properties, and since his headquarters, La Devini^re, is the
farm where Rabelais himself was born, it is clear that the good
giant Gargantua is Rabelais himself.
In a careful and intelligent book Jean Plattard has analysed the
classical authors whom Rabelais knew and from whom he borrowed.
Like many medieval writers and some in the Renaissance,
he owed a great deal to anthologies and to Readers Digestseven
for his knowledge of authors so closely akin to his own vein of
humour as Aristophanes. His greatest debt in this region was to
the Adages of Erasmus, a collection of 3,000 useful quotations
from the classics, with explanations. His chief original sources
were prose writers rather than poets ; Romans more than Greeks
(like many men of the Renaissance he found Latin far easier than
Greek, and annotated his Greek texts with Latin translations of
difficult words) ; and writers of fact rather than imagination^with
one exception, the Greek philosophical satirist Lucian. He quotes
eighteen or twenty good classical authors in such a way as to show
that he knew them; but it is clear that he was not familiar with
Greek and Roman epic, drama, lyric, or (more surprisingly) satire.
His favourite authors were scientists, philosophers, and antiquarians.
Among the scientists are Aristotle, Galen, Hippocrates,
and the elder Pliny. The philosophers he admired most, whom
Gargantua puts first in his reading-list, were Plutarch and Plato. ^3
The antiquarians mentioned by Gargantua are Pausanias and
Athenaeus, and Rabelais also read Macrobius. His favourite
writer was Lucian, the laughing Greek sceptic of the later Roman
10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE 185
empire, whose work also influenced Erasmuss Praise of Folly and
Mores Utopia, It was to Lucian that he owed such inventions as
the imaginary conquests of Picrochole,^^ the description of hell
where the great are made small, and the interrogation of Trouillogan
by Panurge. Lucian was his spiritual comrade, sharing
with him the laughter which delights without condemning.
Serious conflicts, such as those which existed in the life of
Rabelais, can be resolved only by strong will or by great art. No
one would say that Rabelais was a great artist. His work is often
too rough and often too silly. But there can be no doubt that he
was a great man ; and the two solutions which he applied to his own
difficulties and suggested for those of the world were, first, education,
and second, enjoymentgusto^the simple, energetic, lifegiving
gaiety of the joke and the bottle. . . .
*. . . and therefore . . . even as I give myself to an hundred pannier-fulls
of faire devils, body and soul, tripes and guts, in case that I lie so much
as one single word in this whole history: after the like manner, St
Anthonies fire burne you ; Mahooms disease whirle you ; the squmance
with a stitch in your side and the wolfe in your stomack trusse you, the
bloody flux seize upon you, the curst sharp inflammations of wilde fire,
as slender and thin as cowes haire, strengthened with quicksilver, enter
into your fundament, and like those of Sodom and Gomorrha, may you
fall into sulphur, fire, and bottomlesse pits, in case you do not firmly
beleeve all that I shall relate unto you in this present chronicle.^
MONTAIGNE
It is a strange contrast, almost like turning from lunacy to sanity,
to turn from Rabelais to Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), whom
Sainte-Beuve well called The wisest of all Frenchmen. Rabelais
knew much, lived hard, travelled widely, absorbed huge gulps of
thought and experience ; but the result was confusion, which would
have meant strain and indigestion had it not been for his humour,
his health, his tireless energy. As it is, we find it difficult and unsettling
to read hima disharmony which shows that he was not
through and through sympathetic to the ideals of classical culture.
Montaigne, on- the other hand, is not a straightforward imitator of
the classical writers ; but he knew them better than Rabelais, he had
thought more about them, his spirit was largely formed by them,
his culture was principally based upon them, and it was his constant
intercourse with them which raised him high above the place
1 86 10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE
and time in which he lived. One of the two prime facts about
Montaigne is that he was an exceptionally well-read manhe knew
much more about the classical authors than many professional
scholars in the sixteenth, or for that matter the twentieth, century.
The other is that he had a sufficient experience of life and a large
enough soul to master, to use, and to transform his knowledge into
something active and vital not only for himself but for other
modern men.
The first of these facts is the result of an unusual, but admirable,
education. He came of the family Yquem or Eyquem (whose
estates produce one of the finest wines, Chateau Yquem), which
had only recently enriched and ennobled itself. But, because his
father was sympathetic to the ideals of the Renaissance, by which
he had been stimulated in Italy, he did not simply teach young
Montaigne hawking and courtly behaviour or expose him to the
bad old education under which young Gargantua became healthy
and beastly, but instead gave him one of the most thorough
classical trainings ever known. Montaigne describes it himself
in one of his essays. Before he could speak he was put in
charge of a German tutor who knew much Latin and no French
whatever; and it was a rule that nothing but Latin should be
spoken to the little boy and in his presence, even by the servants.
As a result, the first book he enjoyed reading was Ovids
Metamorphoses :
Tor, being but seven or eight years old, I would steal and sequester
myself from all other delights, only to read them: forasmuch as the
tongue in which they were written was to me natural; and it was the
easiest book I knew, and by reason of its subject the most suitable for
my young age. For of King Arthur, of Lancelot of the Lake, of Amadis,
of Huon of Bordeaux, and such idle, time-consuming, and wit-besotting
trash wherein youth doth commonly amuse itself, I was not so much as
acquainted with their names
The little boy could scarcely be taught Greek in the same way,
since he was learning Latin on the direct principle; his father
started him on it, as a game, which would probably have been an
excellent idea had it been continued; however, he was sent off to
school at the College de Guienne, the best in France. He says that
there he lost much of the ground gained by his extraordinary
education. The truth probably is that he had to turn back in order
to learn how to speak French and play with other children. By the
10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE 187
age of twelve he was acting leading parts in school productions of
Latin tragedies by Buchanan and Muret.^
In his teens his life became more normal. He entered on the
usual course of life of a prosperous gentleman : studied law, took
part in local government, went to court. But at thirty-eight, in
1571, he retired from what he himself called the slavery of the
court and public duties^^ to a tower^not indeed an ivory one,
but a book-lined one, where he studied and thought and wrote for
most of the rest of his life. Montaigne did not like to do anything
determinedly or consistently, so that we are not surprised to see
that he came out of retirement now and then. He became a not
very energetic mayor of Bordeaux, he travelled in Italy, Austria,
and Switzerland, and he entertained the Protestant king of
Navarre at his home. But from thirty-eight onwards most of his
life was absorbed in lonely study and self-examination. One of the
main motives for his retirement was his wish to avoid taking sides
in the religious civil wars which were then devastating France : his
father had been a Roman Catholic and his mother a Jewess converted
to Protestantism, while three of his brothers and sisters were
either bred as Protestants or converted later.
In 1580 he published two books of Essays^ with great and immediate
success. They ran into five editions during his lifetime.
As successive editions were called for, he added much material.
The last (1588) contained a whole new book, as well as hundreds
of additions to the other two. After his death his adopted daughter
brought out a still larger edition, containing supplements from
Montaignes own manuscript notes. The importance of this is
that the alterations and additions have been used by Villey and
other scholars to show the development of Montaignes thought
during the most important years of his life, and his deepening
knowledge of the Greek and Roman classics.^^
Montaigne himself, in one of his most interesting essays, gives
an account of his favourite reading.^3 Two general points emerge.
The first is that he read for pleasure. He would not be bored. He
would not read tedious authors. He would not read difficult authors
at all, unless they contained good material. The standard he constantly
uses is one of pleasure. However, his pleasure was not
merely that of pastime, but that which accompanies a high type
of aesthetic and intellectual activity, far above the vulgar escapereading
and narcotic-reading. Two authors he read for profit and
i88 10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE
pleasure combined, whereby I learn to range my opinions and
address my conditions : these were Plutarch, in French (i.e. in
Amyots translation), and Seneca. The remark shows us the second
point. Montaigne had much Latin, but little Greek. He could
read Latin so easily that he was able to choose his Latin reading for
pleasure ; but not Greek.^^ That still puts him head and shoulders
above the moderns, but it explains a certain slackness we often feel
in his thinking, a certain lack of clarity in his appreciation of the
ideals of antiquity.
The poets whom he himself names as his favourites are Vergil
(particularly the Georgies), Lucretius, Catullus, Horace, Lucan,
and the gentlemanly Terence. In prose, next to Plutarch and
Seneca, he likes Ciceros philosophical essays, but complains that
they are verbosealthough not so bad as Platos dialogues. He
also likes Ciceros letters to his friends ; and he concludes by saying
that historians are his right hand, and Plutarch and Caesar chief
among them.
Villey has gone over Montaignes reading with a magnifyingglass,
and listed a formidable array of authors whom he knew well.
There are not less than fifty. The striking absence of Greek
classics is at once observable. Montaigne knew no Greek tragedians
at first hand, quoted Lucian (so familiar to Rabelais) only
once, knew nothing of Aristophanes, met Thucydides only at
second hand, and had not even read Homer properly. Still, he
knew and with qualifications admired Plato and Plutarch; and
although he began by abusing Aristotle, he apparently read the
Nicomachean Ethics with care towards the end of his life and made
considerable use of it.^s Here is Villeys list:
Aesop ^
Ammian
Appian
Aristotle (the Politics and Ethics only)
Arrian
St. Augustine (the City of God only)
Aulus Gellius
Ausonius, because he came from Bordeaux
Caesar, whom he mentions 93 times
Catullus
Cicero, whom at first he disliked and later came to admire, and
quoted 312 times
Claudian
10 189 . RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE
Diodorus Siculus
Diogenes Laertius, with his memorable anecdotes about philosophers
Heliodorus
Herodotus (in Saliats translation, which he never mentions and
always uses)
the Historia Augusta
Homer, at second hand
Horace, who with Lucretius is his favourite poetboth were
Epicureans: 148 quotations
Isocrates, in translation
Josephus
Justin
Juvenal, quoted 50 times
Livy, whom he used freely
Lucan
Lucian, once or twice
Lucretius, 149 quotations
Manilius the philosophical poet of the stars
Martial, with 41 quotations
Oppian
Ovid, 72 quotations
Persius, quoted 23 times
Petronius, apparently only at second hand: most of the Satirica
was still undiscovered
Plato, in whom his interest increased after 1588: he makes over
no quotations from at least 18 of the dialogues, including 29
from that difficult book The Laws
Plautus scarcely at all : Montaigne thought him very vulgar
Pliny the elder, a few moral aphorisms
Pliny the younger
Plutarch, mentioned by name 68 times and quoted 398 times
Propertius
Quintilian
Sallust, less than we should expect
his favourite Seneca, from whom he lifted entire passages, often
without acknowledgement^^
Sextus Empiricus, the only Sceptic philosopher whose work survives
Sidonius Apollinaris, of Lyons
Suetonius, quoted over 40 times
Tacitus, particularly the Annals
Terence
190 10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE
Tibullus
Valerius Maximus and other minor historians and anecdotards
like Nepos and Stobaeus
Vergil, quoted ii6 times
Xenophon.
Now, what use did Montaigne make of this enormous mass of
learning ? The very catalogue of the authors whom he knew is apt
to repel modern readers. We forget that we read countless
ephemeral books, magazines, and newspapers, far less worth reading
: stuff which bears the same relation to literature as chewinggum
does to food. But as soon as we read the Essays, we feel more
at ease. We see that he did not remember and quote these classical
books merely in order to dazzle his contemporaries with his
learning. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is a work in which,
despite the interest of its subject-matter, the deployment of
authorities from abstruse regions of literature is an end in itself,
and one we cannot now admire. But Montaigne took his reading
naturally, and was a little embarrassed by knowing so much less
than men like Bude. His relation to his books was not a mechanical
but an organic one. He did not imitate the ancients as Ronsard
imitated Vergil. He did not want to be a classic in modem dress
any more than he wanted to be a polymath. He wanted to be
Michel de Montaigne, and he loved the classics because they could
help him best in that purpose. So he assimilated them, and used
them, and lived them.
As material for literature, he used them in three ways.
{a) He employed them as sources of general philosophical
doctrine. He selected sayings from them which seemed to him
particularly true and valuable, and then proceeded to discuss and
illustrate these apophthegms from his own knowledge of books
and life.
{b) He used them as treasuries of illustration. After he had laid
down some general tmth which he wished to examine (whether
taken from one of the ancients, or worked out by himself, or
quoted from a modem), he then sought illustrations to prove it,
qualify it, or elaborate it. Some of the illustrations came from his
own contemporary reading, many from recent history, very many
from the classics. For instance, in Essays, i. 55, Of Smells and
Odours, he discusses body-odour. The essay begins with the report
that Alexander the Great had sweet-smelling perspiration, goes on
10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE 191
to condemnations of perfume taken from Plautus and Martial, a
remark about Montaignes own sensitivity to smells, confirmed by
a repulsive quotation from the equally sensitive Horace, jumps to a
note from Herodotus about the perfumed depilatories used by
Russian women, a personal reminiscence about the way perfume
clings to Montaignes moustache, a reference to Socrates freedom
from infection during the plague, and stops abruptly with a story
about the contemporary king of Tunis.
(c) He found stores of compact well-reasoned argument in the
classics : for there were no modern philosophers available who had
put so much hard thinking into such small space. Montaigne is
often indebted to the classics for his arguments even when he does
not acknowledge the debt : without mentioning the source, he will
translate entire paragraphs out of Seneca and lift whole sections
from Amyots Plutarch ; and sometimes he will make what Villey
calls a parquetry^7 out of sentences drawn from different parts of
an author like Seneca whom he knows well.
Turn now to the two most important problems about Montaignes
work, his two chief claims to literary greatness. He was
the inventor of the modern essay. Where did he get the idea?
And he was one of the first modem autobiographical writers,
attempting what Rousseau long afterwards called 'a daring and
unheard-of task, psychological self-description. What was the
origin and motive of that innovation?
The origin of the essay, as far as content goes, is made fairly
clear by the subjects of the first two volumes which Montaigne
published. The themes are predominantly abstract questions of
ethics, and sometimes single moral precepts : Cruelty, Glory, Anger,
Fear, Idleness; That we should not judge of our happiness until after
our death; Tophilosophize is to learn how to die; All things have their
season. The moral treatises of Seneca and Plutarch, although on
the average longer than Montaignes first essays, are on similar
subjects with similar titles: Anger, Kindness, On the Education of
Children, How to distinguish Flatterers from Friends, In addition,
many of Senecas ethical treatises are in the form of letters to his
friends: a shape which Montaigne apparently borrowed for his
essay on education.^'
Nevertheless, Montaigne did not call his works treatises, or
discussions, or even letters. He called them ^essays. The word
192 10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE
may mean assays, weighings and testings; or, more probably,
attempts. More probably the latter, because they follow no
systematic scheme, such as they would have if they were really
weighing facts and opinions. And in the first two volumes the
essays often consist merely of a string of quotations and illustrations
of a single generalization, which is itself not discussed. Villey
therefore suggested that Montaigne began by copying the collections
of memorable apophthegms which were so popular in the
time when his style was forming^particularly the Adages of
Erasmus, which went into 120 editions between 1500 and 1570.
If this is true, the debt of the essay to the classics is a double one,
both to the systematic philosophical discussions of men like Seneca
and to the isolated fragments of philosophical wisdom collected by
the Renaissance humanists.
(As the essay developed, other influences entered it and enlarged
its form and purpose. One of these was classical : the psychological
character-sketch, invented by Theophrastus, and embodied in the
characters of comedy by his pupil Menander. This, after the
appearance of Casaubons great edition of Theophrastus in 1592,
was practised as an independent form by Hall and Earle and
La Bruy^re; and, through the essays of Addison and others, grew
into the modern novel.)^^
But one important element differentiates Montaignes Essays
both from the classical treatises on ethical questions and from the
collections of apophthegms: that is the subjective factor, which
makes them vehicles for Montaignes own autobiography. At one
time or another he tells us nearly everything about himself: his
height, his health, his education, funny things he has seen, a
ghost-story he has just heard, the fact that he seldom dreams, &c.
This gives the Essays an intensely real, vivid, individual style : we
hear him talking, more to himself than to us. He begins where he
likes, ends where he likes, and is content to come to no conclusion,
or several, or half a one. Yet for this subjectivity he himself quotes
a classical model. He says it is like the Roman satirist Lucilius,
who, as Horace tells us, spread out his whole life and character
in his satires, as if in a realistic picture;^ and he might well have
cited Horace too, whose moral Letters are, like Montaignes Essays,
a blend of philosophical meditation and personal musing.
Nevertheless, the intensely personal wish-fulfilment dreamstory
of Rabelais, the autobiography of the artist with the Gar10.
RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE 193
gantuan appetites (Benvenuto Cellini), the rise of autobiographical
writing elsewhere (as in the unhappy Greene), and the great
success of Montaignes Essays show that the new spirit of autobiography
was largely a creation of the Renaissance. It was called
into being by the wish for freedom. Rabelais made himself into
* a giant in power, appetites, benevolence, and learning. Cellini
would be bound by no law, obliged to no potentate, and equalled
by no artist. Montaigne believed nothing without testing it, and
then believed it only until it confined him. His favourite poets
were Epicureans, and his motto. What do I know?
^
was an assertion
of philosophical doubt based on the wish to remain absolutely free
from all systems. The Renaissance gave humanity many things
:
some good, some doubtful, some evil. For good or evil, its greatest
gift was the sense of moral and intellectual freedom. This sense
was given almost infinite scope by the new aesthetic, historical,
geographical, and cosmological discoveries of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries: hence, for example, the relativism of essays
like Montaignes On the Cannibals. The same sense was stimulated
by the rapid extension of the knowledge of human psychology
which resulted both from contemporary social revolutions and
from the revelation of Greco-Roman drama, erotic poetry, satire,,
and philosophy. And it was propelled by the reaction against
medieval authority^the authority of the church, of feudal society,
of the close social structure of small states and tightly organized
trades, of philosophical dogma,3
1 of inherited privilege. Because
it asserted the fundamental dignity of man, the spiritual achievement
of the Renaissance is called Humanism ; and Montaigne was
one of the greatest, and most human, of the humanists.
5076 o
II
SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS
There is no doubt whatever that Shakespeare was deeply
and valuably influenced by Greek and Latin culture. The
problem is to define how that influence reached him, and how it
affected his poetry.
Forty large works, including the two long narrative poems and
the sonnet-sequence, are attributed to Shakespeare. Of these
:
six deal with Roman history^four with the republic and two
with the empire
six have a Greek background
twelve concern British history, chiefly the period ofthe dynastic
struggles in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance
;
fourteen are played in Renaissance Europe. In these, even
when the story is antique, the settings and the manner are
quite contemporary. For instance, in Hamlet^ the prince
whose companions (in the original tale told by Saxo
Grammaticus) carried runes carved in wood^ now forges
a diplomatic dispatch and its seal,^ and in his own court
discusses the stage of Elizabethan London, s Half of these
plays are localized in Renaissance Italy, ^ while two are set
more or less in France {As You Like It and All 's Well).
The other five are in vaguely defined places which are
Italianate {Measure for Measure^ Twelfth Night, and The
Tempest), Frenchified {Lovers Labour 's Lost), or northern
European {Hamlet)
;
one play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, is laid in an England
almost wholly contemporary in feeling; but its hero is
Falstaff, who started life in the fourteenth century. Only
the Sonnets can be said to deal directly with Shakespeares
own time and country.
Of course Shakespeare took little care to exclude geographical
and historical incongruities, or to create a complete illusion of local
and temporal colour. All his plays have touches, and many have
complete scenes and characters, which could only be contemporary
English. But from this broad classification of his themes it is
evident that three great interests stimulated his imagination. The
11. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS 19s
first was the Renaissance culture of western Europe. The second
was England, and particularly her monarchy and nobility. The
third, equal in importance to the second, was the history and
legends of Greece and Rome.
From his characters and their speech we derive a similar impression.
To begin with, most of Shakespeares writing is English
of the English. No poet has ever expressed England, its character,
its folk-speech and song, its virtues and its follies and some of its
vices, and even its physical appearance, so sensitively and memorably.
Rosalind is the daughter of a banished duke (therefore not
an English girl, but French or Italian)
; yet she goes into exile in the
forest of Arden, which is near Stratford-on-Avon, and her nature
and her way of talking are English to the hearts core. Then,
intertwined with the Englishness of Shakespeares characters,
there is a silken strand of Italian charm and subtlety. A number of
his best plays are stories of the intricate villainy which flourished
in Renaissance Italy; lago is only one such villain ; think of Sebastian
and Antonio in The Tempest and the beastly lachimo in
Cymbeline, And much of the wit and fine manners (particularly in
the early dramas) is of the type cultivated by Englishmen Italianate ^for instance, Osrics
ridiculous courtesies in Hamlet. Pandarus
actually calls Cressida by an Italian pet-name, capocchia.^ But
lastly, there is an all-pervading use of Greek and Latin imagery
and decorative reference, which is sometimes superficial but more
often incomparably effective. Think of the aubade in Cymbeline:'^
Hark, hark, the lark at heavens gate sings,
And Phoebus gins arise.
His steeds to water at those springs
On chaliced flowers that lies.
Or of Perditas garland;^
. . . violets dim.
But sweeter than the lids of Junos eyes
Or Cythereas breath.
Or of Hamlets godlike father
See, what a grace was seated on this brow;
Hyperions curls, the front of Jove himself,
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command,
A station like the herald Mercury
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill,
196 11. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS
Or of the idyllic love-duet
In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.
The poet who wrote like that knew and loved the classics.
The power of the classical world on Shakespeare can also be
proved negatively. We have seen how many of the writers of the
Renaissance belonged spiritually to both worlds : that of the Middle
Ages, with knights and ladies and enchanters and magical animals
and strange quests and impossible beliefs, and that of Greco-
Roman myth and art. Such, for example, were Ariosto, and
Rabelais, and Spenser. But Shakespeare, like Milton, rejected
and practically ignored the world of the Middle Ages. Even his
historical dramas are contemporary in tone, far more than they are
medieval: who could dream that Sir John Falstaff was supposed
to be a contemporary of the Canterbury Pilgrims ?
It is significant to observe Shakespeares few allusions to
medieval thought: they are pretty or quaint, but they show that
he did not feel the Middle Ages vital and stimulating. Mistress
Quickly, when describing the death of Falstaff, declares that he
must be in heaven. The biblical phrase is in Abrahams bosom,
but the hostess says
:
Hes in Arthurs bosom, if ever man went to Arthurs bosom,
for unconsciously she finds it easier to think of Sir John being
received by the old symbol of immortal British chivalry than by a
Hebrew patriarch. ^3 Again, one of the men whom Shakespeare
most despises, Mr. Justice Shallow, explains the technique of drill
by recalling a little quiver fellow whom he knew when he himself
played Sir Dagonet in Arthurs show.^^ And sometimes there
are echoes of the Middle Ages in proverbs and in songs : Edgar
as a madman sings snatches of old ballads, among them a beautiful
anachronism which was to inspire another English poet to revive
the medieval tradition
:
Child Rowland to the dark tower came.^5
The only important element in Shakespeares work which can
really be called medieval is the supernatural; Oberon and his
11 . SHAKESPEARE^S CLASSICS 197
fairies, the witches and their spells. Even in that there are Hellenic
touches, and the rest has been shrunk and softened by distance, the
fairies have grown smaller and kinder, the gargoyles and fiends
have vanished for ever.
Now we must analyse Shakespeares classical knowledge in more
detail. The first fact we observe is that he knows much more and
feels much more sensitively about Rome than about Greece, with
the single exception of the Greek myths which reached the modem
world through Rome. The Roman plays^plus some anachronisms
and some solidly English touchesare like Rome. The Greek
plays are not like Greece. Although Shakespeare took several of
his best plots from the Roman biographies of Plutarch, he almost
entirely ignored the Greek statesmen whom Plutarch described as
parallel to his Roman heroes, and used only Alcibiades and Timon.
In Timon of Athens itself there are only two or three Greek names
;
all the rest are Latinsome of them, such as Varro and Isidore,
ridiculously inappropriate ; and the Athenian state is represented
by senators, which shows that Shakespeare wrongly imagined it to
be a republic like Rome. It is tme that in Troilus and Cressida his
warriors were not the anachronistic chevaliers who appear in the
medieval romances of Troy ; and that he has borrowed some things
from the Iliad^the duel of Hector and Ajax, the speech of Ulysses
in 1.3.78 , the stupidity of Ajax, and certainly the character of
Thersites, who does not appear in the romances. (No doubt he
had been reading Chapmans translation of Iliads 1-2 and 7-1 1,
which came out in 1598.) But even so, the whole play is not merely
anti-heroic: it is a distant, ignorant, and unconvincing caricature
of Greece.
The Roman plays are far more real and elaborate in detail than
the Greek. Sometimes they are wrong in secondary matters like
costume and furniture. But the touches of reality in the Greek
dramas are fewer, and the anachronisms are far worse: Hector
quotes Aristotle,^7 Pandarus talks of Friday and Sunday, and the
brothers Antipholus are the long-lost sons of an abbess. In the
Roman plays there are few large misrepresentations and much
deep insight into character. The strong, law-abiding, patriotic
plebeians of the early republic appear in Coriolanus, because of
Shakespeares contempt for the mob, as an excitable degenerate
rabble like the idle creatures of Julius Caesar. Antony is made a
198 11. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS
much better man than he was ; but there Shakespeare has exercised
the dramatists right to re-create character, and has made him a
hero with a fault, like Leicester, like Essex, like Bacon, like so
many great men of the Renaissance. For the rest, he has rendered
better than anyone else, better even than the sources which he
used, the essence of ti^e Roman republic and its aristocracy. On
the other hand, the Athenian noble Alcibiades, who appears in
TimoUy was a complex personality who would have much interested
Shakespeare if he had known anything about him ; but he never
understood the Greeks enough to portray him properly.
Just as Shakespeare has more command over Roman than
Greek themes, so the spirit of his tragic plays is much less Greek
than Roman. Of course the Greeks founded and developed drama
;
without them, neither we nor the Romans could have written
tragedies ; and most of the essentials of Latin as of modem tragedy
are borrowed from them. Nevertheless, the English Renaissance
pla3rwrights did not as a rule know Greek tragedy, and they did
know Seneca, whose tragedies appeared severally in translation
from 1559 onwards, and complete in 1581. Less than ten years
later the sharp and satirical Nashe was sneering at the writers who
from Seneca 'read by candlelight copied 'whole Hamlets^ I should
say handfuls, of tragical speeches.^ Ghosts, and revenge, and the
horrors of treachery, bloody cruelty, and kinsmens murder, and
a spirit of frenzied violence unlike the Hellenic loftiness^these
Shakespeare found in Seneca, and he converted them into the
sombre fury of his tragedies,
Shakespeares free use of Greek and Latin imagery has already
been mentioned. He is fluent and happy in his classical allusions.
No writer who dislikes the classics, who receives no real stimulus
from them, who brings in Greek and Roman decorations merely
to parade his learning or to satisfy convention, can create so many
apt and beautiful classical symbols as Shakespeare. Except the
simplest fools and yokels, all his characters^from Hamlet to
Pistol, from Rosalind to Portiacan command Greek and Latin
reminiscences to enhance the grace and emotion of their speech.
It is of course clear that Shakespeafe was not a bookman. Miss
Spurgeons analysis of his similes and metaphors^^ shows that the
fields from which he preferred to draw likenesses were, in order
:
daily life (social types, sport, trades, &c.), nature (in particular,
growing things and weather), domestic life and bodily actions (which
11. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS 199
are surely both very closely connected with daily life), animals^ and
then, after all these, learning. And even within the range of his
learning Shakespeares classical knowledge occupies a comparatively
small space. He knew more about mythology than about
ancient historyhe knew the classical myths far better than the
Bible. But he had far fewer classical symbols present to his mind
than Marlowe. Learning meant little to him unless he could
translate it into living human terms. It is mostly his pedants who
quote the classics by book and author, and such quotations are
either weak or ridiculous, and almost always inappropriate, as
when Touchstone tells his poor virgin:
I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest
Ovid, was among the Goths.^^
But the classical images which, for Shakespeare, emerge from books
to become as real as animals, and colours, and starsthese images
are used so strikingly as to show that classical culture was for him
a spectacle not less vivid, though smaller, than the life around him.
The loveliest, most loving girl in his plays, waitingfor her weddingnight,
gazes at the bright sky, sees the sun rushing on towards
evening, and urges it to hurry, hurry, even at the risk of destroying
the world. She does not say so: the direct wish would be too
extravagant ; but it is conveyed by the superb image
:
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus lodging; such a waggoner
As Phaethon would whip you to the west.
And bring in cloudy night immediately.^3
It would scarcely be possible to distinguish between Greek and
Roman imagery in the plays ; at most one might point to the predominance
of Rome among his historical images. But in language
it is clear that, as Ben Jonson said, Shakespeare had small Latin
and less Greek.^^ He uses only three or four Greek words.^5 He
does bring in Latin words and phrases, but not so freely as many
of his contemporaries, and with less sureness than he uses French
and Italian. Latin is quoted most freely in the early plays. Lovers
Labour s Lost has a comic schoolmaster who talks Latin, but,
like the rest of Shakespeares latinists, he is not a really learned
pedant, on the same level as the Limousin student in Rabelais.^7
He can only string a few schoolbook Latin words together

200 11. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS

and this in a play where Berownes speech on love introduces
some exquisite classical allusions, used with fine imaginative
freedom
:
Subtle as Sphinx : as sweet and musical
As bright Apollos lute, strung with his hair.^^
Few are the sentences in Shakespeare that seem to have been suggested
by a direct memory of a Latin phrase, while in Milton,
Tasso, Jonson, Ronsard, and other Renaissance poets they are
myriad. But he often uses English words of Latin derivation in
such a way as to show that he understands their origin and rootmeaning.
Occasionally he makes an eccentric attempt to despumate
the Latial verbocination, such as the word juvenal for
youngster; and when he experiments with the importation of Latin
into English he is as likely to fail {exsufflicate in Othello^ 3.3. 182)
as to succeed (impartial in Richard II, 1. 1. 115). All this matters
little. Shakespeare wrote the English language.
To quote phrases from Roman poetry, either in Latin or in
translation, and to imitate striking passages, was not pedantry in
the Renaissance poets. As we have seen,^^ it was one of their
methods of adding beauty and authority to their work. The taste
and learning of the individual poet determined how frequently he
would use quotations, how far he would disguise or emphasize
them, how carefully he would follow the original text or how freely
he would adapt memorable words, images, and ideas. No great
modern writer has ever surpassed Milton in his ability to embellish
his work with jewels cut by other craftsmen. Of the Renaissance
dramatists Ben Jonson, easily the best scholar, was much the
busiest borrower and the most sedulous translator: some of his
most important speeches are almost literal renderings of passages
from the Roman historians who gave him his plots. Compared
with Milton and Jonson, Shakespeare quotes the classics seldom;
but by other standards (for instance, in comparison with Racine)
he quotes freely and often.
Ben Jonsons judgement of Shakespeares classical knowledge
has often been misquoted, and often teased into a comparative
rather than an absolute judgement: that Shakespeare merely knew
less Latin and much less Greek than Jonson^which would still
allow him to be a fair scholar. But the way in which Shakespeare
11. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS 201
quotes the classics is, like his use of Latin words, proof that Jonson
was literally correct. Shakespeare did not know much of the Latin
language, he knew virtually no Greek, and he was vague and unscholarly
in using what he did know. But he used it nearly all with
the flair of a great imaginative artist. What Jonson could have
added, and what we must not forget, is that Shakespeare loved
Latin and Greek literature. What he had been taught at school
he remembered, he improved his knowledge afterwards by reading
translations, and he used both what he remembered and what he
got from translations as verbal embellishment, decorative imagery,
and^plot material throughout his career.
Beginning in 1767 with Richard Farmers Learning of Shakespeare^
there have been many, many discussions of Shakespeares
use of his classical sourcestoo many to treat here. It is a specialist
field of considerable interest, still incompletely covered, since not
many scholars who know enough about Shakespeare and his time
have had the classical training which would enable them to make
all the right connexions. Its chief value for the general reader is
that it keeps him from conceiving Shakespeare as an Ariel warbling
his native woodnotes wild. Shakespeare was indeed part Ariel;
but he was more Prospero, with volumes that he prized above a
dukedom. 30
The most convenient way to assess Shakespeares classical
equipment and the use to which he put it is to distinguish the
authors he knew well from those he knew imperfectly or at second
hand. The difficulty of making this investigation accurate is the
same difficulty that meets every student of the transmission of
artistic and spiritual influence. It is seldom easy to decide whether
a similarity between the thought or expression of two writers
means that one has copied the other. It is particularly hard when
one of those writers is as great as Shakespeare, whose soul was so
copious, whose eloquence was so fluent. We can be sure, for
instance, that he had not read Aeschylus. Yet what can we say
when we find some of Aeschylus thoughts appearing in Shakespeares
plays ? The only explanation is that great poets in times
and countries distant from each other often have similar thoughts
and express them similarly. On the other hand, we are reluctant
to believe that, given the opportunity, a great writer would borrow
anything valuable from a lesser man. Yet some resemblances are
too striking to be denied; and it is folly to imagine that Shakespeare
202 11. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS
could take his plot from one book and his names from another
and yet balk at borrowing a fine image from a third.
This is perhaps a suitable place to suggest a simple set of rules
by which parallel passages in two writers can be taken to establish
the dependence of one on the other. First, it must be shown that
one writer read, or probably read, the others work. Then a close
similarity of thought or imagery must be demonstrated. Thirdly,
there should be a clear structural parallelism : in the sequence of
the reasoning, in the structure of the sentences, in the position of
the words within the lines of poetry, or in some or all of these
together.
Sometimes it is impossible to prove that the later writer read the
works of the earlier, but possible to conjecture that he heard them
discussed. In periods of great intellectual activity a man with a
lively imagination and a retentive memory often picks up great
ideas not from the books which contain them (and which may be
closed to him) but from the conversation of his friends and from
adaptations of them in the work of his contemporaries. We know
that Ben Jonson was a good scholar. We know that Shakespeare
had long and lively discussions with him. Often Jonson must have
tried to break the rapier of Shakespeares imagination with the
bludgeon of a learned quotation or an abstruse philosophical
doctrine, only to find Shakespeare, in a later tournament or even
in a play produced next season, using the weapon that had once
been Jonsons, now lightened, remodelled, and apparently moulded
to Shakespeares own hand. The channels by which remote but
valuable ideas reach imaginative writers are as complex and difficult
to retrace as those by which they learn their psychology and
subtilize their sense of words ; but in estimating a various-minded
man like Shakespeare we must make the widest possible allowance
for his power of assimilating classical ideas from the classical
atmosphere that surrounded him.
There is a good example of this in one of Shakespeares
most imaginative scenes. Plato made known to the modem world
the noble idea that the physical universe is a group of eight concentric
spheres, each of which, as it turns, sings one note ; and that
the notes of the eight blend into a divine harmony, which we can
hear only after death when we have escaped from this prison of
flesh. Somewhere Shakespeare had heard this. He had not read
it in Plato: because he altered it^freely, and, for a student of
11 , SHAKESPEARFS CLASSICS 203
Plato, wrongly, but, for all his readers, superbly. In a scene where
two lovers have already recalled much beauty from classical legend
and poetry, he made Lorenzo tell his mistress, not that the Ptolemaic
spheres sang eight harmonious notes, but (with a reminiscence
of the time when the morning stars sang together^) that
every single star in the sky sang while it moved, with the angels
as the audience of the divine concert
:
There s not the smallest orb which thou beholdst
But in his motion like an angel sings.
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it.^^
Shakespeare was therefore, directly and indirectly, a classically
educated poet who loved the classics. They were his chief bookeducation.
They were one of the greatest challenges to his creative
power. His classical training was wholly successful, because it
taught him their beauties at school, encouraged him to continue
his reading of the classics in mature life, and helped to make him
a complete poet, and a whole man.
He knew three classical authors well, a fourth partially, and a
number of others fragmentarily. Ovid, Seneca, and Plutarch
enriched his mind and his imagination. Plautus gave him material
for one play and trained him for others. From Vergil and other
authors he took stories, isolated thoughts, and similes, sometimes
of great beauty. Because of his early training he was able to
respond to the manifold stimuli which the reading of translations
gave to his creative genius.
Shakespeares favourite classical author was Ovid. Like other
English schoolboys of the time, he very probably learnt some Ovid
at school. 32 He read him later, both in the original Latin and in
Goldings translation of the Metamorphoses. He often imitated
him, from his first work to his last. His friends knew this. In a
survey of contemporary literature published in 1598 Francis
Meres said Shakespeare was a reincarnation of Ovid:
As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the
sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare;
witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets
among his private friends.^s
204 11. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS
The first book he published, and, according to him, the first he
wrote, 34 was a sumptuous blending and elaboration of two Greek
myths which he found in Ovids Metamorphoses and he prefaced
it with a couplet from Ovids Loves, The quotation throws a
valuable light on his artistic ideals. It reads
Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo
pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua;
which means
Let cheap things please the mob; may bright Apollo
serve me full draughts from the Castalian spring.
His other long poem, The Rape ofLucrece^ is based partly on Livy,
partly on Ovids Fastis with several close correspondences of
language and thought. 37
Several quotations of Ovids own words are scattered through
the plays. In The Taming of the Shrew Lucentio poses as a Latin
tutor in order to make love to Bianca. He conveys his message to
her through the device used by schoolboys in classroom repetition
and convicts in hymn-singing;
Bianca : Where left we last ?
Lucentio: Here, madam:
Hac ibat Simois; hie est Sigeia tellus;
Hie steterat Priami regia celsa senis.
Bianca : Construe them.
Lucentio ; Hac ibat, as I told you before, Simois, I am Lucentio, hie
est, son unto Vincentio of Pisa, Sigeia tellus, disguised thus to get
your love; Hie steterat, and that Lucentio that comes a-wooing,
Priami, is my man Tranio, regia, bearing my port, celsa senis, that
we might beguile the old pantaloon.3S
(Of course the translation is not meant to make sense, but there is
an allusion to the original meaning in the old pantaloon.)
Direct quotations also occur in two of the doubtful plays.
And there is one very famous echo which Shakespeare has made
his own. The name of the fairy queen in A Midsummer--Nighfs
Dream is not taken from Celtic legend like her husbands. It is a
Greco-Latin word, Titania, which means Titans daughter or
Titans sister. The name occurs only in Ovid, who uses it five
times, and, in the two best-known passages, of Diana and Circe.
From these two queens of air and darkness and from their melo11
. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS 205
dious title, Shakespeare has created a new and not less enchanting
spirit.
Goldings translation of Ovids Metamorphoses was a coarse free
version in lumbering fourteeners, very unlike the suave graceful
original. But Shakespeare could read the original, he had incomparable
taste, and, as T. S. Eliot has remarked, he had that
ability, which is not native to everyone, to extract the utmost
possible from translations. Therefore several fine passages, which
we now regard as heirs of his own invention, were borrowedno,
not borrowed, but transmuted from Ovid through the Golding
translation.
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards to contend.
This famous quatrain in Sonnet 60 is a transmutation of Ovid, as
Englished by Golding:
As every wave drives others forth, and that which comes behind
Both thrusteth and is thrust himself : even so the times by kind
Do fly and follow both at once, and evermore renew.^2
But that is only one aspect of a complex philosophical idea, the
idea that nature is constantly changing, so that nothing is permanent
and yet nothing is destroyed. This is expounded in the
sermon of Pythagoras towards the end of the Metamorphoses^ and
is the theme of several of Shakespeares finest sonnets,^^
There is, however, not much philosophy in either Ovid or
Shakespeareindeed, one of Shakespeares characters explicitly
distinguishes Ovid and philosophy, implying that the former is far
more delightful. But most of the Metamorphoses is concerned
with sex and the supernatural, both of which interested Shakespeare.
His most sensual poem, Venus and Adonis^ was inspired,
as we have seen, by episodes in the Metamorphoses, Again, when
Juliet says:
Thou mayst prove false; at lovers perjuries,
They say, Jove laughs,
she is quoting Ovids Art of Love, the book which Lucentio also
says is his special subject.^^ In his other great love-drama Shakespeare
based the character of Cleopatra on Dido as drawn by Ovid,
zo6 11 . SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS
and actually made her quote an angry line from Didoes reproaches.^^
As for magic, Prosperous incantation in The Tempest:
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;
And ye, that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets, that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make
Whereof the ewe not bites ; and you, whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms; that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid

Weak masters though ye beI have bedimmed

The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war : to the dread-rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Joves stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake; and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar; graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth
By my so potent art"^^. . . .
this splendid speech, apart from some light, inappropriate, and
quite British fairy-lore, is based on Medeas invocation in Ovid,
Met, 7. 197 f., as translated by Golding, thus:
Ye Ayres and Windes; ye Elves of Hilles, of Brookes, of Woods alone,
Of standing Lakes, and of the Night approche ye everychone.
Through helpe of whom (the crooked bankes much wondring at the
thing)
I have compelled streames to run cleane backward to their spring.
By charmes I make the calme Seas rough, and make ye rough Seas plaine
And cover all the Skie with Cloudes, and chase them thence againe.
By charmes I rayse and lay the windes, and burst the Vipers jaw,
And from the bowels of the Earth both stones and trees doe drawe.
Whole Woods and Forestes I remove: I make the Mountains shake,
And even the Earth it selfe to grone and fearfully to quake.
I call up dead men from their graves; and thee O Lightsome Moone
I darken oft, though beaten brasse abate thy perill soone.
Our Sorcerie dimmes the Morning faire, and darkes ye Sun at Noone.
Some of the ingredients of the witches cauldron in Macbeth^"^ came
from Medeas pharmacopoeia in Ovid,^ which also provided the
vaporous drop profound that hangs upon the corner of the moon.si
11. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS 207
In another field, it was Goldings rather Jorrocksy translation of
Actaeons kennel-book^^ that inspired the heroic hunting-conversation
in A Midsummer-Ntghfs Dream,^^ A number of passages
contain explicit references to Ovids own personality^^ and to his
books. 55 But Shakespeares greatest debt to Ovid is visible all
through his plays. It was the world of fable which the Metamorphoses
opened to him, and which he used as freely as he used
the world of visible humanity around him, now making a tale of
star-crossed lovers into a clownish farce, 5 ^ and now exalting the
myth of Pygmalion to symbolize a higher love.s?
Shakespeare knew one other Latin author fairly well. This was
that enigmatic and decadent figure Seneca, the Stoic millionaire,
Neros tutor, minister, and victim, the Spanish philosopher who
taught serene fulfilment of duty and wrote nine dramas of revenge,
cruelty, and madness. For the English playwrights of the Renaissance
Seneca was the master of tragedy; and even although,
at first glance. Stoicism would not appear to be a creed sympathetic
to that stirring age, the pithy energetic thinking of his letters and
treatises impressed many contemporary writers. He is never
quoted in the original by Shakespeare, except in the doubtful
Titus Andronicus^^ But he deeply influenced Shakespeares conception
of tragedy, and added certain elements of importance to
his dramatic teclmique, while several memorable Shakespearian
speeches are inspired by his work. 5 9
Shakespeares great tragedies are dominated by a hopeless
fatalism which is far more pessimistic than the purifying agonies
of Greek tragedy, and almost utterly godless. None of them shows
any belief in the righteous government of the world, except in so
far as successful evildoers are later punished for their own cruel
schemes. Sometimes his tragic heroes speak of life as ruled by fate
inhuman, unpredictable, and meaningless and sometimes, more
bitterly, cry out against vicious mankind which is unfit to live,^^
and cruel gods who kill us for their sport. That much of this
hopeless gloom came from Shakespeares own heart, no one can
doubt ; but he found it expressed decisively and eloquently in the
Stoical pessimism of Seneca. ^3
To the realization that life is directed by forces indifferent or
hostile to mans hopes, there are several possible responses. One,
which Senecas philosophy teaches, is taciturn indifference:
2o8 11. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS
emotionless, or even proud, obedience to an irresistible fate. This
philosophical disdain of external events occasionally appeared in
the Renaissance, where it was strengthened by chivalrous (particularly
Spanish) traditions. Shakespeare's heroes usually die in
eloquence, but some of his villains withdraw into Stoical silence,
and the Stoicism which challenges and even welcomes death
appears in the death-scenes of later Elizabethan dramatists.
Another response is a furious protest, the yell of suffering given
words, the raving self-assertion which grows close to madness.
The two responses both appear in Senecas own works. The
Elizabethans, and Shakespeare in particular, preferred the second.
We hear it in the ranting of Laertes and Hamlet in Ophelias
grave, ^5 in Hotspurs boasts, in Timons curses.^7 Not so much
single speeches as the general tone of tremendous emotional
pressure in his tragedies, of a boiling energy which repression only
increases and which threatens to erupt at every momentthat,
however strengthened by the pains and ardours of his own life and
increased by the excitements of the Renaissance, is Shakespeares
inheritance from Seneca.
In technique, the general Elizabethan use of stock Senecan
charactersghosts, witches, and othershas already been mentioned.^^
It has also been suggested that Shakespeares gloomy,
introspective, self-dramatizing heroes are partly inspired by those
of Seneca, so unlike the heroes of Greek tragedy. There was
moreover an interesting device of dramatic verse invented by the
Greeks, which reached Shakespeare and his contemporaries
through Senecas plays. It was a series of repartees in single lines,
or occasionally half-lines, in which two opponents strove to outargue
one another, often echoing each others words and often
putting their arguments in the form of competing philosophical
maxims. Called stichomythia, it sounds in Euripides and Seneca
like a philosophers debate; in the Elizabethans it is more like the
rapid thrust and counter-thrust of fencing. It is most noticeable
in Shakespeares early play, Richard J/J, where the hero and the
plot are also shaped on Senecan models.
A number of scenes in Shakespeares histories and tragedies are
closely parallel in thought or imagery to passages in Seneca; and in
some of them there are structural similarities also. There are
examples in early playsRichard III and King Johnand in Titm
Andronicus and Henry VI but there are also several striking
11. SHAKESPEARFS CLASSICS 209
instances in that great tragedy of witchcraft, oracles, ghosts,
murder, and madness, Macbeth, After his stepmother has polluted
him by an attempted seduction, Senecas Hippolytus cries out
:
What Tanais will wash me? what Maeotis,
urging strange floods into the Pontic sea ?
No, not the mighty father with all his Ocean
will wash away such sin.'72
In a second tragedy Seneca elaborates the same idea, adding the
dreadful half-line
:
deep the deed will cling.73
This is certainly the model for the great scenes in which Macbeth
and Lady Macbeth, married in their sin like two parts of a guilty
soul, vainly hope to clean the hands stained with their crime:
Will all great Neptunes ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand ? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine. . . .
and later, in the womans words
:
All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.'74
Again, after recovering from his murderous frenzy, Senecas
Hercules says :
Why this my soul should linger in the world
there s now no reason. Lost are all my goods

mind, weapons, glory, wife, children, strength,

even my madness.
Even so Macbeth, at the end of his crimes, mutters
:
I have lived long enough : my way of life
Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have.'^^
In the same passage^^ Hercules cries
:
A mind polluted
No one can cure.
And in the same scene^s Macbeth asks:
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased ?
Other Senecan parallels in Macbeth are no less powerful. ^9
^16 11 . SHAKESPEARE^S CLASSICS
The third of Shakespeares favourite classical authors was
Plutarch, the Greek moralist and historian who wrote Parallel
Lives of Greek and Roman statesmen. Plutarch entered western
culture in 1559 through the fine translation made by Jacques
Amyot. (Montaigne was one of its most enthusiastic readers, and
it continued to be part of French thought for centuries: we shall
see it as one of the forces inspiring the French Revolution.)
Sir Thomas North turned Amyots version into English in 1579,
and through him Plutarch became the author who made the
greatest single new impression on Shakespeare. Julius Caesar^
Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Timon of Athens all come
from the Lives. Plutarch was not a great historian. North was not
an accurate translator. Shakespeare was sometimes careless in
adapting material from him,^^ sometimes almost echoic in versifying
his prose. Yet the results were superb.
Once again we see how incalculably various, how unpredictably
fertile, is the stimulus of classical culture. The tradesmans son
who attended an unimportant provincial school, who was far from
scholarly and went to no imiversity, who toured and acted and
collaborated and adapted and wrote plays from all sorts of material,
who read Latin keenly but sketchily and Greek not at all, who was
more moved by life than by any books, still was so moved in middle
life by a second-hand English translation of a second-rate Greek
historian that he wrought it into dramas far more tense and vigorous,
far more delicate in psychical perception, far fuller in emotion than
the biographical essays that introduced him to Roman history.
Long afterwards a young English student who wanted to be a poet
was lent the translation of Homer made by one of Shakespeares
contemporaries. After reading and thinking all night, he wrote a
poem saying it had been for him like a new planet for an astronomer,
or, for an explorer, a new ocean. And so for Shakespeare
the reading of Plutarch was an unimagined revelation. It showed
him serious history instead of playful myth. And it showed him
more. Listen.
Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,
I have not slept.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.^
That is a new voice. It is the voice of Brutus. But beyond it we
11. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS Zll
can hear the sombre brooding voices of Macbeth; of Hamlet,
Julius CaesuTy the first of Shakespeares plays from Plutarch and
one of his greatest dramas, marked a climax in his experience. It
was his entrance into the realm of high tragedy.
Analysis of Shakespeares sources will not dull, but intensify,
our admiration for his art. To read a chapter ofNorths plain prose,
full of interesting but straightforward facts, and then to see the
facts, in Shakespeares hand, begin to glow with inward life and
the words to move and chime in immortal music, is to realize once
again that poets are not (as Plato said) copyists, but seers, or
creators.^5 Take Norths version of Plutarchs life of Caesar,
chapters 62.4 to 63.3. The passage deals with the jealousies,
hatreds, and omens threatening Caesars life. Every single sentence
in it is used by Shakespeare in Julius Caesar^ but the details,
instead of being crowded together, are scattered over the first three
acts. What Plutarch made flat narrative, Shakespeare makes
energetic description or crescendo action. As a dramatist, he
initiates at least one important change. Plutarch speaks of Caesar
as suspecting and even fearing Cassius. Shakespeare could not
make an heroic figure out of an apprehensive dictator : he felt that if
Caesar had really feared Cassius he would have protected himself
or eliminated the danger; doubtless he remembered the many
anecdotes of Caesars remarkable courage. Therefore he altered
these incidents, to show Caesar not indeed as quite fearless, but as
affecting the imperturbability of marble. Plutarch writes:
'Caesar also had Cassius in great jealousy and suspected him much:
whereupon he said ... to his friends, "What will Cassius do, think ye?
I like not his pale looks. Another time, when Caesars friends complained
unto him of Antonius and Dolabella, ... he answered them
again, "As for those fat men and smooth-combed heads, quoth he,
"I never reckon of them; but these pale-visaged and carrion lean people,
I fear them most.
In Shakespeares mind, this changed into
:
Caesar: Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep 0 nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
Antony: Fear him not, Caesar, hes not dangerous;
He is a noble Roman, and well given.
212 11. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS
Caesar : Would he were fatter! but I fear him not
:
Yet if my name were liable to fear,
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius.
Again, Plutarch mentions the omen of the sacrificial victim which
had no heart ; but all he can add is the obvious comment and that
was a strange thing in nature, how a beast could live without a
heart\ Shakespeare cannot show the sacrifice on the stage. But
he has- the omen reported, and invents a lofty reply for Caesar
Caesar : What say the augurers ?
Servant: They would not have you to stir forth today.
Plucking the entrails of an offering forth,
They could not find a heart within the beast.
Caesar
:
The gods do this in shame of cowardice
:
Caesar should be a beast without a heart
If he should stay at home today for fear.
So indeed Caesar must, or should, have spoken.
One example is enough to show how Shakespeare turns Plutarchs
prose descriptions into poetrykeeping the touches of
beauty which were part of the original scene described, colouring
it with fancies and images, and adding his own eloquence. In
chapter 26 of his life of Marcus Antonius, Plutarch describes the
first appearance of Cleopatra:
Therefore, when she was sent unto by divers letters, both from
Antonius himself, and also from his friends, she made so light of it and
mocked Antonius so much, that she disdained to set forward otherwise,
but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of
gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in
rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, citherns, viols,
and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now
for the person of herself : she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold
of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus commonly
drawn in picture ; and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair
boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in
their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her. Her Ladies
and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them, were apparelled like the
nymphs Nereides (which are the mermaids of the waters) and like the
Graces, some steering the helm, others tending the tackle and ropes of
the barge, out of the which there came a wonderful passing sweet savour
of perfumes, that perfumed the wharfs side, pestered with innumerable
11 . SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS 213
multitudes of people. Some of them followed the barge all alongst the
rivers side; others also ran out of the city to see her coming in. So that
in th end, there ran such multitudes of people one after another to see
her, that Antonius was left post alone in the market place in his Imperial
seat to give audience.
In Shakespeare^^ this becomes:
Enobarhm : When she first met Mark Antony she pursed up his heart,
upon the river of Cydnus.
There she appeared indeed, or my reporter devised well for
her.
Enobarhm'. I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne.
Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were love-sick with them, the oars were silver
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description; she did lie
In her pavilioncloth-of-gold of tissue

Oer-picturing that Venus where we see

The fancy outwork nature; on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool.
And what they undid did.
Agrippa: O! rare for Antony!
Enobarbus : Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
So many mermaids, tended her i the eyes,
And made their bends adornings ; at the helm
A seeming mermaid steers; the silken tackle
Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands.
That yarely frame the office. From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her, and Antony,
Enthroned i the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.
Agrippa: Rare Egyptian!
214 11. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS
Nearly every phrase in North contains something flat, or repetitious,
or clumsy: and such other instruments as they played upon
in the barge^; apparelled and attired; commonly drawn in
picture ; with the which they fanned wind upon her ; a wonderful
passing sweet savour of perfumes that perfumed. And consider
the structure of the first sentence. It is still possible for the
reader to understand that the scene was exquisitely beautiful;
but the words dull it. Shakespeare omits or emends the infelicities,
invents his own graces, and adds verbal harmonies,
which, like the perfumes of Cleopatras sails, draw the world
after them.
Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch : these were Shakespeares chief classical
sources. A fourth author helped him early in his career, but did
not stay long with him. This was the Roman comedian Plautus.
In The Brothers Menaechmus Plautus told (from the Greek) a
merry tale of identical twins separated in childhood, grown to
manhood ignorant of each other, and suddenly brought together
in the city where one has a wife and a home while the other, his
exact duplicate, is a stranger. The resulting confusions and the
ultimate recognition made a good comedy. This was the basic plot
Shakespeare used in The Comedy of Errors \ but, by adding a great
deal to it, he improved it. He altered the names of the characters,
and changed the locale from a little-known port to a famous city.
He made the twin brothers have identical twin servantsmultiplying
the confusion by eight, at least. He made the stranger
brother fall in love with his twins sister-in-law. He made the
early separation more real by making it more pathetic : the father
who has lost both sons appears in the first scene, under sentence
of death as an enemy alien, and only in the last scene, where he
meets his sons and his wife supposed dead, is he reprieved.
Some of these enlargements Shakespeare himself invented.
Some he took from sources outside the drama: the shipwreck,
apparently, from the romance Apollonius of Tyre, But the grand
complication, the creation of twin servants, he took from another
of Plautus comedies, Amphitryon, And a careful reading of The
Comedy of Errors with Plautus two plays will show that Shakespeare
did not merely lift the idea from Amphitryon and insert it
en bloc into the other play, but blended the two plays in an organic
fusion to make a new and richer drama.
11 . SHAKESPEARFS CLASSICS 215
Amphitryon was not translated into English until long after
Shakespeare was dead. The only known translation of The Brothers
Menaechmus was printed in 1595, some years after the accepted
date for Shakespeares Comedy of Errors. The conclusion is
virtually certain. Shakespeare read Plautus comedies in the
original Latin.^^ He used them just as he used the stories he took
from all his other sourcesas a basis of interwoven action which
he made into poetry by adding deeply human characterization and
the poetry of his own inimitable words. As a result The Comedy
of Errors is more of a drama than most of Plautus comedies : more
carefully wrought, more finely characterized, more various, less
funny but more moving, and, despite its naughtiness, nobler in
moral tone.^o
Still, the limitations of his classical knowledge came out clearly
in his adaptation of Plautus. They are those we have noticed
already. For a great imaginative poet, they were not defects but
advantages. We must, however, recognize their existence,
Shakespeare knew Latin enough to get the story of the plays when
he read them, but not enough to appreciate the language as well as
the dramatic art of the poet. Plautus is a very witty writer, full of
puns and deft verbal twists and comic volubility. Anyone who can
read his language fluently is bound to be infected by the rattling
gaiety of his words. Shakespeare (who could not even get the name
of Epidamnus right) failed, in The Comedy of Errors^ to take over
Plautus verbal skill, although he mastered his plotting and surpassed
his characterization. But we cannot be anything but
grateful for this. A more intimate knowledge of the style of other
comedians might well have hindered the development of Shakespeares
own incomparable eloquence. If he had stopped at
Lucrece and The Comedy of Errors^ we could regret that his
classical learning was so much inferior to Marlowes, to Spensers,
to Miltons. But even then, he was Ovid reincarnated; and now
he became Plautus romanticized. He was still growing and learning.
Plautus gave him another part of his education: the ability
to build a long story out of coincidences and complications
which, although credible, were always fresh and unexpected.
What Plautus might have given him in verbal dexterity he
later achieved for himself; and thereby made his language indistinguishably
a part of his own characters, the very voice of his
own thought.
ai6 11. SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS
Other authors he knew, but only in outline, or by quotations
learnt in school and remembered afterwards, or by extracts published
in the Readers Digest type of collections which were so
common in the Renaissance. Some of them gave him a beautiful
line or a powerful description, but none deeply affected his thought.
In an exhaustive work called William Shakspere^s Small Latine
and Lesse Greeke^ Mr. T. W. Baldwin has analysed the educational
system of England in Shakespeares boyhood, inferring from that,
and from echoes in the dramas, what were the books he probably
read in school. To begin with, Shakespeare used the standard
Latin grammar written by the two great Renaissance educators,
John Colet and William Lily, for he quotes and parodies it several
times. 91 It contained many illustrative quotations froni classical
authors. Even if Shakespeare did not read their works, he remembered
the excerpts, and used them as they were given in the
grammar. 9^ This accounts for some otherwise inexplicable
coincidences: they are due to Shakespeares memory for good
poetry. For instance, one of his first Latin texts was a collection
of pastoral poems by the Italian humanist Baptista Spagnuoli,
known as Baptista Mantuanus. The schoolmaster Holofernes in
Lovers Labour 's Lost actually quotes a line from it and praises the
poet.93 Again, in Hamlet, Laertes utters a beautiful epitaph
over Ophelia
:
Lay her i the earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring 1
It is impossible to escape the conclusion that this is a reminiscence
of a sentence of the same shape, thought, and rhythm in the satirist
Persius :95
Now from his tomb and beatific ashes
Wont violets grow ?
Only it is equally impossible to believe that Shakespeare ever read
that most difficult author. But Mr. Baldwin has pointed out that
the passage from Persius is quoted in full in the explanatory notes
on Mantuanus elegies, where Shakespeare no doubt read and
remembered it.96
Shakespeare also read some Vergil at school, but apparently only
the early books, as elementary Latin pupils still do. The descriptions
of the fall of Troy in Lucrece, 1366 , mdHamlet, z,z. 4Si ,
11 . SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS 217
are partly modelled on, partly exaggerated from Aeneas account
in Aeneid^ z ; and the line with which Aeneas begins that famous
history

You bid me, queen, renew a grief unspeakable

is echoed at the opening of The Comedy of Errors:
A heavier task could not have been imposed
Than I to speak my griefs unspeakable.^^
That standard text-book, Caesars Gallic Waror at least the
part dealing with Britain (a suitable selection for English beginners)
was also known to Shakespeare. In 2 Henry old Lord Say,
attempting to persuade Jack Cade and his Kultur-Bolsheviks that
they should not lynch him, quotes it
;
Kent, in the Commentaries Caesar writ.
Is termed the civilst place of all this isle.
Of Livy, Shakespeare knew at least the first book, with the story
of Tarquin and Lucrece.^^
From other classical authors, he seems to have known only a few
memorable passages. For instance, when Brutus is facing his
doom, he cries
O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!
Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.^
Apparently this is an echo of the opening lines of Lucans poem on
the civil war:^^
a mighty nation,
its conquering hand against its vitals turned.
Like everyone in the Renaissance, Shakespeare brings in scientific
and other information from Plinys Natural History^ but without
naming its author. And when Polonius accosts Hamlet, and asks
him what he is reading, the bitter reply:
Slanders, sir : for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey
beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and
plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with
most weak hams

points to only one satirical rogue known to us : the Roman Juvenal,

whose tenth satire contains a terrible description of the ugliness
2i8 11. SHAKESPEARFS CLASSICS
and weakness of old age.^o^ Slight as these and other such reminiscences
are, they show Shakespeares liking for the classics, his
sensitive ear, his retentive memory, and the transforming magic of
his eloquence. Others, like Jonson, stud their pages with quotation-
marks, and talk in italics. When Shakespeares characters
speak, only the pedants quote : the rest speak from the fullness of
their own heart, and of his.
Shakespeare was an Englishman of the Renaissance. It was a
wonderful timescarcely less wonderful than the worlds great
ages of Greece and Rome which returned again in it. One of the
vital events which then gave vigour to mens minds and depth to
their souls was the rebirth of classical culture. It was not the only
such event. There were revolutions, explorations, and discoveries
in many other regions distant, although not utterly alien, from it.
But it was one of the most important : for it was a revolution of the
mind. Like all sensitive and educated men, Shakespeare shared
in its excitements. It was one of his great spiritual experiences.
True, England was more important to him; and so was the social
life of contemporary Europe, with its subtleties, its humours, and
its villainies ; and most important of all was humanity. But he was
not the unschooled poet of nature. For him great books were an
essential part of life.
He had a fair introduction to the Latin language, not enough to
make him a scholar, not enough to allow him to read it fluently, but
enough to lead him (like Chaucer and Keats) to love Greek and
Roman myth, poetry, and history. He lived among men who knew
and admired classical literature, and he learnt from them. His
first books were adaptations of Greco-Roman originals, affectionately
elaborated and sumptuously adorned by his superb imagination.
Until late in his career he continued to read and use
translations of Greek and Latin books ; twelve of his forty works
(and those among the greatest) dealt with themes from classical
antiquity; and classical imagery was an organic part of his poetry
from first to last. Greek and Roman literature provided not only
the rhetorical and dramatic patterns which he and the other
Renaissance poets used, not only rich material to feed his imagina^
tion, but the challenge of noble humanity and of consummate art.
To that challenge many great souls in the Renaissance responded,
none more greatly than the man who had small Latin and less Greek.
12
THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
LYRIC POETRY
Songs are the simplest, commonest, and most natural kind of
poetry. The people of every nation, every little clan or county,
make up their own songs, and sing them to their own tunes, and
often dance with them. Songs need not all be gay. They and their
music can be sorrowful, or stately and severe. They need not always
make their hearers dance. But they must be meant for music;
and within the music must be felt the pulse of dancing, whether
the body dances like King David the Psalmist,^ or the heart alone.
(^yric poems are songs. They have developed out of the dancerhythms
and folk-melodies and verbal song-patterns worked out
by each people for itself. In the names of nearly every kind of
lyric we can hear singing or dancing. Ballad (like ballet) comes
from ballarey which means dance : so does the word ball, used
for a dancing-party. A sonnet is a sonetto, a little sound or song.
T)de and hymn are simply Greek words for song. Chorus means
round dance. Psalm and lyric are both harp-music.^
Lyric poetry becomes more intense and complex when it grows
away from music and the dance. If a song is not meant to be
danced, and yet has a strong rhythm, its emotion is usually heightened.
Everyone feels this with ballads. When a particular songpattern
becomes popular, and then, while being elaborated for the
sake of the words, subordinates or abandons its music, it usually
maizes up for that loss by having a rich verbal melody, with
intricately interwoven patterns of sound (such as rhyme), haunting
music of vowels and consonants, and phrases beautiful enough to
sing by themselves.
Every country can create its own songs, and some can develop
them into poetry. (For instance, ballads were produced all over
western Europe in the later Middle Ages, from Spain to Scotland,
from Germany to Iceland; not all, but some, grew into great
poems.) Certain nations, more gifted in self-expression than
others, made more numerous and beautiful patterns of song,
which were borrowed and copied by their neiglxbours. The Provencal
minstrels set not only France but Italy singing, and then the
220 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
other western countries. More than anyone else, the southern
French gave us rhyme. Although there are rhyming poems in
church Latin (from which the first rhymes in vernacular languages
may have come), there is no regular rhyme in classical Greek and
Latin poetry and none in Old English. It is not even essential in
English poetry, where the greatest writers rarely use it. But it has
given a perfectly new beauty to most of the finest European
poetry, from Dante to yesterday. Rhyme, with many of the patterns
based upon it, couplet, ballad, multiple-rhymed stanza, ^sonnet,
grew up in the later Middle Ages, spreading from country to
country in a springtime exuberance, song by song.^
Song and dance are so instinctive that we should not expect
modem lyric poetry, starting from them, to be deeply influenced
by the lyrics of Rome and Greece. After all, Greek and Roman
music has disappeared; we cannot see their lovely dancing; it is
difficult even to trace the rhjthms in their lyric poems, and
impossible to feel them to be as natural as our own dance songs,
like
It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino
or
O, my luves like a red, red rose,
Thats newly sprung in June.
All we have left of them now is the words: few even of the words.
Nearly all Greek and Roman lyric poetry was destroyed or allowed
to disappear during the Dark Ages. Sappho is lost, except for a
few scattered jewels. Nearly all Alcaeus is gone, and most of
Pindar, and all but a few^words of many more Greek poets whose
names we know from encyclopaedias and quotations. In Latin
we have four priceless books of Horace, some lyrics by Catullus,
the work of a few third-raters like Sidonius Apollinaris, and rare
anonymous gems like The Vigil of Venus, These poems are few*
altogether, and they are nearly all difficult to understand. In the
Middle Ages Greek lyric poetry was unknown to the west. Horace^s
^ odes were read by scholars, but seldom by poets and never by the
public. By the time the surviving Latin lyric poets were read more
widely and the remains of Greek lyric poetry began to be published,
every modern western country had its own lyrics well advanced
and still developing. Greco-Roman influence in this field was
therefore late, and only partially effective.
LYRIC POETRY 221
(Simple, private, emotional lyrics, voicing the pain of longing or
the joy of possession, the delight of spring or the violence of hate,
must be pure song^ They can borrow very little from the classics.
But when lyric poetry grows less private and more reflective, then
it can and often does enrich itself by subtilizations of thought,
elaborations of pattern, new devices of style and imagery, adapted
from Greco-Roman lyric and fused into a new alloy. |t was partly
under Latin and even more under Greek influence that the modern
European countries built up their formal lyric poetry; and to its
most prominent type they gave a Greek name, the ode.
The chief classical models for the modern formal lyric were
Pindar and Horace ; and then, far behind them, Anacreon (with his
imitators), the poets of the Greek Anthology, and Catullus.
Pindar was born about 522 b.c., was trained at Athens in music
and poetry, wrote hymns, songs of triumph, and festal lyrics all
his life with the greatest success, and died about 442.3 Coming
from the territory of Thebes, which lay a little apart from the full
current of Greek life and thought, he seems to belong to an age
earlier than the busy, revolutionary, thought-searching fifth
century. He is more, not less, intense. But his intensity is emotional
and aesthetic; in his poems we see few of the struggles and
triumphs of the intellect. His spiritual energy, however, is compellingly
strong, his power to see visions and to make them
intensely and permanently alive in a few speedy words is unsurpassed
in any poetry, and the inexhaustible wealth of his
vocabulary and sentence-structure makes readers (unless they
prefer prose to poetry) as excited as though his subjects equalled
his eloquence in greatness.
His surviving poems (apart from some fragments discovered
very recently) are four books of choral songs intended to celebrate
|the victories of athletes at the national sports festivals held every
year at the great shrines of Greece. They pay little or no attention
to the actual contests, and not much more to the personality of the
winner, unless he is a great ruler; but they glorify his family^both
for its past achievements (in which the victory is a unit) and for the
grand legends with which it is linked. Above all they exalt nobility of
every kind, social, physical, aesthetic, spiritual. These poems were
not recited, but sung by a large choir, with Pindars own music and a
beautiful intricate dance to intensify the effect of the superb words.
222 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
The two chief difficulties in understanding Pindar are not the
results of our own ignorance, or of our distance from him. They
have always existed. They troubled his readers in classical times.
Horace, himself a skilful and sensitive poet, felt them too.
The first difficulty is the actual structure of his poemstheir
metre and their pattern. They are of every kind of length, from a
trifle twenty-four lines long to a titan of just under 300. Being
dance-songs, they must be built up of repeated and varied
rhythmical units. But what are the units ? How are they repeated
and how are they varied ?
^^The odes are all divided into sections^groups of verses which
we might call stanzas.
In a few poems the stanzas are all exactly the same. Evidently
the dance here was a single complex evolution, repeated again and
again,
Most of the odes are in a form like A-Z-P: where A and Z are
two stanzas almost exactly equal, and P is a briefer, quieter stanza,
differently arranged but on a similar rhythmical basis. The same
A-Z-P pattern is then repeated throughout the poem. Here the
dancers apparently performed one figure (A), then retraced it (Z),
and then performed a closing movement (P) to complete that
section of the poei^ Or else, after dancing A and Z, they may have
stood still singing the closing group of verses (P). These units are
called, in Greek, strophe (.4), antistrophe (Z), and epode (P).
Poems built on a single stanza-pattern are called monostrophic
;
the A-Z-P poems triadic.
So far, good. But can these stanzas be broken down further

into verses or linesas a ballet can be dissected, not only into

movements, but into separate elements and subordinate figures.?
At this point scholars usually stopped, until the nineteenth century.
They saw the single or triple stanza-division (which they knew
from Greek tragedy, where the choruses sang and danced in
similar patterns), but they could not be sure of the component
units of each stanza. In the first editions of Pindar the stanzas
were chopped up into series of short lines, more or less by guesswork,
and their readers assumed that he wrote irregularly,
varying the length and pattern of his lines by caprice, and balancing
only stanza against stanza.
Scholars now know, however, that Pindar divided his stanzas
by breathing-spaces into verses, rh5rthmical units of varying length
LYRIC POETRY 223
and patternnot so much like the regular lines of a modern poem
as like the varying musical phrases that make up a 'romantic
symphonic poem. The verses in each stanza correspond to each
other almost exactly. In the A-Z-P pattern, the units composing
the A and Z stanzas correspond all through the poem; and the
units of the P stanzas correspond all through the poem.^
The result is more complex than most of our poetry, and much
more like our music. For instance, a sonnet is made up of fourteen
iambic lines, all ofthe same length within a syllable and all on exactly
the same rhythmical basis. The variety is produced by the rhymescheme,
which makes the lines interweave on a pattern like this:
a
h
a
h
c
d
C
d
e
/
g
e
f
g
The stanzas of Pindars odes, on the other hand, have no rhymes,
and they hardly ever have more than two lines the same in shape,
so that one stanza may look like this
a
a
b
c
bd
J' (shortened)
0
/
/
224 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
And then the same pattern will be echoed in the next stanza ; and
there will be a rhythmical kinship running through h, c, e,
and /, so that a few basic dance-movements can be felt pulsing
through them all despite their differences. If you read aloud one
of Pindars odes with a strong but fluent rhythmical beat, you will
sense behind it the intricately interweaving rhythm and music of
choir and ballet. The odes could even be set to music and sung
and danced, now that these patterns have been worked out by
devoted scholars ; but until the nineteenth century nothing of them
was known, except the broad stanza-grouping A-Z-P (with an
occasional A-A-A-A), built up out of metrical units irregular and
apparently haphazard in length and rhythm.
The second difficulty in Pindar has not yet been solved. This is
that no one can follow his train of thought. Horace, the calm,
restrained, elegant, enlightened Epicurean, said Pindars poetry
was like a torrent rushing down rain-swollen from the mountains,
overrunning its banks, boiling and roaring. ^ We feel its tremendous
power, we are excited and exalted and overwhelmed by its
speed and energy, it is useless to argue and analyse, we are swept
away as soon as we begin to read. True; but does it make
sense
In eras when reason was stronger than emotion or imagination,
people thought Pindar wrote like an inspired lunatic. He was a
madman like Blake, who sawfine visions and rammed them together
without sequence or even coherence, or filled in the intervals with
meaningless spouting. Malherbe called his poems balderdash,
galimatias
J
Boileau saw them as beautiful disorder. Horace felt
them to be imaginative energy uncontrolled, and he had read more
of Pindar than any modern man. Contemporary scholars have
constructed various schemes to make Pindars thought seem continuous.
An admirable recent book by Dr. Gilbert Norwood of
Toronto suggests that each poem is dominated by a single visual
imagea harp, a wheel, a ship at seasymbolizing the victor and
his family and circumstances. ^ Others have tried to link stanza
to stanza by finding repetitions of key-words and key-phrases at
key-points. I believe myself that it is not possible for us to find
either a continuous train of thought or a central imaginative
symbol or a series of allusive links in every one of Pindars odes.
The unity of each poem was created by the single, unique moment
LYRIC POETRY 225
of the festival for which it was written. The nation-wide contest,
the long training and aspiration, the myth of city or family that
inspired the victory, the glories of the earlier winners in the same
city or family, the crises of contemporary Greek history, the shrine
itself and its godall these excitements fused into one burning
glow which darted out a shower of brilliant images, leapt in a
white-hot spark across gaps unbridgeable by thought, passed
through a commonplace leaving it luminous and transparent,
melted a group of heterogeneous ideas into a shortlived unity, and,
as suddenly as a flame, died. It is difficult to recapture the full
significance even of Greek tragedy or early comedy, without the
acting, the scenic effects, the chorus, the dancing, the great
theatre, and the intense concentration of the Athenian audience.
In reading Pindars triumphal odes it is almost impossible to
understand them unless, simultaneously, we revive in our own
minds the high and unifying excitement created by the poetry and
the music and the dancing and the rejoicing city and the glorious
victor and the proud family and the ennobling legend. We have
nothing left but the words and a ghost of the dance. The thoughts
and images of Pindars poems do not always succeed each other in
logical sequence. They are chosen for their beauty and their
intensity and their boldness. They are often grouped by a process
like free association, and linked simply by contrast, by the poets
wish not to be logical, but to be nobly inconsequent, divinely
astonishing, as unique as the triumphal moment.
The greatest Roman lyricist, Horace (65-8 B.c.), said it was too
dangerous to try to rival Pindar. He wrote at a time when the
Greco-Roman world, still trembling with the fury and exhaustion
of generations of war and civil war, needed no excitement, no
audacity, no excess, but calm, moderation, thought, repose. His
odes were not composed for a single unique moment, but for
Rome and its long future. They are all in precisely arranged fourline
stanzas, or (less often) couplets. Unlike Pindars lyrics, they
fall into a comparatively small range of variations on traditional
line- and stanza-forms. The patterns which Horace prefers are
based on models created by the Greek lyric poets Alcaeus and
Sappho, who worked in the seventh and sixth centuries, several
generations earlier than Pindar, From them, too, he adopted a
number of themesalthough we cannot certainly tell how many,
SO76 Q
226 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
since nearly all they wrote has vanished. He could not copy
Sapphos deep intensity of emotion, nor the songs of fierce hatred
and riotous revelry which Alcaeus sometimes sang ; but he reproduced
and deepened Alcaeus political sensibility, the keen love of
nature felt by both Alcaeus and Sappho, something of their bold
independent individualism, and much of their delicate grace,
which produces eifects as surprising in their subtlety as Pindars
in their power.
After describing the dangers of emulating the dashing energy
of Pindar, Horace compares Pindar to a swan. For the Italians
this did not mean the mute placid beautiful creature which floats
somnolent on the lake, but the strong-winged loud-voiced bird
which in flight soars high above everything but the eagle. Why
not the eagle itself, the bird of Jove ? Probably because, although
a conqueror, the eagle is not a singer; it symbolizes power to be
feared more than beauty to be admired. Still, one of his followers
preferred to think of Pindar as the Theban eagle. Eagle or swan,
he flies too high (says Horace) for us to attempt to follow him on
man-made wings, without falling, like Icarus, into the sea.
I, Horace goes on, am like a bee, hard-working, flying near the
ground on short flights, gathering sweetness from myriads of
different flowers. Certainly the swan is stronger, more distinguished,
more beautiful ; but the bee makes honey, the substance
which is unique in the world, fragrant of innumerable blossoms,
and not only a food but a symbol of immortality. Rarely has one
poet contrasted his work and character so emphatically with that
of a great predecessor. ^3 The contrast is important, because it
images the division between the two most vital ideals of formal
lyric poetry in modern literature. Among the lyricists who follow
classical inspiration, consciously or unconsciously, some are descendants
of Pindar, some of Horace. The Pindarics admire passion,
daring, and extravagance. Horaces followers prefer reflection,
moderation, economy. Pindaric odes follow no pre-established
routine, but soar and dive and veer as the wind catches their wing.
Horatian lyrics work on quiet, short, well-balanced systems.
Pindar represents the ideals of aristocracy, careless courage and
the generous heart. Horace is a bourgeoiSy prizing thrift, care,
caution, the virtue of self-control. Even the music we can hear
through the odes of the two poets and their successors is different.
Pindar loves the choir, the festival, and the many-footed dance.
LYRIC POETRY 227
Horace is a solo singer, sitting in a pleasant room or quiet garden
with his lyre.
Characteristically, Horace often undervalued his own poems.
Brief, orderly, tranquil, meditative, they are less intense and
rhapsodical but deeper and more memorable than those of Pindar.
Cool but moving, sensitive but controlled, elusive but profound,
they contain more phrases of unforgettable eloquence and wisdom
than any other group of lyrics in European literature.
Inspiration and reflection; passion and planning; excitement
and tranquillity ; heaven-aspiring flight and a calm cruise near the
ground. These are not only differences between two individuals
or two schools of lyric poetry. They are the distinguishing marks
of two aesthetic attitudes which have characterized (and sometimes
over-emphasized) two different ways of making poetry, music,
painting, oratory, prose fiction, sculpture, and architecture. Detach
Pindar and Horace from their background, and read them as
poets in their own right. Pindar, the bold victor who sang with
the same conquering energy that possessed his own heroes, who
made his own medium, who dominated the past and future by the
comet-like intensity of his moment, is he not romantic'
}
Horace,
the man who ran away in the civil war, the ex-slave's son who
worked his way up to become the friend of an emperor, the poet
who built his monument syllable by syllable as carefully as bees
build their honeycomb, the apostle of thought, care, self-control,
is he not classical'
}
The distinction has often been misapplied. 0.11 Greco-Roman
literature and all its imitations and adaptations in modem languages
have been called classical'. Modern literature which shuns
regular forms, which is conceived as a revolt against tradition,
which gives full and free expression to the personality of the writer,
which values imagination more than reason and passionate emotion
more than self-restraint, has been called romantic' and very often
anti-classical^ The distinction between the two attitudes to art
is useful enough, although it tends to make us forget that there are
many others. But it is a dangerous mistake to call one classical'
and the other anti-classical', and to assume that all Greco-Roman
literature with its modem descendants is classical' in this sense.
It is painful to hear such a poet as Shelley described as romantic',
when romantic is taken to mean turning away from Greek and
Latin literary tradition' : for very few great English poets have
228 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
loved Greco-Roman literature more deeply or understood it
better.^^ And it ruins our appreciation of Greco-Roman literature,
of which a lame and important part is tensely emotional and boldly
imaginative. (The word classical simply means first-class, good
enough to be used as a standard ; and by derivation it came in the
Renaissance to be a general description for all Greek and Latin
literatur^ It is still employed in that sense at those universities
which have a Chair of Classics or profess fitudes Classiques ; and
in this book it has been used to mean that, and nothing more.^^
Pindar and Horace, then, are both classical poetsin the sense
that they belong to the same literary tradition, the tradition which
sprang from Greece and grew through Rome. But in many of
their aims and methods they are quite different ; and much of the
greatest modern lyric poetry can be best understood as following
the practice of one or the other. There are bold exuberant freepatterned
odes, which derive from Pindar. There are brief,
delicately moulded lyrics, seriously meditative or ironically gay,
which derive from Horace. And in the work of some poets we
meet both styles. Milton produced both Pindaric odes and
Horatian sonnets. Ronsard began by soaring up with Pindar,
and then, with Horace, relaxed. This is possible because the two
attitudes are not polar antitheses. After all, both Pindar and
Horace were lyric poets ; Pindar, for all his excitement, kept a firm
control of his language and thought; Horace, though usually
restrained, sometimes breaks into plangent grief or daring imagery.
Therefore the two schools, Pindaric and Horatian, are not
opponents, but complements and sometimes allies.
Other Greek poets, and one other Roman, were admired by
modern lyricists, but much less than Pindar and Horace. The most
famous of these Greeks was Anacreon, who sang of love, wine, and
gaiety in the sixth century B.c. Nearly all his poems have been
lost; but a certain number of lyrics on the same range of subjects,
written by later imitators, survived and for some time passed
under his name. To them we owe many pleasant little images of
the lighter aspects of life, frail pleasure or fleeting melancholy:
youth as a flower which should be plucked before it withers, love
not an overmastering daemon but a naughty Cupid. In form, the
Anacreontics (as the imitators are called) were simple and easy and
singable. {The Star-Spangled Banner was written to the tune of a
LYRIC POETRY 229
modern Anacreontic song called Anacreon in Heaven,) They are
slight things, but charming. For instance
In the middle of the night-time,
when the Bear was turning slowly
round the hand of the bright Keeper,
came a knocking, came a tapping; and when the poet opened his
door, there entered, not a raven, but a little boy with a bow. The
poet warmed and sheltered him; in return, after he had dried his
bowstring, he fitted a sharp arrow to it, and . .
There was also the Greek Anthology, an enormous collection
of epigrams and short lyrics on every conceivable subject, from
almost every period of Greek literature. It contains a vast quantity
of trash, some skilful journeyman work, and a surprising number
of real gems : small, but diamonds. Some of our poets have been
indebted to it in developing the modern epigram, ^nd many of its
themes were taken up, partly through the Renaissance Latin poets
and in part directly, into the sonnets and lesser lyrics of France,
Italy, England, and other countries.^
^
Catullus, who belonged to the generation before Horace and
lived a life as short and passionate as his own poems, left a handful
of love-lyrics which have never been surpassed for intensity of
feeling and directness of expression. Every lover should know the
greatest
:
I hate and love. You ask how that can be?
I know not, but I feel the agony.^^
Some, like the poems on Lesbias pet sparrow, are gay, easy, and
colloquial. Others are epigrams and lyrics forged out of white-hot
pain and passion, yet with perfect craftsmanship. Most of them
are too great to copy, but modem poets have adapted some of the
themes, and sometimes disciplined themselves by emulating
Catullus rapidity and his truth.
^ong before the Renaissance began, lyric poetry already existed
in Europe. Proven9al, French, Italian, English, German, Spanish
poets had made song-patterns of much beauty and intricacy.
Perhaps in the very beginning the songs of the vernacular languages
had grown out of the Latin hymns of the church; but they soon
left behind any link with the parent language. Therefore, when
Pindar and Horace and the other classical lyric poets were
230 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
rediscovered, the discovery did not create modern lyric poetry. It
was not like the theatre, where the emergence of Greek and Latin
comedy and tragedy was a complete revelation of hitherto
undreamed-of forms and creative possibilities. Poets who already
commanded the rhyme royal, the sonnet in its various shapes,
ottava rima, and many more complex stanza-forms scarcely needed
to borrow many patterns from the classics.
(^hat they did borrow was, first of all, thematic material. Not
the broad subjects^love and youth and the fear of death and the
joy of life^but a number of clear and memorable attitudes to the
subjects of lyric poetry, images or turns of thought that made them
more vivid ; and, of course, the whole range of imagery supplied
by Greco-Roman myth. More important, they enriched their
language on the model of Pindars and Horaces odes, taking it
farther away from plain prose and from conventional folk-song
phraseology. And in their eagerness to rival the classics, they
made their own lyrics more dignified, less colloquial and song-like
(with a tra-la-la and a hey nonino), more ceremonial and hymnlike.
This was the most important change that classical influence
brought into modern lyric: a graver, nobler spirit. To mark these
debts and their general kinship with the classics, the Renaissance
lyric poets frequently copied or adapted the verse forms of Pindar,
Horace, and the others ; and, for more ambitious and serious lyrics,
they chose the name ode'^^
^t is a Greek word, meaning song^ brought into modern speech
through its Latin form oda. Neither Pindar nor Horace used it as
a name for their poems, but it is so firmly linked with them now,
and so clearly indicates their qualities of loftiness and formality,
that it can scarcely be abandoned. Many modern lyrics are songs,
written for the^noment. An ode is a song in the classical manner,
written for eternity^
PINDAR
Horace was known throughout the Middle Ages, although
seldom imitated in the vernacular languages.^^ Pindar was unknown;
and his poetry was stranger, more brilliant and violent.
Therefore, when he was rediscovered, he made a deeper impact on
the Renaissance poets. The modern formal lyric became, and
remained, more Pindaric than Horatian. The first edition of
Pindars odes was printed at Venice by the great publisher Aldus
LYRIC POETRY 231
in 1513. Educated men already knew Horaces admiring reference
to Pindars unapproachable loftiness.^^ xhis was a challenge, and
the Renaissance poets were not men to refuse it.
The earliest vernacular imitations of Pindar were in Italian.
Probably the hymns of Luigi Alamanni (published at Lyons in
^ 53^~3) have priority.^^ the loudest and boldest answer to the
challenge of Pindars style and reputation came from France a
few years later, and made the name of Pierre de Ronsard,
the first who in all France
had ever Pindarized.^^
Ronsard was born in the Loire country in 1524. Like Chaucer
and Ercilla,25 he was a royal page, and in his early manhood
travelled abroad in the kings service. One of his young companions
infected him with enthusiasm for Vergil and Horace, and
while still in his teens he began to write love-poems on themes
drawn from the classics.^^ But a serious illness, which made him
partly deaf, debarred him from continuing a diplomatic and courtly
career. Aged twenty-one, he determined to turn to poetry and
classical learningfor the two were then, in the expanding
Renaissance, almost indissolubly allied. He had already had the
good fortune to find an excellent teacher, Jean Dorat, and followed
him to the College de Coqueret, a small unit of the university of
Paris. Dorat (c. 1502-88) was one of the many superb teachers,
with a strong but winning personality, learning both wide and
deep, a mind constantly in pursuit of new beauties, and a sensitive
literary taste, who helped to create the Renaissance and its literature.^'
He was the formative influence, while Ronsard and his
young friends were the energy and the material, of the group of
poets who rebelled against the traditional standards of French
poetry and proclaimed revolution in ideals and techniques. They
called themselves the Pleiade, after the group of seven stars which
join their light into a single glow.^^
The revolution preached by the Pleiade was neither so violent
as they believed nor so successful as they hoped. It was, nevertheless,
important enough. In a sentence, it amounted to a closer
synthesis between French poetry and Greco-Latin literature, the
two meeting on an equal basis. Its three chief landmarks were:
the publication of The Defence and Ennoblement of the French
Language by Ronsards friend Joachim Du Bellay in 1 549
232 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
the appearance of Ronsards The First Four Books of the Odes
in 1550;
the staging of Jodelles Captive Cleopatra and Eugene in
1552.30
As young men do, the Pleiade issued extravagant claims to
originality, heaped contempt on their predecessors, and made
daring experiments from which they later recoiled. But in the
main they were right, and successful.
Du Bellays thesis was this. It is unpatriotic for a Frenchman
to write in Latin. It is an admission of inferiority for a Frenchman
to write in French without trying to equal the grandest achievements
of Greek and Latin literature. Therefore French poetry
should loot the Roman city and the Delphic temple^ raising the
literature of France to a higher power by importing into it themes,
myths, stylistic devices, all the beauty of Greece and Rome.^i
Abandon the old medieval mystery-plays and morality-plays. But
also abandon the idea of writing plays in Latin. Write tragedies and
comedies as fine as those of the classical dramatists, but in French.
Abandon the old-style French lyrics, leave them to provincial
festivals and folk-gatherings : they are vulgar*. 3^ But also abandon
the idea of writing lyrics in Latin or Greek.33 Write odes still
unknown to the French muse containing all that makes Pindar
great, but in French.
Du Bellay was right. Nationalism narrows culture; extreme
classicism desiccates it. To enrich a national literature by bringing
into it the strength of the continent-wide and centuries-ripe culture
to which it belongs is the best way to make it eternally great. This
can be proved both positively and negatively in the Renaissance.
It was this synthesis of national and classical elements that produced,
in England, Shakespeares tragedies and the epics of
Spenser and Milton. It was the same synthesis in France that,
after a period of experiment, produced the lyrics of Ronsard, the
satires of Boileau, the dramas not only of Racine and Corneille
but of Moliere. It was the failure to complete such a synthesis that
kept the Germans and certain other nations from producing any
great works of literature during the sixteenth century, "and made
them spend their efforts either on imitating other nations, writing
folk-songs and folk-tales, or composing faded elegances in faded
Latin.
Ronsard and his friends claimed that he was the first Frenchman
LYRIC POETRY 233
to write odes, and even to use the word ode. The brilliant investigations
of M. Laumonier and others have made it quite clear that,
as his opponents pointed out at the time, he invented neither the
word nor the thing. The word ode had been used in both French
and current Latin years before Ronsard started writing; and the
(actual invention of the French ode is due to Clement Marot quite
as much as to Ronsard^^^ It is not even clear whether, as he
declared, Ronsard was the first of his group to write odes in the
manner of Pindar. 35
What is absolutely certain is that Ronsard was the founder of
elevated lyric poetry on classical models, not only for France, but
for all modern Europe. He achieved this by the bold step of
publishing a huge single collection of ninety-four odes all at once.
The First Four Books of the Odes. This act he conceived as rivalry
with Pindar (who left four books of triumphal odes containing
forty-four poems) 3 ^ and Horace (who left four books of odes, 103
poems in all, but on the average much shorter than Ronsard's),
and as the annunciation of a new trend in French poetry. Although
he drew subjects and models for these poems not only from Pindar
but from Horace, and Anacreon, and many other sources both
within and without classical lyric, the most striking and ambitious
of his odes were written in rivalry with Pindar, 3 7 and with them we
can begin a survey of Pindaric odes in modem literature.
Horace said that following Pindars flight was like soaring on
artificial wings, and was apt to end in a spectacular failure. 3 8 Did
Ronsard succeed?
Pindars odes deal with victories at the Olympic and other
national games. Ronsard tried to find subjects even nobler. The
first one in book i, for instance, praises King Henri II for concluding
a successful peace with England, and the sixth glorifies
Francois de Bourbon on the victory of Cerisoles. But most of
them were written for a friend or a patron with no particular
occasion to celebrate, and are merely encomia. Therefore the
sense of exultation and immediate triumph which swept through
Pindars victory odes is often absent from Ronsards, and is replaced
by an elaborate but sometimes frigid courtesy.
In power of imagination and richness of style, Ronsard falls far
below Pindar. His sentences are straightforward, often coming
very close to rhyming prose. Often enough their meaning is
234 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
obscure, because he felt that, to be a poet like Pindar, he must
cultivate the dark profundity of an oracle. He usually achieved
this, however, not by writing sentences in which every word is
charged with deep significance, their order too is meaningful, and
whole phrases contain many different layers of thought, through
which the reader must slowly penetrate ; but by using lofty periphrases
and alluding to strange myths, all of which become quite
clear as soon as one recognizes the reference. The sentences
themselves are far simpler and less various than those of Pindar.
His vocabulary is neat and pretty (with an unfortunate passion for
diminutives, which he owed to Marullus), but, apart from proper
names, seldom has anything comparable with the blazing newforged
compounds and the white-hot poetical words of Pindar.
The myths he introduces are far from being flat and conventional.
Some are deliberately abstruse. Some are as rich as a Renaissance
tapestry. Odes^ i. lo contains a fine, and largely original, description
of the birth of the Muses, their presentation to their
father Jupin, their song of the battle between the Gods and the
Titans, and the power with which Jupiter rewarded them. Such
myths are not pedantic. But they are not heroic. They have not
Pindars burning intensity. They contain no pictures like Pindars
lightning-flash vision of the maiden Gyrene straining motionless
in combat with a lion;^ and we feel that Ronsard could not see
such things, because his eyes were not opened.
Ronsards Pindaric odes are divided into strophes, antistrophes,
and epodes. In itself this is uselessly artificial, since they were not
meant to be sung by a choir and danced. The stanzas are made up
of blocks of short lines, mostly varying between six and nine
syllables from poem to poem. Each stanza is practically uniform
;
there is none of Pindars ebb and flow. The rhymes are usually
arranged in couplets interspersed among quatrains. What is most
important is this : nearly every stanza is hermetically sealed off, to
form one group of sentences without carry-over; and within each
stanza the sense nearly always stops at the line-ending, and seldom
elsewhere. This is far more limited and hampered than the style
of Pindar, whose thought flows on from line to line, stanza to stanza,
triad to triad, without necessarily pausing at any point not dictated
by the sense, until the end of the poem. Evidently Ronsard still
has the little two-forward-and-two-back rhythms of the folk-dance
running in his head. That epitomizes the differences between his
LYRIC POETRY 235
odes and those of Pindar. Ronsards are a simpler, more naive,
thinner, less melodious imitation of a rich, polyphonic, warmly
orchestrated lyrical work.
In 1551 Ronsard gave up the attempt to rival Pindar. In fact he
had neither the character nor the environment which would enable
him to become a second Pindar; he was too soft, and his public
too shallow. In the odes he often refers to his attempt to copy
Homer and Vergil in a plaster cast of the Aeneid^ called The
Franciad\^^ but his soul was not deep enough and strong enough
to enable him to complete such a task, and he abandoned it after
four books. In the same way, he gradually dropped the manner
and matter of Pindar, and returned to the poet whom he had once
boasted of surpassing.^^ He abandoned the A-Z-P arrangement
in strophe, antistrophe, and epode, and took to writing in couplets
and little four-line and six-line stanzas. His tone became quieter,
melancholy instead of heroic, frivolous instead of triumphant. He
boasted less often of playing a Theban string, and turned towards
the softer, more congenial music of Horace, Anacreon,^3 and the
Greek Anthology.
Still, his attempt, and the supporting work of the Pleiade, were
not useless. He set French lyric poetry free from the elaborate
stanza-forms in which a very few rhymes, difficultly interwoven,
confined the poets thought.44 He shook off much of the heritage
of folk-song, which had originally been natural and had become
conventional and jejune. He and his brother-stars in the Pleiade
added many valuable words and stylistic devices to the French
language, from their study of Greek and Latin poetry. He showed
that French lyric could be noble, and thoughtful, and equal in
majesty to the greatest events it might choose to celebrate.
The Italian Ronsardor, as he hoped, the Italian Pindar^was
Gabriello Chiabrera (1552-1638), whose epitaph, written by Pope
Urban VIII, boasted that he was the first to fit Theban rhythms
to Tuscan strings, following the Swan of Dirce (Pindar) on bold
wings which did not fail, and that, like his great fellow-townsman
Columbus, he found new worlds of poetry .45 la his youth
Chiabrera was made enthusiastic for the study and emulation of
classical literature by association with Paulus Manutius, son of the
publisher Aldus, and by hearing the lectures of Marc-Antoine
236 12, THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
Mxiret, the brilliant friend and commentator of Ronsard. His
Pindaric poems are partly independent creations, but partly
modelled on those of Ronsard and the poetry of the Pleiade.^^ They
are only a small proportion of his large output, which includes
several epics, dramas, pastorals, and musical dramas (opera
libretti written in an attempt to re-create the true effect of the
combination of music and words in Greek tragedy). His Heroic
Poems {flanzoni eroiche) contain about a hundred odes, of which
twelve are divided like Pindars into strophes, antistrophes, and
epodes. They are all composed in stanzas of six, eight, ten, and
sometimes more than ten lines. The lines are uneven in length,
sometimes having three beats, or four, or five. The rhymes are
unevenly distributed : a typical pattern being ahab cddc efefA"^ So
both rhythm and rhyme are irregularly balanced; but the pattern
struck out in the first stanza is carefully preserved in all the others.
The general effect is therefore quite like that of Pindars odes,
except that the turning triadic movement of the dance is lost.
The few triadic poems run in shorter, simple stanzas.
Chiabrera had genuine victories to celebrate. He wrote a number
of these poems after naval battles in which the galleys of Florence
played a successful part against the Turks, enslaving Turkish
prisoners and liberating Christian slaves. However, neither in
them nor in his numerous poems glorifying various Italian
dignitaries of state and church did he achieve anything like Pindars
volcanic blaze: only a mild and pleasing warmth. The besetting
sin of baroque poetry is already traceable in his poemsthe habit
of introducing a classical allusion not to support and add beauty
to the poets own invention, but as a substitute for imagination.
The odes are crowded with Greco-Roman deities and myths,
Apollo and the Muses, the tears of Aurora for Memnon, the beams
of bright Phoebus, and the roars of the Titans ; yet Chiabrera puts
them in, not because they excite him, but because they are expected.
The melody of his odes is very charming, for he is skilful at interweaving
rhyme and rhythm, but they do not sound so much like
Pindars triumphal odes as like gracefully elaborated Italian
canzoni. Like Ronsard, whom he admired and strove to emulate,
Chiabrera was really a songster.
^^he word ode was introduced into English in Shakespeares
time. For Shakespeare it meant a love-poem. He used it to describe
LYRIC POETRY 237
one in Lovers Labour Lost^^^ and in As You Like It Rosalind
complains that her lover (true to one of the conventions of pastoral)
is carving Rosalind on the tree-trunks, hanging odes upon hawthorns
and elegies upon brambles Spensers exquisite Epithalamion
is not a Pindaric ode, despite its metrical complexity:
apparently it is a blend of the Italian canzone with Catullus
wedding-poems. The earliest extant English poem actually called
an ode is an address to the Muses printed in the introduction of
Thomas Watsons e/caro/x-Tra^ta, or Passionate Century ofLove^ and
signed by one C. Downhalus (1582) : it is a pleasant little piece in
six-line stanzas, but very far from the Pindaric pattern.
The first actual imitations of Pindar in English came two years
later. They were in Pandora^ published in 1584 by John Southern.
The book contains three odes and three odellets. The first ode,
addressed to the earl of Oxford, promises to capture the spoyle of
Thebes and cries
:
Vaunt us that never man before,
Now in England, knewe Pindars string, so
However, Southern does not really know Pindars string ; he is
roughly and ignorantly copying Ronsard.s^ His odes are merely
poems in a regular four-beat rhythm, arranged in couplets and
quatrains and divided into stanzas called strophes, antistrophes, and
epodes^but not even keeping the A-Z-P Pindaric pattern which
Ronsard understood and followed. Southerns sole importance is
historical. Even at that it is not very great, for his imitation of
Pindar was only an ignorant copy of the work of another imitator:
-
The first truly Pindaric poem in English is one of the greatest.
This is Miltons prelude and hymn On the Morning of Chrisfs
Nativity^ which he began on Christmas morning, 1629. Not long
before, he had bought a copy of Pindar: it is now in Harvard
University Library, and shows by its annotations how carefully
he read it.^^ After a short preludein which he calls on the
Heavenly Muse to give the poem as a Christmas present to Jesus

Milton breaks into a rich, powerful, and beautiful descriptive

hymn in a regular succession of eight-line stanzas. The lines are
of irregular length, rhyming aahcchdd and rising to a final alexandrine.
The hymn is therefore not written in triads like most of
Pindars odes. What enables us to call it Pindaric is the dancing
238 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
metre with its controlled asymmetry, the vivid imagery, and, most
of all, the splendid strength and vividness of the myths, both the
dying deities of Greece and Rome
:
In consecrated earth,
And on the holy hearth,
The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint
and the glorious new spirits of Christianity, visiting the earth to
celebrate the incarnation of God:
The helmM cherubim
And sworded seraphim
Are seen in glittering ranks with wings displayed.
At last, a modern pupil of Pindar, meditating on the greatest
theme in Christian thought, and using all the eloquence and
imagination with which both classical antiquity and biblical
learning had endowed him, had achieved an even stronger and
loftier flight than the eagle of Thebes.
Ben Jonson also attempted the Pindaric vein, with interesting
and original results. In the same year as Milton wrote his Pindaric
hymn on Christmas, Jonson completed his Ode on the Death of
Sir H. Morison, s 3 This is actually built in the triadic form A-Z-P
;
and, although the rhymes are arranged in couplets in the Turn and
counter-turn, and not much more elaborately in the stand, the
lines are so widely varied in length and so skilfully married to the
meaning that the effect is broader, more Pindaric, than the rather
operatic stanzas of Chiabrera, and more thoughtful than the lilting
odes of Ronsard. And yet, the thoughtfulness, the slow pace, the
frequent epigrams (more spacious than Pindars brief aphorisms),
are really derived from Jonsons favourite poet Horace. One
famous stanza will show the free form and the meditative tone
:
It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere
:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures, life may perfect be.
LYRIC POETRY 239
This, then, is the first of many great modern odes in which the
styles of the two great classical lyricists, Pindar and Horace,
interpenetrate to form a new beauty.
(The modern ode was created very slowly, after many failures. In
these two poems of Milton and Jonson it was newly born. We can
now attempt to define it. In modem literature an ode is a poem
combining personal emotion with deep meditation on a subject of
wide scope or broad public interest. It is short enough to express
one emotion in a single movement, but long enough to develop
a number of different aspects of that emotion. It is either addressed
to one person (human or superhuman) or evoked by one occasion
of particular significance. Its moving force is emotion more than
intellect; but the emotional excitement is tempered, and its
expression arranged, by intellectual reflection. The emotion of
the ode is stirred and sustained by one or more of the nobler and
less transient events of human life, particularly those in which
temporary and physical facts are transfigured by the spiritual and
eternal. The interplay ofthe emotions and reflections which make its
material is reflected in the controlled irregularity of its verse-form.
Who now reads Cowley?* asked Pope, adding
Torgot his epic, nay Pindaric art.s^
Abraham Cowley (1618-67) was a precocious and talented poet
who claimed to be the inventor of the English Pindaric ode, and for
a long time imposed this claim upon the public. His rhapsodic
odes (published in 1656) were indeed directly suggested by his
study of Pindar ; and he said in his preface that he tried to write,
not exactly as Pindar wrote, but as he would have written if he had
been writing in English (and, by implication, in the seventeenth
century). He was rightly determined not to make a plaster cast,
but to re-create and rival. Therefore he abandoned Pindar's
triadic form and replaced it by irregular verse, without even the
stanzaic regularity of Milton's and Jonson's odes. If it had not
been rhymed and had not possessed a certain basic pulse, we should
now call it free verse. This, however, was not Cowley's invention.
Madrigals in free asymmetrical patterns, bound together only by
vague rhyme-schemes, were common before his day; Milton him-
^.self, Vaughan, and Crashaw had already published more serious
240 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
poems in equally free forms, If Cowley made any innovation,
it was in using a free form, not to follow the ebb and flow of song,
but to represent the gush and lapse and swell of emotional excitement.
The real effect of his work was to make the concept of a
Pindaric ode, in which the poets emotion masters him and is
imaged in the irregular metre, familiar to English poets and their
readers. His poems themselves are negligible.
Ode means song. Poets knew this, in the Renaissance and the
baroque age : they endeavoured to enhance the beauty of their odes
by having them set to a musical accompaniment, or by making
them reproduce, in words, the movement and harmony of music.
Those who wrote Horatian lyrics, if they thought of music,
usually designed their work for one singer, or at most a small
group.56 But with its broad sweep and surging emotion, the
Pindaric ode was fully able to reproduce or to evoke the music
of a choir and an orchestra.
In a very early ode of this kind Milton emphasizes the juncture
of poetry and music
:
Blest pair of sirens, pledges of heavens joy,
Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse,
Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power employ.
And he goes on to describe the eternal music of heaven, where the
bright seraphim and cherubim are the orchestra, and the blessed
souls sing everlastingly to their music. He does not, however,
attempt to echo musical sounds in his own beautiful lines.57
The first English opera {The Siege of Rhodes) was performed in
1656, and, after the Restoration, English musical taste turned
eagerly towards the new Italian musichighly emotional yet
extremely dignified, gorgeously decorative and often quite unreal,
In 1683 the London Musical Society inaugurated annual performances
of musical odes in honour of the patron of music, St.
Cecilia. Purcell himself set the first. In 1687 John Dryden produced
a technical masterpiece, his Song for St, CedlicHs Day^ to
be set by the Italian composer Draghi. Beginning with a reminiscence
of Ovid, proceeding to a combination of biblical and pagan
musicology, then evoking the sound of trumpets, drums, flutes,
violins, and the organ, it ends with a Grand Chorus on the Last
Judgement.
LYRIC POETRY 241
This was little more than a skilful trick; but ten years later
Dryden changed skill into art, and wrote, for the same occasion,
Alexander'*s Feast It was a great success. Dryden thought it the
best poem he had ever writ ; and long afterwards it was splendidly
reset by Handel.
This was only one, although the greatest, of the many musical
Pindaric odes written in the baroque period. They are Pindaric in
the studied irregularity which reflects their connexion with music
(and of course in much else beside^in their use of myths, their
loftiness of language, &c.) ; but where Pindar designed his poems
for the dance, these odes are written for orchestra and stationary
singers. (I have sometimes thought that the Horatian odes with
their musical settings find their best parallel in the fugue, the
Pindaric odes like Alexanders Feast in the grand toccatas and
chaconnes which Bach wrote to test the fullest powers of his own
art, and the odes of the revolutionary period in the symphony.)
A recent writer has distinguished four classes of these works

sacred odes, cantata odes, occasionaF or laureate odes, and odes

for St. Cecilias Dayand has worked out from contemporary
criticisms and parodies (such as Swifts Cantata) the qualities
which were considered necessary to make a good musical ode.s9
Clearly it was a difficult art, but^like opera and oratorioan art
in which success was much hoped for and highly rewarded.
Contemporary poets have made few attempts to marry their poems
to music in this way, and the most moving recent works have been
made by blending new music with literature already accepted:
Coplands Lincoln Portrait and Vaughan Williamss Serenade for
Music,
CThe greatest lyricist of the eighteenth century did not write
a Pindaric ode for music. Instead, he wrote a Pindaric ode which
contained music, the music not only of the orchestra but of
nature:
The rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar

the light dance of spirits and the floating grace of Venus herself.
Grays Progress of Poesy begins and ends with an allusion to
Pindar, and, with true Pindaric dignity, sets Gray himself in the
direct line of mighty poets with Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden.
Perhaps, as a Bard, he could foresee his successors, Keats and
Wordsworth and Shelley.
5076 R
242 12. i'tlE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
Most of the Pindaric odes written in the baroque period were
not musical but ceremonial. With the aid of Pindar, poets celebrated
the births, marriages, and deaths of the nobility and gentry
;
the accessions, coronations, birthdays, jubilees, and victories of
monarchs; the founding of a society, the announcement of an
invention, the construction of a public building, any public event
that expressed the pomp and circumstance of the age. The result
was exactly as Horace had predicteda series of spectacular,
bombastic failures. More bad poems have been written in the
intention of rivalling Pindar than in any other sphere of classical
imitation. True poets are genuinely inspired by their subjects:
energy and eloquence are breathed into them, they are excited,
mastered, dominated, they miist write. Their problem is to control
their emotions, and to direct them to the point of maximum
expressiveness. But mediocre poets are not overwhelmed by their
subjects, not even excited by them. They try, therefore, to borrow
the themes and expressions of true poetic excitement from some
other poet who was deeply moved and memorably eloquent. With
the best available wax, and selected high-grade feathers, they
construct artificial wings, launch themselves off into the azure air
in pursuit of Pindar, the Theban eagle, and fall into the deep, deep
bog of bathos with a resounding flop.
It was particularly difficult to be truly Pindaric in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Pindar lived in an age abounding
in great poets, where prose, and the type of thought best expressed
in prose, were not yet fully developed. The baroque period was an
era of orderly thought, measured prose, and cool, symmetrical
verse. Even the lyrics of such an age usually chime with all the
regularity and less than the harmony of church bells. The distinction
between ordinary common sense and emotional excitement,
whatever its cause, was then marked by a broad, almost impassable
frontier. Therefore the poets who announced that they felt
themselves transported by Pindaric excitement convinced neither
themselves nor their audience nor posterity.
What wise and sacred drunkenness
This day overmasters me ?
cries Boileau ; but he knows perfectly well that he is stone sober,
and determined to write a Pindaric ode.^
Even if the baroque poets had been capable of feeling and
LYRIC POETRY 243
expressing genuine enthusiasm, the subjects of their Pindaric odes
were seldom such as to generate it. That is the fatal defect of
occasionaF poetry. Pindar loved the great games, the handsome
youths striving against one another, the horses and the chariots
and the shouting crowds. Countless baroque poets were personally
quite indifferent to the marriage of His Serene Highness or the
erection of a new Belvedere in his lordships grounds, but made
odes on such subjects as a matter of duty. Boileau, who detested
war, wrote an ode on the capture of Namur. The results of the
spurious excitement produced by poets labouring their wits on
tasks like these are painful to the lover of literature, unless he has
a hypertrophied sense of humour. If he has, he may even collect
some of the finer examples, such as Edward {Night Thoughts)
Youngs panegyric on international trade
:
Is merchant an inglorious name ?
No; fit for Pindar such a theme;
Too great for me; I pant beneath the weight.
If loud as Ocean were my voice.
If words and thoughts to court my choice
Outnumbered sands, I could not reach its height.
Kings, merchants are in league and love.
Earths odours pay soft airs above,
That oer the teeming field prolific range.
Planets are merchants; take, return,
Lustre and heat; by traffic burn;
The whole creation is one vast Exchange.
When Shadwell was made Poet Laureate in 1688, and began
the practice of producing annual birthday odes for the king,
he initiated a long, heavy tradition of laureate poetry in which
inspiration was replaced by perspiration.
Truly great Pindaric odes unite strong and rapid eloquence with
genuine and deep emotion. It is a rare combination. The baroque
era, for all its talk about the poetic sublime and the need of rivalling
Pindar, seldom achieved it. Even although the themes of death
and virtue and young womanhood were, and are, profoundly
significant, Dryden failed to make anything really moving out of
them in his ode To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young
lady^ Mrs. Anne Killigrew. It has been called the finest biographical
ode in the language but it contains so much verbal cleverness
244 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
that Dryden clearly either did not feel deeply about the girls
death, or was unwilling to give his emotions free expression. It
was nearly a century later that Thomas Gray, with his sensitive
spirit and his love of wonder, found subjects to excite both himself
and the readers of his Pindaric odes, and, not only in the passion
of the words and rhythms, but in the gloomy forebodings and
defiant challenges of the Bard, announced the age of revolution.
HORACE
It is more difficult and less attractive to follow Horace than
Pindar. Poets are eager to believe that they can soar above the
Andes, but seldom willing to undertake to polish a twenty-fourline
poem for seven years. There are, accordingly, fewer Horatian
lyrics than Pindaric odes in modem literature; but their quality
is higher.
Horaces lyrics were known in the Middle Ages, intermittently.
They were not, however, greatly loved. Petrarch, who discovered
so many other beauties, was the first modern enthusiast for their
discreet and lasting charm. But he had his own style of lyric
poetry, and although he incorporated thoughts and graceful
phrases from Horace in his poems, he did not form them on the
Horatian models. Even his enthusiasm failed to bring Horace back
into full favour. It was late in the fifteenth century that the
Florentine scholar Landino, and his greater pupil Politian, founded
Horaces modem reputation.
The Italians were the first to appreciate Horace. The Spaniards
were the first to cultivate the Horatian manner intensively in
their lyric poetry. Having learnt from the Italian humanists to
appreciate Horace (with the bucolic poets and others), they began
to emulate his odes very early in the sixteenth century. They
used modem metres, in short stanzas which could easily be
adapted to Horatian material; and the result was a new and
natural beauty.
That doomed elegant Garcilaso de la Vega (1503-36) wrote the
earliest Horatian lyrics in Spanish, using the stanza called the
lyre : three seven-syllable and two eleven-syllable lines, borrowed
from Bernardo Tasso, it became the favourite medium for the
reproduction of Horaces neat four-line stanzas.
Fernando de Herrera (i534-97) received Greek mythological
material and lyrical impulses through Horace^for it is clear that
LYRIC POETRY 24S
he knew no Greek/^ His poem to Don Juan of Austria is really
a triumphal ode, inspired by two of the few poems in which Horace
allowed himself to become airborne on a long ambitious flight.^
Horace implied that Octavian, by conquering Mark Antony, had
become one of the gods whose wisdom overthrows Titanic brute
force. Herrera also tells the story of the battle between the gods
and the giants; he implies that Don Juan, by conquering the
rebels, has merited heaven; and, like Horace, he compares the god
of song to himself, the poet of the event.
Greatest of the Spanish lyricists was Luis de Leon (c. 1527-91),
who said that his poems fell from his hands while he was young.
This means that, among them, his emulations of Horace and other
poets were not tasks (like so many classicizing works) but spontaneous
expressions of real enthusiasm. He did fine translations
of Vergils Bucolics and the first two books of the Georgieshe
actually called The Song of Solomon a pastoral eclogue with two
lovers answering each other, as in Vergil. From Horace he translated
over twenty odes, sometimes (like many Renaissance translators)
incorrectly, but always beautifully and naturally; and in
middle life, while imprisoned by the Holy Inquisition, he got
hold of a Pindar and translated the first Olympian ode. But
several of his own original poems are modelled on Horace and
Vergil : notably the famous Prophecy of the TaguSy which is inspired
by the Tibers prophecy in the Aeneid and the warning of Nereus
in the OdesJ^ To him, as to Garcilaso and others, the idyllic
description of country life beginning
Happy the man who far from business cares
Like Adam in the Garden,
given by Horace in the EpodeSy meant more than the sour satiric
twist at the end ; and they both embodied in poems of their own
its pastoral charm^which for the warlike Spaniards was then as
great a relief as for the exhausted Romans 1,600 years before.
In Italy the first Horatian odes were published in 1531 by
Tassos father Bernardo. Since they were more purely classical
in form than the sonnets and canzoni which were the accepted
Italian lyrical patterns, Tasso was leading the same kind of revolution
that Ronsard was to make in France a few years later. ^2 He
was followed by many others, notably Gabriello Chiabrera, whom
we have already met as a Pindaric.'^^
246 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
Chiabrera in Italy, some of Ronsards friends in France, Gabriel
Harvey and others in England attempted to go farther than using
Horaces themes and imitating the structure and tone of his odes.
They tried to re-create his metres. There were two possible ways
of doing this. The first was exceptionally difficult, virtually impossible.
It was repugnant to the movement of history. It meant,
not strengthening one tradition by another (as the best classical
adaptations do), but substituting a dead one for a living one.
It was an effort to abolish the stress accent of modern languages,
in order to impose on them the system of scanning lines by
quantity, counting syllables long or short, which was created in
Greek and successfully taken over into Latin. The two systems
are fundamentally different. Even in Latin they competed. There
they were reconciled by the acceptance of a series of intricate rules,
intelligible to few but the educated who knew and felt the rhythms
of Greek. When the Roman spoke the first line of Horaces bestknown
ode, he said
/ffff
integer uitae scelerisque purus
;
but when he sang it or declaimed it as verse, he paused on long
syllables, and made it
integer uitae scelerisque purus

a slower, more complex, difficult, and beautiful pattern. 74 The

aim of the strictly classicist metricians in the Renaissance was to
try to introduce patterns of the second type into modem languages.
Music was actually written for verses of this kind ; but music and
verses are both forgotten now.^s
Although it was impossible to try to make modern poetry scan
by quantity, it was not out of the question to take the patterns of
Horaces lyrics, and other classical metres, and adapt them to
modem stress-accent. (This is the plan on which Longfellow
wrote the familiar hexameters of Evangeline and Goethe those of
Hermann and Dorothea.y^ In Spain, for instance, Villegas took
the Sapphic stanza, and, without too much violence, hammered
its pattern of longs and shorts into the mould of stressed and unstressed
syllables ; Chiabrera managed it in Italian, and bequeathed
the result to a greater lyricist in the nineteenth century, Giosue
Carducci and Ronsard did the same in French.
LYRIC POETRY 247
In France it was the Pleiade which naturalized Horace; and
chiefly it was Ronsard. But before Ronsard published his odes,
Peletier in 1544 turned the "Art of Poetry into French verse; and
then, in 1547, brought out a collection of his own Poetic Works
containing three' translations and fourteen imitations of Horaces
lyrics. Like the Horatian poems published in Spain, they were
not in a form modelled on Horaces Alcaic or Sapphic stanzas, but
in native patterns designed to produce a similar effect, ^8 to lay less
emphasis on rhyming tricks and minor elegances than the earlier
poets, and to reproduce something of the sculptural restraint and
economy of Horaces lyrics.
Although Ronsard boasted that he rivalled Pindar and surpassed
Horace, 79 he could not do so, and he knew it. He did not even
want to, for long. He had begun to imitate Horace when he was
only seventeen and the chief classical model for the poems with
which he started to form his collection of Odes was Horace, the
material being drawn mainly from Horace and Vergil. During
the productive years 1545-50 he was, as he himself asserted, both
the French Horace and the French Pindar. However, the collection
contained only fourteen Pindaric odes ; and, after the publication
of the first four books, it was with obvious relief that he came
down from yonder mountain height and rejoined Horace among
the flowers of the meadow. Even although he maintained his
interest in Greek, from 1551 onwards he turned away from Pindar
towards the elegiac poets and the Greek Anthology, particularly
the Anacreontics.^^ His tone became lighter, less aggressive, more
frivolously gay or mildly melancholy.
Why did he turn again towards Horace? He might have
abandoned him as he abandoned Pindar.
He loved him sincerely. Their natures were genuinely sympathetic.
Both were pagans. Not that Ronsard was anti-Christian,
nor Horace atheistical, but neither felt that religion was deeply
connected with morality, an4 neither believed that the powers of
iieaven were closely interested in his own personal affairs. (That
is the main reason why Ronsard, in his preface to the Odes, dates
his first poetic experiments to coincide, and contrast, with Marots
rhymed version of the Psalms.)84 It is amusing to see how neatly
Ronsard takes over Horaces favourite Epicurean consolation

"dont worry, leave everything to the godsand transfers it to

Christian surroundings, while still allowing himself and his friends
248 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
the same freedom of action and enjoyment of life. It was in enjoyment
of life that the two were most sympathetic. When Ronsard
writes a love-poem or a drinking-song, he is not imitating Horace
even if he quotes one of the odes. He is writing because he loves
women and wine, and he is quoting Horace because he loves
literature, Horace in particular. Laumonier has a fine page on the
drinkers of the Vendome country, where Ronsard was born, and
where he felt at home.^s The plump grey-haired Roman with the
bright eyes would have felt at home there with him.
In England Horaces lyrics were taught in schools, and quoted
in Latin, for some time before poets took to imitating them.^^ The
first Horatian in England was Ben Jonson, who admired and often
copied the satires and letters, translated the Art of Poetry and
based his own critical principles on it, and transmitted to his
poetic sons his admiration for the odes.^^ We have already seen
(p. 238) that Jonsons own odes are Horatian as well as Pindaric.
Herrick, in his own ode to Sir Clipseby Crew, shows that these
imitations were not pedantry but based on real human sympathy
:
Then cause we Horace to be read,
Which sung, or said,
A goblet to the brim
Of lyric wine, both swelled and crowned,
Around
We quaff to him.
Herricks and Jonsons work is so penetrated with the poetry of
Horace that it is inadequate to speak of imitation. Line after line,
stanza after stanza, is good in itself for lovers of poetry, and better
for those who recognize the voice of Horace, now speaHng English.
Andrew Marvells Upon CromwelVs Return from Ireland has
often been called the finest Horatian ode in English. Certainly it
shows how a good classical metre like the Alcaic can be simplified,
changed to a stress-pattern, and yet keep its original beauties of
thoughtfulness and dignity. But although there are fine stanzas
in it, there is too much prose, like:
And now the Irish are ashamed
To see themselves in one year tamed,
and too many conceits.
LYRIC POETRY 249
His friend Milton has one translation of a delightful Horatian
love-poem, into a similar, but slightly richer metrical form
:
What slender youth, bedewed with liquid odours,
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave?^
Although it shows signs of the fault which sometimes mars
Miltons epic poetry, it helped to teach him the art of compression,
of getting the maximum of meaning into the minimum of
space. This lesson he carried into the English sonnet. By making
the sonnet stronger and richer, he gave it new life. Nine of his
sonnets begin with an address, as Horaces odes so often do ; and
one:
Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous .son
actually with a close imitation of Horaces
O lovelier daughter of a lovely mother.^
Horaces inspiration goes throughout the sonnets, from a tiny
comic trick like this
:
Some in file
Stand spelling false, while one might walk to Mile-
End Green;^'
to the deep moral, political, and educational purpose which inspires
the greatest of them, and which Miltons example transmitted to
Wordsworth and many a later English poet.^^
Respected as a critic in the baroque period, Horace was less
admired as a lyric poet than he deserved; but when the better
poets felt a deep but tranquil emotion, which could not issue in
Pindaric rage, they often turned to Horaces manner, sometimes
to his very metres.^^ Popes early Ode on Solitude and Collinss
beautiful odes To Evening and To Simplicity show how natural
the adaptation was. The Oxford Book of English Verse contains
a less natural blend from the same period, in a Horatian metre:
Wattss Day ofJudgment. With the Greek lyric metre now known
as Horaces Sapphic stanza, it mingles the most fearful medieval
imaginings of Doomsday: open graves, shrieking victims, devils,
stop here, my fancy! Inappropriate as the metre appears, it has
a terriiEying momentum from the very first stanza:
When the fierce North-wind with his airy forces
Rears up the Baltic to a foaming fury;
And the red lightning with a storm of hail comes
Rushing amain down. . .
.
250 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
There could be no better example, in small space, of Christian
thought and myth carried by a purely classical poetic form.
A generation or two later, with the poets of the revolutionary
era, a new vigour and richness, a stronger self-assertion sang
through the odes. The two strains can still be clearly traced.
Horace has his followers, and Pindar; some of the greatest poems
of the period made a new synthesis which both would have
admired.
The heirs of Pindar in this epoch include Goethe, Shelley, Hugo,
Wordsworth, and Holderlin. (Once more we see how mistaken it
is to call this period anti-classical. Victor Hugo, for example,
began his career with a series of odes, in which, just like his
predecessors, he calls on the Muses, sings to his heroic lyre, and
describes classical scenes and landscapes. The essential differences
are his style and his purpose.) The Pindaric ode became very free
in form. Its rhythm was stronger, but more varied. It was still
a dance, but the dancers, instead of repeating one triple figure, or
one complex inwoven movement, moved through a series of
patterns governed only by the will of the poet, or his fiery
imagination.
Bad as Cowleys odes are, perhaps it was they which established
this dithyrambic form in English. Shelleys Ode to Naples is in
ten irregular stanzas, marked epode, strophe, and antistrophe,
even numbered and Greek-lettered ; but the names and numbers
have no real sequence. It is the difference between a classical
and a modern ballet; between a Haydn symphony and a modern
symphonic poem. The Pindaric ode has in fact always aspired
towards free improvisation: poets knew that he had written
dithyrambs without law, and yearned to have his authority for a
mode of expression which would, without being incoherent, be
absolutely free.
The content of the Pindaric ode had always been highly
emotional. It now became more energetic than it had been during
the baroque period, and its emotion, though not less intense, more
supple and variedand therefore more Greek. Finally, with the
general liberation of the spirit that came with the close of the
eighteenth century, the range of subjects which the ode covered
became much wider, and its aspirations, both individual and social,
loftier.
LYRIC POETRY 251
Goethe admired Pindar more than any other non-dramatic
Greek poet except Homer, jje was reading and translating
Pindar in his early twenties. From 1772 onwards he began to
write spirited lyrics in short irregular lines, sometimes with scattered
rhymes and sometimes entirely rhymeless, characterized by
a tone of bold defiant energy which he himself felt to be Pindaric. ^ 6
Schiller too left a number of Pindaric poems, mc\uAmg2.Dithyramh
and the two famous odes, The Gods of Greece and To Joy (exalted
in the last movement of Beethovens Ninth Symphony) ; they are
full of genuine love for Greek myth and Greek truth, but they are
monotonous in rhythm, sometimes cheap in phrasing. The unhappy
Holderlin was the truest Grecian of his generation in
Germany. He translated about half of Pindars lyrics; and,
although he did not fully understand the metres and sometimes
strained the meanings, they stimulated him to produce a number
of lofty and difficult hymns in free verse, which were scarcely
appreciated until a century after he died.^^
Through his Odes and Ballads Victor Hugo is more often Pindaric
than he is Horatian;^ and often we see him, with characteristic
love of excess, attempting to surpass Pindar by outshouting,
outsinging, and outdancing his predecessor and all the Olympian
choirs. The strings of exclamations become monotonous; but
they are redeemed by the fine imagery, and by the sweeping,
constantly changing rhythms.
Shelleys Ode to the West Wind, although its form is a stanza
derived from a simple Italian lyric pattern, succeeds so magnificently
in making the autumn wind into a powerful and impetuous
superhuman presence, and in personifying many aspects of nature ^from^the fallen leaves to the
sleeping Mediterranean, from tiny
seed and buds to vast clouds, angels of rain and lightning, that it
recaptures something more essentially Pindaric, more Greek, than
any of its baroque or Renaissance predecessors.
The greatest modem Pindaric poem, however, is Wordsworths
OdeIntimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,
It seems at first to be far, far from Pindars world and
Pindars clear energy. Yet, just as the form is Pindars, adapted
to the stresses of the modem poetic mind, so, turned inwards and
darkened with modernity, is the spirit. The ode opens with rejoicing,
and closes with triumph renewed. It is the festival of
spring:
252 12. THE RENAISSANCE AND AFTERWARDS
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday.
But the poet, tvithin the rejoicing, is alone, with a thought of grief.
Again and again he declares that he is one with the gay birds and
winds and children; and again and again he pauses, doubtfully
and sadly, looking for a lost radiance, the visionary gleam that has
gone with his youth. The ode is not a glorification of triumph,
but a description of a painful conflict, gradually resolved. Through
a series of irregular stanzas, some dancing and lyrical, some brooding
and meditative, Wordsworth moves on to the final proclamation
of victory, out of the suffering which (as Aeschylus wrote)
teaches wisdom:
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Few in the age of revolution could admire Horaces moral and
political message. It was an era of youth ; he seemed middle-aged.
Yet he was a superb artist in words, he loved nature, he knew
beauty, he had a spiritual depth and serenity that communicated
themselves to some of those who cared little for his social creed.
The Horatian tradition was altered much more deeply than that
ofPindar, yet something of it survived.^9 The stanza of the meditative
odes became, although still regular, more intricate. The
thought, while still tranquil, was often made more private. Nature
was observed in more vivid and elaborate detail. Sometimes the
complexity and exultation of Pindar were taken into the poets
own heart, and blended with the thoughtful depths of Horaces
lyrics.
The tradition of Horace was most fertile in the baroque age
when it produced Collinss exquisite odes.^o<^ In Collins had
a far greater successor. The odes of John Keats are not like
Horace, because they are not like the work of anyone but John
Keats himself. But they are in the direct line of descent from
Horace, whose work helped to bring them into being; and they
look back beyond him to reach something younger and richer. The
greatest, the Ode to a Nightingale^ opens with a direct, unmistakable
echo of Horaces voice, over twenty centuries.^^^ But in all the
superb 1819 odes there is something quite new, a change made by ^
the mind of Keats and by the sensibilities of his era upon the
LYRIC POETRY 253
inheritance which Horace passed to him from Greece. The odes of
Pindar had been intense realizations of the moment of public
triumph, with everything vividly alive, crowded and active, ablaze
with energy. The exultant city surrounded the family of the
champion, the procession moved on with dance and music, the
poet spoke for all Greece, and all Greece listened. In Horace,
although the lyric was often a lonely song, it was to be heard by
a friend, it was to influence others by charming them, it was
uttered for Rome. But for Keats, the public has disappeared.
The poet is alone ; silent ; nearer to grief than to rejoicing. He
contemplates a Greek vase; he sits in embalmed darkness^ half
in dream, listening to a lonely bird ; he recalls a vision of two fair
creatures, couched side by side, or evokes the mellow season of
Autumn, the cloud of Melancholy. And out of this quietness and
this reflection, he mounts into an imaginative excitement akin to
Pindars. He sees the figures on the vase as alive, panting and
young ; he hears their melodies, piped to the spirit. As the nightingale
moves from tree to tree, he takes wings to fly to it. Autumn
appears to him in a ^shape no less human and real than any
Hellenic deity, and Melancholy as a mighty veiled figure in her
secret shrine. The excitement does not blur, but sharpens his
senses, giving him keener perception of a thousand details^the
dew in the musk-rose, the piping of gnats, the iridescent ripple
on the sandy shore. His very thoughts grow into branching
trees, and murmur in the wind. Only the dance which Wordsworth
felt around him in the festival of spring is absent from
these odes. Keats, like Horace, has become a solitary singer;
but he has no hearers, and his lyre is a birds song or the night
wind.
In the English romantic odes the original purpose of Pindar has
been quite reversed and mellowed by blending with the subtleties
of Horace. Yet many essentials of the Greek and Roman lyric
remain, transfigured. Piercing vividness of imaginative detail;
creation of great superhuman visions transcending ordinary life;
profound spiritual ecstasy, the adoration of beauty and the
exaltation of noble idealsall these elements of poetry have been
transmitted, through the tradition of the ode, from Horace and
Pindar to modem poets. The song and the festal dance have
passed away. In these lyrics, the structure of the ode reflects the
subtler excitements of the lonely human soul.
254 12. JLYKHJ k'UE'lRY
Since the revolutionary era closed, dozens, hundreds of poets
have composed odes: but none finer. A moving book could be
written on the nineteenth-century odes alone, and a noble anthology
of them needs to be made. Most of those produced in the last
hundred years are Pindaric rather than Horatiansome consciously
(Hart Crane said I feel myself quite fit to become a
suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine age')^<^2 ^nd some, like
Walt Whitman's, unconsciously. Although musical odes were
composed less often, the ode kept its natural kinship with music
and the dance; Swinburnes technical virtuosity and corybantic
energy are closely parallel to the rhapsodies of Liszt.
From the mid-nineteenth century onwards there was a movement
of growing strength to break the regular patterns of verse, to
allow it to sound wholly spontaneous, like immediate improvisation.
Much of this came from the desire for originality, the hatred of
tradition, the urge to twist the neck of eloquence, down with
everything fancy and artificial, away with thou and thee, abolish
Parnassus and the Muses, damn anything that s lofty, I cannot
bear But much of it was strengthened by the sense that
real poetry had always been free, that Greek art, at its best, meant
freedom. (It was largely the Hellenic improvisations of Isadora
Duncan which set the modem ballet free, during the same period
and for the same reasons.) Thus, when Gerard Hopkins was
impelled to write poems on the tragic shipwrecks of the Eurydice
and the Deutschland, he knew he was writing in the manner of
Pindaralthough the words, the syntax, even the rhymes he used
were boldly unprecedented.
Hopkinss verses flowed molten into a strange mould. Part of it
he had made, part of it was English, part of it (for he was a trained
classical scholar) was Greek and Roman, Since he died, all
moulds have been broken. Some modern lyrical free verse is
merely typographical cleverness. Some represents the dialogue
of half-heard figures in an interior drama. But in so far as the rest
is rhythmical, it is a descendant of the excited songs of the
Bacchic revellers, which Pindar was one of the first to make into
art, and which many of his admirers have since heard through the
irresistible mountain-torrent energy of his poems of triumph.
TRANSITION WE have seen how, after Greek and Roman civilization was
almost overwhelmed by repeated floods of barbarism, it
managed to survive, in strangely dtered but still powerful forms;
how its influence continued to exist throughout the Dark Ages;
and how it was one of the great currents which flowed with increasing
strength through the Middle Ages, until at last it became
one of the most powerful urges in that tidal wave of energy,
emotion, and thought which we know as the Renaissance. We have
now to trace its power, sometimes diminishing, sometimes
increasing, always changing, and never dying, throughout the
literature of modern Europe and America. Within this period

from the end of the Renaissance to the present day^we can make
a rough but useful division. The first part, which ran from about
1600 to about 1770, can be called the age of monarchies, or the
Counter-Reformation, or, comprehensively, the baroque age.
The second part is the truly modern age, from the American and
French revolutions and the industrial revolution down to our own
times.
This twofold division is not merely a convenience. It reflects
a real change both in the nature of our civilization and in the power
exerted upon it by classical culture. Since about 1850 the whole
tone, much of the purpose, and many of the methods of literature
have undergone a revolution of great importance: not an abrupt
shallow transformation, but a strong and permanent change of
direction. This change accompanied and was conditioned by the
great novelties of the nineteenth century :
industrialism and the rise of applied science
;
a tremendous increase in the actual population of Europe and
America
;
a move away from government by inherited privilege
monarchy, aristocracy, landed property, inherited capital
towards government by the people or through the people
democracy, socialism, communism, and fascism;
356 13. TRANSITION
the abolition of serfdom and slavery (temporarily, in some
countries)
;
the provision of a much wider education for the mass of the
people in many lands.
In literature the change takes several important forms
:
(a) A huge increase in the amount of literature produced,
(b) A shift in emphasis towards literary standards acceptable to
large masses of people and types of art which would influence the
greatest possible number of paying customers or recipients of
propaganda. Poetry has been, and still is, losing ground to prose.
Poetic drama is very rare and special, while prose drama (on the
screen as well as the stage) flourishes. No one writes didactic
poems, while there are thousands of books of serious non-fiction.
Epics have disappeared, novels are superabundant. Similarly,
there is less and less emphasis on style ; but immense stress is laid
on power and appeal, which in practice mean emotional intensity
within certain limited fields. There are a large number of very
popular new, or newly re-created, literary patterns, none of them
strict, but all designed to please a large public of fairly low cultural
standards: the detective film and detective story, the musical
comedy, the strings of unrelated jokes which compose many radio
shows, the reporters diary of ephemeral on-the-spot observations.
Since about 1900 no single literary type has raised its standards,
but all have broadened them.
(c) As a reaction to this, extreme specialization and coterization
in the work of artists who are determined not to aim at mass
effects. T. S. Eliot is the best-known example, and often the growth
of specialization can be traced within the career of a single artist
:
for instance, Joyce, Rilke, Picasso, Schbnberg. It goes all the way
from the invention of a private language (Joyce, Tzara), through
the use of unintelligible symbols, to the creation of works of art
out of purely private material : personal experiences unexplained
and unknown to others (Auden, Joyce, Dali), odd myths, haunting
quotations, obscure symbols, references to abstruse books or
religious practices or almost unobserved events (Eliots Waste
Land^ on the Fisher King and the meaning of Datta Dayadkvam
Damyata, Pounds Cantos^ the French surrealists who admired the
murderers of Le Mans), and the foundation of new quasi-religious
cults (Stefan George).
13 . TRANSITION 257
{d) And finally, in literature at least, one unquestioned gain : a
great increase in vigour, spiritual energy multiplying as it finds
more voices, and an enlarged and deepened field of subject-matter
for the author.
In literature, these are among the deepest effects of recent social
changes. Only the third seems to have much to do with classical
influence. However, the power of Greco-Roman culture is more
pervasive and penetrative than one might at first imagine. We
have mentioned the spread of education. This is one of the most
important factors in the civilization of the last three or four hundred
years. It was not by any means nation-wide in any country, until
quite recently ; yet education was diminishing nowhere, and spreading
slowly but continuously, throughout western Europe and
America, from the Renaissance onwards. And from the beginning
of this periodsay, 1600until about 1900 (and in several
important countries much later) the focus of higher education was
the study of the classical languages and literatures. Until well
within living memory it was the exception rather than the rule
to find, in America, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain,
Holland, Poland, and other civilized lands, a school which went
any distance beyond the three Rs without compulsory Latin and
optional Greek^far less a college or a university.^ Technical and
vocational schools were invented only after the rise of massproduction
in industry.^ Until the First World War knowledge of
the classics was increasing. More was discovered about them, and,
until at least 1900, more people were learning about them.^
A final general remark. During the period from 1600 to the
present, classical influence has affected life and literature most
directly and intensely in France; it has produced the richest effects
in literature among the English; and it has evoked the largest
quantity of scholarship in Germany.
The generation which was alive in 1600 saw the end of the Renaissance.
It sounds unreasonable to speak of the end of a rebirth : for
surely the classical literatures and so much of modern civilization
as depends on them were reborn in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries ; and they did not die. Still, this rebirth and regeneration
were only one aspect of a much broader revolutionary change
which included events as diverse as the Protestant reformation and
the discovery of America. The most characteristic thing about
S076 * s
258 13. TRANSITION
this change was not its concrete effects so much as its emotional,
its vital qualities : bliss was it i^ that dawn to be alive, but to be
young was very heaven.
But it ended sombrely.
With the latter half of the sixteenth century a cold wind seems
to blow in upon the world. Poets turn harsh; heroes die ingloriously;
men begin to hate more than they love; aspiring
societies and noble works are cut short by violence ; freedom, often
extravagant or licentious, is succeeded by repressive laws and
organizations, sometimes stupid and often cruel ; even the classical
books which had once connoted stimulus and liberation come to
mean regulation and law and the multiplication of rules. Perhaps
this reaction was inevitable
; possibly some of it was necessary and
salutary ; but it was painful. However, the reaction that followed
the Renaissance did not everywhere mean a contraction of the
human spirit, without any compensation. In some countries (such
as Spain) it did. In other countries it meant that, after a pause,
literature and the arts and human thought left a period of wild
uncoordinated expansion and entered on a period of regulated
progress. Whether the progress would have been greater if the
regulation had been less is a question no historian can answer
without guess-work.
Certainly the period of reaction saw a great number of those
disasters of civil and international war which deserve the name of
public crimes. It saw needless waste of lives, and property, and
objects of art, and products of learning. This history of the late
sixteenth century is full of broken lives : scholars who were murdered
because some drunken soldier thought they had money
concealed, who fled from their native country because they belonged
to the wrong sect or party, who like Casaubon had to study
Greek in a cave in the hills while their parents hid from the S.S.
(I have sometimes thought that the discovery of manuscripts,
which helped to start the Renaissance, did not come to any
necessary end in the sixteenth century^most of Petronius turned
up in Dalmatia in 1650but that it was discouraged and then
stopped, by war, looting, and political oppression.) The history
of England in the Dark Ages (p. 39 f.) and many similar stories
show that scholarship can scarcely be blotted out except by total
barbarization ; but it can be gravely weakened, the main arteries
cut, the few uninfected areas tied off, the healthy interflow broken,
13 . TRANSITION 259
decay creeping over every section, and growth discontinued for
generations, for centuries.
Here are the peaks in the counter-wave which rolled back the
tide of Renaissance.
1. First, and most importantsince Italy had been the chief
stimulus to other European nations^the sack of Rome in 1527
by the armies of two peoples which had not experienced the full
effects of the Renaissance: the Germans and the Spaniards. s The
effect of this was clinched by the Spanish occupation of Italy,
according to the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis (i 559).
2. The wars of religion spoilt many a valuable life. One keydate
is the massacre of St. Bartholomew (1572).^
3. Still more frightful was the Thirty Years war in Germany,
which effectively crushed out any chance the German states had
had of reaching the same level of civilization as their neighbours.
4. It should be remembered that the barbarians were still
pressing on in the east. They put Hungary out of European
civilization for centuries, with the battle of Mohacs in 1526. The
Balkans were occupied and partially paganized, while Poland and
Austria were perpetually under threat.
5. The Counter-Reformation had many good effects, but several
bad ones. The Spanish Inquisition, established as a national
organization by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1480, now became more
powerful. The Inquisition was not only anti-Protestant and anti-
Jewish, but deadened, or tried to deaden, many of the most active
impulses of Catholicism ; it twice imprisoned St. Ignatius Loyola,
while St. Theresa was several times denounced, and her Conceptos
del amor de Dios was prohibited. The Society of Jesus, an institution
great for both good and evil, was founded in 1540. After
the Council of Trent, in 1564, an index of books prohibited to
Catholics was issued, and censorship in the modern manner began
with its ordinances.'
6. In Britain, Switzerland, Germany, and other Protestant
countries the puritan and Lutheran reaction was equally active.
A ban was placed on the British theatre in 1642 which lasted
virtually until 1660; and even after its removal its ill effects were
felt for many generationsfirst in the Restoration comedies
(whose lewdness was quite unparalleled in English literary history)
and then in a cutback in British stage-design and stage-management
which lasted until weU into the nineteenth century, and may
26o 13. TRANSITION
have been responsible for the failure of British drama to produce
worthy successors to Marlowe and Shakespeare.^
Some of these reactions were purely military or political. There
was a very important spiritual reaction which found its opponents
among poets, scholars, and thinkers. The conflict between the
two sides, almost evenly matched, lasted for nearly a century, and
is not yet solved. It was called the Battle of the Books.
14
THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
There was a very famous and very long-drawn-out dispute in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which agitated not
only the world of literature but the worlds of science, religion,
philosophy, the fine arts, and even classical scholarship. It was
never decided; it involved a number of comparativjely trivial
personal enmities, temporary feuds between men and women and
pedants who are now forgotten ; the issues were not always clearly
stated on either side; some of the protagonists missed their aim,
like the Player Kings Priam, striking too short at shadows ; and
there was far too much emotion involved, so that the entire dispute
became a subject for laughter, and is now remembered under the
satiric titles of la querelle des anciens et des modernes and
THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS.^
Nevertheless, it was an important dispute. In the first place, it
was remarkable that an argument about taste should have lasted
many years and occupied much attention, for that meant that the
standards of criticism, and therefore of literature, were pitched
very high. In the second place, the personalities interested were
among the greatest of the time: Pascal, Boileau, Bentley, Swift.
In the third place, the issues debated were of deep significance,
and continue to be significant at the present day. They recur
(although often disguised or misunderstood) in nearly every contemporary
discussion of education, of aesthetic criticism, and of
the transmission of culture. The battle waged in France and
England at the turn of the seventeenth century was only one
conflict in a great war which has been going on for 2,000 years and
is still raging. It is the war between tradition and modernism;
between originality and authority.
The chronology of the affair is not of the chiefest importance.
Nor are the books that marked its various stages. There were many
violent skirmishes on minor issues ; sometimes important victories
seemed at the moment to be defeats, and the losers built a trophy
and went away rejoicing. But as a test of the vitality of taste in
various European nations during the baroque age it is worth
observing that the battle started in Italy, or rather that the early
262 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
frontier encounters occurred there ; that the real fighting took place
in France; that an interesting but secondary struggle went on in
England ; and that no other European or American country played
any part except that of spectator. Yet though the part played by
English writers was secondary, the works they produced were more
permanently interesting than anything which came out of France:
for they included Bentley^s Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris
and Swifts Battle of the Books,
Later we shall survey the authors who appeared as champions
on one side or the other, and describe the phases of the battle.
First, it is essential to analyse the issues which were being debated
and the arguments used on both sides.
The question was this. Ought modern writers to admire and
imitate the great Greek and Latin writers of antiquity? or have the
classical standards of taste now been excelled and superseded?
Must we only follow along behind the ancients, trying to emulate
them and hoping at most to equal them? or can we confidently
expect to surpass them? The problem can be put much more
broadly. In science, in the fine arts, in civilization generally, have
we progressed beyond the Greeks and Romans ? or have we gone
ahead of them in some things, and fallen behind them in others ? or
are we inferior to them in every respect, half-taught barbarians
using the arts of truly civilized men ?
Since the Renaissance many admirers of classical literature,
charmed by the skill, beauty, and power of the best Greek and
Roman writing, had assumed that it could never be really surpassed,
and that modern men should be content to respect it
without hope of producing anything better. After the rediscovery
of Greco-Roman architecture this assumption was broadened to
include the other arts ; and it took in law, political wisdom, science,
all culture. It was now attacked by the moderns on many grounds.
The most important of the arguments they used were four in
number.
I. The ancients were pagans; we are Christians, Therefore our
poetry is inspired by nobler emotions and deals with nobler subjects.
Therefore it is better poetry.
This is a far less simple argument than it sounds. Stated in
these terms, it appears excessively naive; yet it is a thesis which
shallow minds might well accept or deny without question, and
deeper thinkers might ponder for years. Obviously the fact that
14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 263
a bad writer is a Christian does not make him a better writer,
although it should make him a better man. Some books and
buildings and pictures produced by devout Christians and full of
devout feeling have been artistically indefensible. J. K. Huysmans,
himself an ardent Catholic, believed that much Catholic art
of the nineteenth century was directly inspired by the Devil, in
order to turn sensitive souls away from the true religion. And yet,
in great works of art, the presence of the spirit of Christ, with its
intense psychical sensitivity, its rejection of so much human unworthiness
and inadequacy, and its moral nobility, must add
greatness; its absence leaves a spiritual lacuna which no artistic
skill can compensate or conceal.
The three greatest modern heroic poems are all blends of pagan
and Christian thought, dominated by Christian idealsDantes
Comedy, Tassos The Liberation of Jerusalem, and Miltons
Paradise Lost, In them all, the Christian religion is the essential
moving factor. But in none of them could Christianity have been
so well expressed without the pagan vehicle. Dante found no
Christian teacher able to conduct him through the terrors of hell
and the disciplines of purgatory towards his spiritual love Beatrice
in heaven. He was guided by the pagan poet Vergil, to whom his
poem owes more than to any other mortal except the pagan philosopher
Aristotle. Milton makes Jesus say, in Paradise Regained,
that Greece derived its poetry and its music from the Hebrews
but that is not true, nor did Milton himself believe it. At the
opening of his own Paradise Lost and again later in the poem, he
summoned the aid of a Heavenly Muse, who was really the spirit
of Christianity, but embodied in a pagan shape. ^ There are no
Muses in the psalms of David or the songs of the prophets ; nor
does Milton, except in minor details, ever copy Hebrew poetry,
while Greek and Roman literature is a constant inspiration to him.
The Roman Catholic church and the Protestant churches have
long been internally divided on the question : Do the pagan poets
teach nothing but evil, so that they should be cast out? or do they
teach some good, so that they can be accepted and fitted into the
pattern of Christian education? St. Augustine thought their
beauties were not all bad, and their wisdom not all deceit, so that
they could be used to broaden the mind and enlarge the soul of
Christians. In Aristotelian terms, his answer means that some of
the pagans were potentially good, and could be formed into real
264 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
good by being put to a Christian use. And that is how many
medieval teachers took them. Others, like St. Jerome, thought all
the pagans were bad ; they were the voices of the world which Jesus
came to destroy; their very charms were evil, and Vergil was a
beautiful vase full of poisonous snakes. This belief recurs again
and again throughout modem history: in SaVonarola, in Father
Ranee, founder of the Trappists, and in many a fundamentalist
preacher to-day. (In essence, it goes back to Plato ; and the counterview
goes back at least to Aristotle.) The churches, however,
usually inclined towards the broader opinion, that many pagan
writers were potentially valuable. The baroque period was marked
by the work of many brilliant Jesuit teachers who used the classics
as hooks to draw souls, as well as by the steady expansion of
classical education in Protestant countries.
2. The second argument is the most popular nowadays. It is
this. Human knowledge is constantly advancing. We live in a later
age than the Periclean Greeks and Augustan Romans: therefore we
are wiser. Therefore anything we write, or make, is better than the
things written and made by the ancient Greeks and Romans,
The emotional pressure towards accepting this argument was
strong in the Renaissance, when worlds which the ancients had
never seen were being discovered every generation, every decade
:
worlds in the far west, in the antipodes, in the sky. But in the
Renaissance the discovery of the great classical books was still too
new to allow men to vaunt one achievement of thought and will
above the other. All the discoveries were equally wonderful: the
new world of unknown nations and strange animals found by
Columbus, the new worlds revealed by science, and the new world
of subtle writing and trenchant psychology and glorious m3rth
created by antiquity. In the baroque age, on the other hand, the
classics were growing familiar, especially the Latin classics, less
daring than the Greeks. Their thoughts had so long been current
that their majesty had become customary and their daring had
been equalled. Meanwhile, the science of the ancients, Vitmvius
the architect, Hippocrates the doctor, and the few others, had been
examined, equalled, surpassed, and discarded; while the selfperpetuating
fertility of modem experimental science was asserting
itself more emphatically every year. Men forgot that Lucretius and
his master Epicurus and Epicums master Democritus had known
that matter was constmeted of atoms; men forgot that the Greeks
14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 265
had inferred, by thought alone, that the planets revolved round
the sun ; men forgot that Hippocrates had laid the foundations of
medicine. They saw that, by experiments which had never been
conceived before, modern men had found out things which had
never been proved or believed possible of proof. They concluded
therefore that civilized humanity as a whole had become better,
and that their moral conduct, their arts, and their political intelligence
had improved also. This is now the commonest attitude to
the question, and looks like being the most persistent. The
diagram of human history which most European and American
schoolchildren have in their heads is simple. It is a line, like the
line on a graph, rising continuously at a 45 angle, from the cavemen,
through ancient Egypt, past Greece and Rome, through a
nebulous Middle Age, past the Renaissance, upwards, ever upwards,
to the ultimate splendour of to-day. Much of this belief,
however, is false. Sir Richard Livingstone sums it up thus: we
think we are better than the Greeks, because, although we could
not write the superb tragic trilogy, the Oresteia^ we can broadcast
it.
Yet part of this modern optimism is true and justified. The
ancients never believed in the noblest and most ennobling ideal of
modern sciencethat man can change and improve nature. The
abolition of disease; the curtailment of labour; the suppression of
physical pain; the conquest of distance, planetary and interplanetary;
penetration of the heights and the depths, the deserts
and the poles ; interrogation of nature far beyond the limits of our
own senses, and the construction of machinery to continue that
questioning and then change the answers into actsthese magnificent
achievements have given modem man a new freedom which
raises him higher above the animals, and allows him, with justice,
to boast of being wiser than his ancestors.
But the argument is false when applied to art, and particularly
false when applied to literature. (In philosophy it is highly
questionable, and in politics and social science it cannot be
accepted without careful examination.) Great works of art are not
produced by knowledge of the type which can be accumulated
with the lapse of time, can grow richer with succeeding generations,
and can then be assimilated by each new generation without
difficulty. The material and the media of art are the human soul
and its activities. The human soul may change, but it does not
266 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
appear to grow any greater or more complex from generation to
generation, nor does our knowledge of it increase very markedly
from age to age. One proof of this is that the ordinary problems
of living, which have been faced by every man and woman, are no
less difficult to-day than they were 2,000 years ago : although, if
the argument from scientific progress were universally true, we
ought to have enough knowledge at our disposal to enable us to
solve the great questions of education, and politics, and marriage,
and moral conduct generally, without anything like the perplexities
of our forefathers. In one of his finest poems Housman
comforts himself by the same sad reflection.^ Watching the storm
blowing over Wenlock Edge, he remembers that the Romans once
had a city there.
Then, twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare
:
The blood that warms an English yeoman.
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
There, like the wind through woods in riot.
Through him the gale of life blew high
;
The tree of man was never quiet
:
Then twas the Roman, now tis 1.
And is it not truer to say that to-day our scientific progress has
made the problems of life not easier, but more difficult ? Now that
we have learnt to change the world, the world has become less
stable, so that it is more difficult to understand : new problems are
constantly arising, for which no clear precedents exist. And our
naive confidence in applied science has to some extent dissuaded
the common man from thinking out problems of conduct as
earnestly as our forefathers did, in conversation, in public debate,
in meditation, and in prayer.
To the assertion that man has progressed through the accumulation
of scientific knowledge there is a counter-argument which
is sometimes overlooked. This is that many arts and crafts have
been forgotten during the past centuries, crafts of great value, so
that our scientific advance has been partly offset by the loss of
useful knowledge. Some such crafts were the property of skilled
tradesmen, who never wrote their secrets down ; others were part
of the mass of folk-lore which has only recently perished ; others
again were the result of generations of skilled practice in work that
14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 267
is now done, more copiously but not always more satisfactorily,
by machinery. For example, the pharmacopoeia could be greatly
enlarged if some of the valuable herbal remedies known to country
folk a few generations ago were available; but many have been lost.
The art of oratory was studied by the ancients for many centuries.
During that time they discovered thousands of facts about applied
psychology, about propaganda, about the relation between thought,
artifice, and emotion, about the use of spoken language^facts
which became part of a general tradition of rhetorical training, and
were lost in the Dark Ages. Men make speeches to-day, and still
move their hearers; but they cannot calculate their results so
surely, and the speeches themselves have a narrower influence
than those of the great classical orators because the rules of the
craft have been forgotten, s
Even if we know more than the ancients, does that prove that
we are better ? Does it not mean that they did the great work, and
that we only use it, adding a little here and there? This objection
was put very forcefully by the twelfth-century philosopher Bernard
of Chartres, in the famous phrase, We are dwarfs standing on the
shoulders of giants.^ However, it was taken up and turned round,
wittily though falsely, by the partisans of the modern side in the
Battle of the Books. They pointed out that we ought not to call
Plato and Vergil ancients and think of ourselves as their young
successors. Compared with us, Plato and Vergil and their contemporaries
are young. We are the ancients. The world is growing
up all the time. 7
Now, this is the commonest modern assumption, and it is one
in which the deepest fallacy lies. The assumption is that the whole
of human civilization can be compared to the life of a man or an
animalas a continuous process in which one single organism
becomes steadily more mature.^ It is the great merit of Spengler
to have shown, in The Decline of the West, that this is false,
because it is over-simplified. Toynbee, in his Study of History,
has elaborated and strengthened the view which Spengler stated.
This view is that civilization all over the world, or for that matter
civilization in Europe, is not one continuous process but a number
of different processes. Different societies, groups of races,
grow up at different times, forming separate civilizations (he
calls them cultures, but he means the set of activities we call
civilizations). At any given moment there may be three or four
268 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
different civilizations alive at once, all of different ages. There
have been several in the past, which have died or been destroyed.
One civilization can come into contact with another, can destroy
it or imitate it or learn from it. But one civilization does not grow
out of another and surpass it, any more than one full-size tree
grows out of the top branches of another. Spengler proceeds to
infer that the growth, maturity, and decay of all the different
civilizations follow the same rhythmic pattern, and manifest themselves
in comparable intellectual, social, and artistic phenomena.
Thus he says that our present time is preparing for The era of
warring Caesarismsa name he devised as early as the First
World War, before the emergence of Mussolini, Hitler, and those
othersand says it is contemporary with the Hyksos period in
Egypt (c, 1680 B.C.), the Hellenistic period in Greco-Roman
civilization (300-100 B.C.), and the age of the contending states in
China (480-230 B.C.). (One of the smaller, but not less striking,
aspects of this theory is that it helps to explain the sympathy which
men of one civilization often feel for their contemporaries^ in
another, and the repulsion or lack of understanding with which
they confront art or thought of a period too early or too late for
them to grasp. For instance, Tacitus was a great historian; but we
have not yet arrived at the period when we can fully appreciate his
spiritual attitude and his strange style, because he belonged to an
age later than ourselves ; while the mystery religions of antiquity,
the stories of the saints in primitive Christianity, and the religious
beliefs of more recent primitives" such as the founders of Mormonism
are too early for most of us to understand nowadays.)
If this theory is true, the modems in the Battle of the Books were
mistaken in saying that they were later than the Greeks and
Romans, and therefore wiser. They were later in absolute time,
but not in relative time. Spengler holds that, on the chart of the
growth of civilizations, they were at an earlier stage. Louis XIV
looks like Augustus Caesar; his poets read like the Augustan poets
;
and the Louvre corresponded to Augustus" reconstmction of
central Rome. But both the monarch and the arts of seventeenthcentury
France look less mature than those of Augustan Rome.
And apart from theories, the cold facts of history are enough to
disprove the argument. The development of civilization has not
been continuous since the flourishing of Greco-Roman culture.
It has been intermpted. It has been set back many centuries by
14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 269
wars, savages,, and plagues. The European of the tenth century
A.D. was not ten centuries in advance of the European of the first
century b.c., but, in everything but religion, many centuries behind
him.
3. Some of the participants in the battle used a third argument,
which dovetails with the second. It was put succinctly by Perrault,
in the sentence Nature does not change,^ The lions of to-day
are no less fierce than those of the days of Augustus Caesar; roses
smell no less sweetly; men are no taller nor shorter. Therefore the
works of men are as good to-day as they were in classical times.
This argument also is at least half-true. The great things of life,
out of which art arises, change very little : love, sin, the quest for
honour, the fear of death, the lust for power, the pleasures of the
senses, the admiration of nature, and the awe of God. Yet that
does not prove that, in all times and places, men are equally skilful
at making works of art out of this material. Art is a function of
society. The ability of men to create works of art out of these
universal subjects depends largely on the character of the societies
in which they live: their economic structure, their intellectual
development, their political history, their contacts with other
civilizations, their religion and their morality, the distribution of
their population between various classes and occupations and types
of dwelling-place, even the climate they enjoy. Everyone has a
voice and can sing; people are always singing; but the art of song,
and the craft of writing solo or choral music, take long to develop,
and reach a high level only in special periods and places. Throughout
history men have enjoyed looking at beautiful women (and
beautiful women have enjoyed being looked at). But in Islam it is
against the law of the Prophet to make a representation of any
living thing, so there are no Arabian artists comparable to Giorgione
or Rubens. In colonial America it was indecent to paint
nudes, money was not plentiful enough to support schools of art,
and life was often hard : so there are no colonial American pictures
of women comparable to those by the contemporary French
painters Boucher and Fragonard, At all times men can produce
great works of art; but sometimes the impulse and often the
necessary social conditions and skills are absent, and without them
it is impossible. The argument therefore neither proves nor disproves
the primacy of classical art and literature.
4. The fourth argument is the argument from taste. Many
270 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
modernists, as well as defending contemporary art, reversed the
charge and attacked the classics, saying that they were badly
written and fundamentally illogical.
This is a consequence of, and a natural reaction to, an exaggerated
admiration of the classics. It is painful to be told that
Homer is absolutely above criticism, that VergiFs Aeneid is the
perfect poem; and such assertions always provoke a revolt. As
early as the fourth century Plato was breaking down the belief that
Homer's teachings were always right and always noble, Orthodox
Greek thinkers declared Homer to be a repository of all known
wisdom (a theory amusingly burlesqued by Swift in A Tale of a
Tub) ; and among them up rose Zoilus, who tore the Iliad and the
Odyssey to pieces for bad taste and improbability. A common
expression of this reaction is parody. Parody was common in
antiquity, particularly among the Sceptic and Cynic philosophers,
who used, by parodying Homer's greatest lines, to attack his
authority, and through him the inviolability of tradition and convention.
Epic parody began again in the Renaissance as soon as
men became really familiar with the Aeneid^ and has continued
until very recently. One of the earliest attacks on the authority of
the classics, introducing the Battle of the Books, was Tassoni's
Miscellaneous Thoughts. Now, Tassoni (1565-1635) was the author
of a good and celebrated epic parody. The Ravished Bucket {La
secchia rapita), a mock-heroic poem about a war between Modena
and Bologna which broke out in the thirteenth century, and which
was actually caused by the theft of a bucket belonging to a Bolognese.
This was copied by Boileau in The Lectern and then through
him by Pope in The Rape of the Lock. Just before the battle began
in France, Scarron had a considerable success with two such
parodies, Typhon or the Battle of the Giants (1644) and Vergil
travestied (1648-53, on an Italian model), and he was followed by
others. Two of the most amusing books produced during the
dispute were similar epic parodies : Fran9ois de Calli^res's Poetic
History of the War lately declared between the Ancients and the
Moderns (1688), and Jonathan Swift's The Battle of the Books
(1697-8, published in 1704).
This attack on the classics has two chief aspects, which are
sometimes confused. Briefly, it consists in saying that the Greek
and Roman writers are either silly, or vulgar, sometimes both.
For example, their dramatic conventionssuch as the introduc14
. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 271
tion of gods into human conflictsare described as stupid. Lucan
thought so as early as the first century a.d., and (to outdo Vergil)
wrote an epic which makes no use of divine characters. It will be
recalled that the forger who produced Dares Phrygius said it was
authentic because no gods appeared and intervened in the action
(pp. 5i2). In this part of the argument the moderns seem to have
the advantage. Still, it is difficult to write on sublime subjects
without introducing the supernatural, and in a critical age the
appearance of tangible and audible divinities can always be made
to look ridiculous. The most ambitious works on this scale produced
in modern times already look a good deal the worse for wear
:
Hardys The Dynasts ' 2ini Wagners The Ring of the Nibelungs.
Again, the early history and legends of Greece and Rome, when
read without historical and imaginative perspective, contain many
absurd inconsistencies. In an age of myths, when an exceptionally
brave man or beautiful woman becomes famous, stories from the
lives of other people are soon attached to the name of the hero or
heroine, whether they fit in with the rest of the facts or not. Little
local deities are, through time, identified with well-known gods and
goddesses, who thus acquire many different and often paradoxical
characters. When all the legends are written down, some of them
are obviously contradictory. It is easy for a strict rationalist to
conclude therefore that they are all nonsense. Pierre Bayle was
among those who took this view. He calculated that (on the
assumption that all the legends about Helen of Troy were true)
she must have been at least sixty, and probably 100, at the time of
the Trojan warscarcely worth fighting for.^^
Similarly, the stylistic mannerisms of the classical poets can be
criticized : Perrault and his friends used to have great fun parodying
the long Homeric similes, with their irrelevant conclusions.
And the sequence of ideas in classical poetry can sometimes be
described as naive or unreasonable. Perrault in his Parallel between
the Ancients and the Moderns^^ tells an excellent story about an
admirer of the classics who was praising Pindar with enormous
enthusiasm, and recited the first few lines of the first Olympian
ode, with great feeling, in Greek. His wife asked him what it was
all about. He said it would lose all its nobility in translation, but
she pressed him. So he translated:
Water is indeed very good, and gold which shines like blazing fire
in the night is far better than all the riches which make men proud.
272 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
But, my spirit, if you desire to sing of contests, do not look for any star
brighter than the sun during the day in the empty heavens, nor let us
sing any contest more illustrious than Olympia.
She listened to this, and then said You are making fun of me.
You have made up all this nonsense for a joke; but you cant fool
me so easily. And although her husband kept trying to explain
that he was giving her a plain literal translation, she insisted that
the ancients were not so stupid as to write stuff like that.
But are the ancients vulgar ? The second aspect of the argument
is one of much interest and importance. In brief it is this. The
classical poets are vulgar, because they describe common things
and use undignified words ; their heroes and heroines give way to
violent emotions, and even work with their hands. Modern poets,
of the age of Louis XIV, do not write of such things : therefore
modern poets are superior. Perrault scoffs at Homer for describing
a princess going down to the river with her maids-of-honour to do
her brothers laundry;^ 3 Lord Chesterfield, a most gentlemanly
personage, raised his eyebrows at the porter-like language of
Homers heroes readers of refined taste and aristocratic sensibilities
were deeply and genuinely shocked at the very mention of
such things as domestic animals and household utensilsor, to
put it with Homeric bluntness, cows and cooking-pots. One of
the passages most generally objected to was the famous simile in
Homer where the hero Ajax, slowly retreating under heavy Trojan
attacks, is compared with a donkey which has strayed into a field
and is stubbornly eating the grain, while boys beat it with
sticks to make it move on.^^ The very word donkey, said the
modernists, could not be admitted into heroic poetry; and it was
ineffably vulgar to compare a prince to an ass. The poet of the
Odyssey was even worse when he described Odysseus palace as
having a dunghill at its gate.^^ The general attitude of these critics
resembled that of the old Victorian lady who went to see Sarah
Bernhardt in Antony and Cleopatra, and, after watching her
languish with love, storm with passion, and rave with despair,
murmured How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!
The answer to this argument is twofold. In the first place (as
Tasso observed), those who are accustomed to the refinements of
the present day despise these customs as old-fashioned and obsolete.^
There is really nothing disgraceful for a princess in superintending
the washing^particularly since Nausicaa is not described
14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 273
as doing any dirty work, but rather making a trip to the riverside
with her maidens as a sort of gay picnic, more real and not less
charming than Arcadia. The manners and customs of the Homeric
epics are indeed primitive, but they are nobly primitive, and only
a very limited mind can despise them as gross.
On the other hand, words and images drawn from ordinary life
are sometimes used in classical literature ; although not in all of it.
(The historian Tacitus, for instance, deliberately avoids calling a
spade a spade, and uses the periphrasis Things by which earth is
extracted ; he will not even use the common word Taverns for the
pubs where Nero went on his night excursions, but calls them
resorts or restaurants.^ 9) But what the baroque critics did not
realize is that, even in Homer, the vulgar words to which they
objected were carefully chosen and sparingly used. For instance,
donkey occurs only once in all the Homeric epics, in the image of
Ajax retreating; and immediately before it the poet compares Ajax
to a lion at bayalthough he seldom uses double comparisons.
What Homer meant, therefore, was that Ajax was as brave as a lion
and as stupid as a donkey, and that his bravery and his stupidity
were closely connected aspects of his personality. This is comic.
Homer meant it to be so. But it is true to life. To omit such brave
and stupid soldiers from a poem about war would be to falsify the
poem. Ajax is a comic hero, the only one in the epicalthough
both Nestor and Paris have a humorous side. As for Odysseus, his
adventures during his return go far beyond anything in the Iliad.
Odysseus is extremely clever, and utterly determined. He will get
home in spite of every kind of temptation and trial ; he will regain
possession of his own house, wife, and wealth, although they are
all claimed by younger rivals. To do this, he has to suffer. He is
shipwrecked naked on a strange island. He escapes from a cannibal
giant by hanging on to the -underside of a ram. In order to get near
his own house, he has to disguise himself as a ragged beggar, and
have bones thrown at his head ; but he endures. Sometimes during
these trials he is pathetic, and sometimes he is grotesqueas
when, during a sleepless night of anxiety, he is compared to a
black-pudding which is being turned over and over in a hot
frying-pan. But his humiliation and grotesquerie are part of his
trials, and his endurance of them is necessary, to make him more
truly heroic.
At bottom, the question is whether humour and the heroic can
5076 T
274 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
go together. Can the sublime emotions admit comic relief without
being weakened ? If they cannot, Dantes Comedy
^
Shakespeares
Macbeth and Hamlet, Tolstoys War and Peace, along with many
other great works, must be purified or discarded. And it must be
remembered that at the supreme crises in the Homeric epics, there
are no images and no words except those of the utmost nobility.
Behind these attacks on the art of the classical poets lay a number
of preconceptions, which deserve examination, since the participants
in the battle were not always aware of them.
The first was the assumption that contemporary taste^the
taste of the baroque age, or father of France, or rather of the
French aristocracy, or rather of a small group within the French
aristocracy^was the supreme judge of all art. It was a monarch
as absolute as Louis. It could judge even things beyond the province
of art. The Marechale de Luxembourg is said to have
exclaimed, after a shuddering glance at the Bible, What manners!
what frightful manners! what a pity that the Holy Spirit should
have had so little taste !^o Yet, although believed impeccable, this
taste had certain limitations. Its standards were partly made by
women, and by women who did not read with much care : so that
they were apt to pronounce a book or a play barbarous if it did not
pay much attention to love, and they could damn even the most
important work by calling it tedious.^^ Again, taste was overwhelmingly
dominated by reason, and almost ignored the irrational
beauties of poetry. Assuming that poetry was merely an
elaborate method of saying what might be clearer in prose, it
expected a prose translation to contain all the beauties of the poetic
original. And, most important, it was fearfully snobbish. It could
scarcely bear the mention of anyone beneath the rank of marquis.
No person worth writing about (it held) ever does any work, or
experiences anything but the grandest emotions. From this it is
an easy step to a limitation of language that makes it impossible
even to mention everyday things, because ordinary means common,
and common means vulgar. There was an uproar once in a French
theatre, long after this, when a translation of Othello actually used
the word mouchoir for the object which is the key of the plot;
while a baroque poet avoided the word chien by calling the animal
de la fidelite le respectable appui.^^
14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 275
This habit was largely responsible for the growing cult of poetic
cliches which ruined French poetry in the eighteenth century: it
carried the chill upward, and upward, until even love began to
sound common, and it was better to szyfires orfiame. Some of this
was originally attributable to Spanish influence, for in aristocratic
detachment from the ordinary world no one (at least in western
civilization) has ever excelled the Spanish nobles of the seventeenth
century. Certainly, it produced a drastic limitation of the vocabulary
and syntax of French drama, and helped to kill a promising
literary form. Doubtless these conventions were, as Hugo and the
other revolutionary writers who attacked them believed, part of
the old social system; but they took longer to destroy than the
monarchy itself. They outlasted the revolution and the Terror:
it was a generation later that
with breasts bare, the nine Muses sang the Carmagnole.
The second assumption behind the modern attack was nationalism.
From the time of Alfred in England, from the time of Dante
in Italy, we have seen that the national language of each country
is used as a tonic to strengthen patriotism. Statesmen and thinkers
who are eager to increase the solidarity of their own people vaunt
their language as equal or superior to Greek and Latin. This was
the inspiration of Dantes essay On Vernacular Style?^ In French
it had already appeared in Du Bellays Defence and Ennoblement of
the French Language,^^ After him it was restated by Malherbe
(who, although a purist and a classicist, despised much of the
best of classical literature), and then in 1683 by Fran9ois Charpentier,
who argued in his treatise On the Excellence of the French
Language that to admire the Greeks and Romans would keep the
French from cultivating their own tongue. At the time this seemed
reasonable enough. It was impossible to foresee that it was part of
the general movement towards nationalism which, in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, was to have such disastrous results, not
only in politics but in literature, and occasionally in art and music.
It would be a darkening of the light if any European or American
country were to fall victim to the delusion that it has its own
literature and its own culture. Politicians can be nationalists

although the greatest are something more. But artists, like

scientists, work in a tradition which covers many countries and
histories, transcending them all. The finest creative artists are
276 . 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
those who live most fully both within their own nation and time,
and within the much larger cultural stream of civilization, to
which even the most powerful state is only a small channel, a single
tributary.
A third impulse behind the modernists attack was their opposition
to traditional authority. They felt that the prestige of the
ancients was a dead hand, which kept the rising age from developing
its full power, kept men from thinking clearly and boldly,
discouraged aspiration and invention. In this they were speaking
for the Renaissance, and they represented the best of its spirit.
When first discovered and when properly used, the great achievements
of classical antiquity were challenges to generous rivalry,
not commands to laborious imitation. In the age of revolution,
early in the nineteenth century, they became so again. But in this
period they too often acted as a chilling weight on the imagination.
The scientists and philosophers in particular attacked them for
this narcosis, and boasted of ignoring all tradition in the advance
of their own work. Bacon had been the first aggressor here. Some
of his successors, supporters of the Royal Society, Vent so far as
to express the opinion that nothing could be accomplished unless
all ancient arts were rejected . . . everything that wore the face of
antiquity should be destroyed, root and branch.^' Descartes,
who prided himself on thinking out philosophy on his own account,
boasted that he had forgotten all his Greek; and although he
actually wrote two of his works in Latin, he had them carefully
translated later.
The moderns also wished to assert naturalism, as opposed to the
conventional loftiness and highly stylized unreality of classicizing
literature. One of the leaders on the modern side was Charles
Perrault, who gave us some of the most famous fairy-tales in the
western world : Puss in Bootsy Little Red Riding Hoody Blueheardy
and Cinderella. In this also the modernists had more right than
wrong on their side. The greatest works of baroque literature are
those in which, even when the language is correct and the setting
formal and symmetrical, the eternal realities of the human heart
find their most direct and complete expression. This conflict has
been immortalized in a famous scene from Molieres Misanihropey
where Alceste bitterly attacks a formal elegiac love-poem, and says
he far prefers a pretty little folk-song because it is closer to nature.^^
(And yet, in the same play, an admirable speech on the blindness
14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 277
of lovers is translated by Moliere^who had an excellent classical
educationpractically word for word from Lucretius.^^)
The weakest of the modernist preconceptions was the fifth.
Most of the moderns knew little or no Greek. And they all
assumed that translations were amply sufficient to allow them to
estimate the best v/orks of antiquity^translations which were
often in prose, and often (as we now know) positively incorrect.
Perrault himself wrote a four-volume comparison of the ancients
and the moderns although he could not read Greek at all, and
knew little Latin literature outside the works of Cicero, Horace,
Ovid, and Vergil.^ It is true that good translations of classical
books are few, but that does not mean we can take bad ones as our
authority, any more than we should judge a picture by a blurred
monochrome photograph. It is also arguable that, consciously or
unconsciously, the moderns were asserting a preference for the
Latin over the Greek tradition. Homer was attacked dozens of
times more often than Vergil; the chief defenders of the ancients
(Racine, Dacier, Boileau) were good Greek scholars ; and when the
regeneration of classical studies came, in the late eighteenth
century, it was through a deepened understanding of Greek. By
that time (see Chapter 20) a new Battle of the Books was about to
begin.
Phases of the Battle
As full of confusion, uproar, false boasts, missed blows, and
unexpected defeats as any Homeric battle, the Dispute of the
Ancients and Modems in France is difficult to describe in any
easily intelligible and memorable sequence. It was complicated
by the facts that irrelevant personal feuds, such as that between
Boileau and the Jesuits, and those which set the supporters of
Corneille against Racine, often clouded the issues ; that second-rate
men sometimes brought out first-rate arguments to prove wrong
conclusions ; and that really important critics such as Boileau never
did themselves and their cause full justice. However, if the chief
arguments are kept clearly in view, the course of the actual battle
will be easier to follow.
The first blows were stmck in Italy at the beginning of the
seventeenth century. Homer and his Greek admirers were attacked
by the brilliant Alessandro Tassoni, author of the mock-epic,
The Ravished Bucket, In his Miscellaneous Thoughts (1620), he
278 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
applied argument 4 to the Iliad with ruthlessly sharp intelligence
and lofty baroque taste. Most of the objections raised by later
criticsimprobable incidents, weak structure, vulgar imagery, the
absence of a single grand subject, the interventions of the gods and
the inconsistencies of the heroesall these and many more were
heaped on Homers white head. And Tassoni went on to the
positive argument that in fact modem men are far superior to the
ancients of Greece and Rome in nearly every sphere of life and art.
The conflict became hotter in France. Here its first phase
centred in the French Academy, which was founded in 1635. The
very name of this institution implied that seventeenth-century
France was intellectually at least as far advanced as Greece: for
the Academy was not a mirror-copy of Platos research institution,
but a rivaland even, it was hoped, an improvement. We
now think of the French Academy as a rather dictatorial authority
on questions of language and taste, a closed corporation with a
talent for not electing the greatest authors. But we must beware
of thinking that, when it was founded, it was either unified or
conservative. On the contrary, the majority of its early members
were what we should now call advanced progressives; Boileau,
who admired tradition, was in the minority throughout his career
as a member ; and one of the side-issues that confused the Dispute
of Ancients and Moderns was a struggle for the control of the
Academy and the power to write its regulations.
The fourth speech delivered before the Academy, at its meeting
on 26 Febmary 1635, was an attack on classical literature by the
dramatist Boisrobert. He also used argument 4: for his purpose
was to prove that his own plays had failed merely because his
audiences had a mistaken admiration for the Greco-Roman poets,
and that the ancients, though no doubt inspired by genius, were
inferior in taste and grace to his contemporaries and himself. The
speech is stated to have been bitterly combative in tone, but provoked
no immediate reaction (which confirms that the Academy
was inclined towards the ^modern side), and is now lost.
A more sustained and violent attack on the classics was delivered
a generation later by one of Richelieus most powerful civil servants,
Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin (1596-1676), whom Boileau called
The prophet Desmarets. This man was an exact contemporary of
Milton; he was converted in middle life, to become a fiery and
resolute Catholic; and his ambition, like Miltons, was to write a
14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 279
great poem of Christianity which would equal by its technique and
surpass by its subject the epics of pagan antiquity. He made two
chief attempts: Clovis, on the conversion of the pagan Frankish
king to Christianity (1657, republished with a polemical preface
1673), and Marie-Magdeleine (1669), on the conversion of the
Jewish harlot to Christianity and her attainment of sainthood.
Although these poems are not great works of art, the theory on
which they were written is admirable, and it was a mistake of
Boileau to condemn it. 32 It is justified not only by Paradise Lost,
but by the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, some of which are
on biblical or Christian subjects (Polyeucte, Esther, Athalie), while
others [Phedre in the queens repentance, Iphigenie in the martyrs
resignation) are Christian in spirit. But Milton, Tasso, Racine,
and other great Christian poets acknowledged that the works of the
ancients were noble, and then tried to surpass them. The prophet
Desmarets made the mistake of trying to prove that his own and
his contemporaries works must be good because the works of the
ancients were bad. (This is argument 4 again.) It is an amusing
proof of his self-deception that one of his critical treatises maintains
the superiority of the moderns, in an argument set out as a
Platonic dialogue between two characters with the Greek names of
Eusebe and Philedon.33 Before his death he solemnly called on
Charles Perrault to continue the struggle
:
Come, Perrault, and protect your fatherland.
Join in my fight against this rebel band,
This gang of weaklings and of mutineers
Who praise the Romans, greet our work with jeers . .
and then, like Hamilcar after dictating to Hannibal his oath of
eternal hatred for Rome, fell asleep in peace.
There was another demonstration in 1683, when the witty
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757) published his
Dialogues of the Dead, The main idea of these imaginary conversations
is an expansion of argument 3, for they place ancients and
modems on exactly the same level : Montaigne talks with Socrates,
and Erasistratus the physician with Harvey the surgeon. But they
also emphasize argument 2. Fontenelle believes that progress in
the arts and sciences is not a possibility, but an inevitable law
;
and at most he qualifies it by his own enlightened cynicism, as
when both Harvey and Montaigne, after explaining modem
28o 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
scientific and material progress, concede that, although men have
learnt more than their ancestors, they have not become any better.
There are also several trenchant assertions of argument 4: in a
conversation with the little fable-teller Aesop, Homer is ridiculed
for the absurd conduct of his gods and heroes. Fontenelle delivered
further flank-attacks on the ancients in his Discourse on the
Nature of the Eclogue^ where he defended his own atrociously
artificial pastorals by declaring Theocritus vulgar and Vergil
affected ; in his Digression on the Ancients and Moderns ; and in his
Remarks on the Greek Theatre
^
which called Aeschylus a sort of
lunatic, as he no doubt was to that serene and narrowly focused
intelligence.
These were skirmishes. The main battle was launched on
27 January 1687 by Charles Perrault, who read before the Academy
a poem on The Age ofLouis the Great. This work was based mainly
on arguments 3 and 4, attacked the bad taste of the Homeric epics,
and listed a number of contemporary Frenchmen who, said
Perrault, would in due time be just as famous as the great Greeks
and Romans. His list includes such household words as Maynard,
Gombauld, Godeau, Racan, Sarrazin, Voiture, Rotrou, and
Tristan, together with Regnier and Malherbe, who are slightly
better known, and Moli^re, who really is a world figure ; it omits
Racine and Boileau.
While the poem was being read Boileau was scowling and chafing
and muttering, like Alceste listening to the sonnet. Before it was
finished he went out, saying that it was a disgrace to the Academy.
For a long time, however, he made no systematic reply. He wrote
a few epigrams comparing Perrault and his sympathizers to the
savages of North and South America and to lunatics and he
proposed that the Academy should adopt as its symbol a group of
monkeys admiring themselves in a clear well, with the motto sibi
pulchri^ beautiful in their own eyes ; but it looks as though he had
been too angry to construct a real answer.
Encouraged by his own success and his opponents silence,
Perrault went on to cover the ground more completely, by publishing
a series of dialogues between contemporary characters (one
of them personifying himself), called Parallel between the Ancients
and the Moderns. These came out at intervals between 1688 and
1697, dealt with architecture, sculpture, painting; oratory;
poetry; and science, philosophy, and music. They also included
14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 28 i
a very injudicious and inexact defence of his own knowledge of
Greek and Latin. All four of the chief arguments were used in
various places ; but argument 4 was employed only in the discussion
of literature, while Perrault was wise enough to keep argument 2
('progress is continuous) for subjects like architecture and science.
Before any answer could be composed, a diplomat called de
Callieres produced an amusing parody, A Poetic History of the
War lately declared between the Ancients and the Moderns^ which
drew off some of the heat from the contest, and which Swift later
indignantly denied copyingalthough it bears the same relationship
to his Battle of the Books as Boileaus The Lectern does to
Popes Dunciad, Like Swifts parody, it ended with the victory of
the ancients, and the glorification of their greatest modern supporters:
by which de Calliferes meant Boileau and Racine.
Still, no systematic reply was attempted from the classical side.
Boileau got involved in a feud with the Jesuits (although, as
devoted to classical education, they should have been on his side)
because he had supported Pascal: so that the odds were further
shifted against him. Meanwhile, Bayle was incorporating Perraults
and his own modernist ideas in his Philosophical Dictionary
particularly the weakest of all the arguments, the argument from
taste: he said, for instance, that Achilles raging for the loss of
Briseis (and his honour) was like a child crying for a doll.^^ This
argument was answered in 1692 by Huet, in a Letter to Perrault^
and in 1694 by Boileau, in his rather ill-humoured Critical i?eflections
on Longinus. Although Soileaus criticism of Perraults
ignorant blunders were perfectly justified, their effect was diminished
by the tone of sour pedantry in which they were written.
We shall see a similar phenomenon in Britain in the next
generation.
Soon afterwards the great Jansenist and anti-Jesuit Arnauld
addressed a letter to Perrault, suggesting a reconciliation between
the two groups of opponents, for the sake of reason and of Christian
charity. Boileau followed this up by a handsome letter to Perrault,
in which he abandoned many of his strongest positions. He agreed
that the seventeenth century was the greatest age of mankind, and
conceded that the men of his own day surpassed the Augustans in
tragedy, philosophy, lyric poetry, science, and novel-writing,
while the Augustans retained the primacy in epic, elegy, oratory,
and his own field of satire. There was a formal reconciliation, and
282 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
this phase of the battle closed, leaving the modems with a very
marked advantage.
The bridge between the first French phase of the battle and the
English phase was Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis, Seigneur
de St. fivremond, bom in i6io, exiled in i66i after Fouquets fall,
and prominent in London (where his daughter had a salon) for a
quarter of a century: he died in 1703 and was buried in Westminster
Abbey. Rigault begins his chapter on the subject with
an acid description of the cultural relations between France and
England: Tme to her general habits, he says, England has taken
a little more from us than she has given us. 3
8 And, with perhaps a
touch of imagination, he relates how St. fivremond sat in Wills
coffee-house and instmcted the barbarian EnglishDryden,
Wotton, Temple, and suchin the necessity of reading the classics
in the original rather than in translation. The relations between
English literary society and France during the baroque age were
very close and rich, so that, although St. vremond no doubt
created a liaison, he was certainly not the only channel of ideas.
The first shot of the battle in England was fired by the cultured,
intelligent, and above all discreet diplomat Sir William Temple,
patron of Jonathan Swift. In 1690 he published a little book
dedicated to his alma mater, Cambridge, called An Essay upon the
Ancient and Modem Learning, This is a ridiculously exaggerated
assertion of the primacy of the classics. It takes up arguments 2
and 3, and inverts them. Yes, it says, we have progressed; but
most of the really important discoveries were made by the ancients
;
we have added little: let us respect our superiors. And, although
the modems assert that nature does not change, that merely proves
it is more difScult for us nowadays to surpass the ancients, who
have already said everything worth saying. There is nothing new
in astronomy to vie with the ancients, unless it be the Copernican
system; nor in physic, unless Harveys circulation of the blood.
Like Perrault, he gives a list of the moderns whom he thinks
worthy of lasting fame ; and it is worse, if anything, than Perraults.
The Italian immortals, for instance, are Boccaccio, Machiavelli,
and Fra Paolo Sarpi; and the English are Sidney, Bacon, and
Selden. His list proclaims him a determined admirer of the
second-rate. And then, in one very celebrated passage, he declared
that the oldest books were also the best:
14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 283
The two most ancient that I know of in prose, among those we call
profane authors, are Aesops Fables and Phalariss Epistles. ... As the
first has been agreed by all ages since for the greatest master in his
kind, ... so I think the Epistles of Phalaris to have more grace, more
spirit, more force of wit and genius than any others I have ever seen.
He adds that some have questioned the authenticity of these letters,
but that taste and discernment are enough to show they are genuine.
Phalaris was a powerful Sicilian monarch who reigned despotically
and, it is said, with savage cruelty in the sixth century B.c.
More than 700 years after his death a forger composed a collection
of letters and published them under Phalaris name. This was
another of these mystifications like the eyewitness accounts of the
Trojan war by Dares and Dictys.^^ Perhaps it is unfair to call
it a forgery. Perhaps it should be called an imaginative exercise,
like many a modern historical romance told in the first person.
But it produced the same results as if it had been a forgery: it
deceived generations of readers, and obscured the truth of history.
The chief merit of Temples essay was that it caused the real facts
to be made known at last.
Meanwhile, however, another Cambridge man replied to
Temple. This was the brilliant William Wotton: he had been an
infant prodigy, and knew more about the classics than Temple had
ever dreamt of. His Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning
(1694) is the best book directly concerned with the dispute. It
distinguishes the sciences, which progress, from the arts and
philosophy, which do not ; and it answers argument i by proving
that it is to the advantage of the Christian faith to use the best of
pagan literature, to transform and transcend it. Wotton was a
friend of the man who was the best scholar not only in Cambridge
but in all England, and not only in England but in the whole
world. This was Richard Bentley.
Now, because of the advertisement given to the Letters of
Phalaris by Temples remarks, a new edition of their Greek text
was called for. It was published in 1695, by a group of the dons
and undergraduates of Christ Church, Oxford, headed by the
dean, Aldrich; but signed, according to a convention by which
each new book produced in the House was attributed to one of the
group, by the Hon. Charles Boyle, second son of the earl of Orrery
and a kinsman of the distinguished scientist. The preface contained
a tart reference to Bentley, who, as librarian of St. Jamess
284 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
Library, had refused to allow a manuscript of the letters to be kept
out more than a few days. Like his disciple Housman, Bentley
never forgot or evaded an attack.
In 1697 he produced a Dissertation on Aesop and Phalaris,
which was published in the second edition of Wottons book.
Boyle and his friends replied, wittily and amateurishly. In 1699
Bentley issued an enlarged and final version of his Dissertation^
which, although it did not at once carry conviction (because of the
very loftiness of its standards), marked an epoch in the history
of scholarship.^ It was as scientific as any modern savant could
desire. By clear and sensible analysis of the letters themselves,
by subjecting them to historical, philological, and literary examination,
he proved that they were written in the wrong dialect of
Greek, that they referred to men and cities that flourished long
after the death of the real Phalaris, and that they contained quotations
from poets centuries younger than the Sicilian tyrant. He
added the best of all culminatory arguments, that from spirit. The
letters, he says, are not vigorous, vivid, Medicean, but artificial
and jejune
:
You feel, by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse
with some dreaming pedant with his elbow on his desk; not with an
active, ambitious tyrant, with his hand on his sword, commanding a
million of subjects.
In the same treatise Bentley exposed three other forgeries of the
same type, the Letters of Themistocles, Letters of Socrates, and
Letters of Euripides; and he gave the true descent of the socalled
Fables of Aesop.
Ne'^^ertheless, the Dissertation had one serious fault, which
stemmed from Bentleys own character. He argued so haughtily
and violently that his tone created opposition in many readers who
were genuine lovers of the classics. For instance, Pope, who was
no fool, might have wished to put the Christ Church group into
his Dunciad, but instead he introduced Bentley as an example of
Pedantry (Housman himself pinned him in the phrase tasteless
and arbitrary pedant.^^) The nemesis, the Agamemnonian tragedy,
followed inevitably. Bentley produced an edition of Miltons
Paradise Lost^ in which nearly all the poetry was altered to suit his
own taste and the criteria of contemporary style. He asserted that
the poem contained so many unintelligible phrases thatshaving
14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 285
been dictated by Milton in his blindnessit must have been deformed
by a careless editor: just as a number of the Greek and
Latin classics have been deformed. Thus,
No light, but rather darkness visible'^^
was obviously ridiculous, since darkness reveals nothing. Milton
must have meant darkness in which it is still possible. to see;
what could the correct version be.^I have it:
No light, but rather a transpicuous gloom.
And thus, by applying the standards of his own age and the limitations
of his own imagination to Miltons poetry, Bentley fell into
exactly the same faults and follies as the moderns had committed
in criticizing Homer.44 This was not the last time that an arrogant
professor was to spoil great poetry in the belief that, while the poet
had been blind, he himself could see perfectly.
Swift, who was Temples secretary, had been watching this
conflict. He had a certain amount of sympathy for both sides, for
he was a good classical scholar, but admired and cultivated originality;
and he viewed both sides with his own ingrowing contempt,
for he hated pedants and polymaths, he loathed upstarts and
ignoramuses, and he despised the pettiness which causes mankind
to divide Truth and squabble over her mangled body. In 1704 he
published two of his earliest satires, A Tale of a Tub and The
Battle of the Books, The first of these contained, among many sideblows
at the innumerable species of human folly, several savage
cuts at Bentley and Wotton. The second was a description of the
battle, told in the manner of Homer. Although Swift declared
with some violence that he had never heard of de Calliferess Poetic
History of the War . . . between the Ancients and the Moderns, there
are some close parallels still, it is amusing enough and original
enough, as epic parodies go.
It contains one episode more interesting than the various mockheroic
adventures: a fable (told partly in epic style^^) of a dispute
between a spider and a bee. The spider reproaches the bee,
who has broken his web, with being a homeless vagabond with
no possessions, living on loot; and he boasts that he himself is
the architect of his own castle, having both designed it and spun the
material out of his own body. (This was the reproach which the
modems aimed at the ancients, calling them copyists, the thieves
286 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
of others thoughts, while they themselves claimed to be entirely
original in all they wrote.) The bee replies that it is possible to
rely exclusively on ones own genius, but that any creative artist
who does so will produce only ingenious cobwebs, with the addition
of the poison of selfishness and vanity ; while the bee, ranging
with infinite labour throughout all nature, brings home honey and
wax, to furnish humanity with sweetness and light.
By this fine phrase (which later became a favourite of Matthew
Arnold) Swift stood out unequivocally as a partisan of the 'ancients,
a believer in Greco-Roman culture as the essential preparation for
creative art and thought. Although he did not mention Horace,
he was surely thinking of the poem in which Horace compared
himself to the hard-working bee, gathering sweetness from innumerable
flowers.47 He knew Horaces poetry well ; and perhaps
he liked it better because of his own crushing failure to write odes
in the manner of Pindar.^ And yetand yet Swift himself, in his
own best work, was far more of a modern than an ancient. Compared
with those of Boileau and of Pope, his satires are boldly
original, owing relatively little to his satiric predecessors; and
sometimes, like his own spider, they are marked by 'an overweening
Pride, which feeding and engendering on itself, turns all
into Excrement and Venom.
Just as Bentley, by the chances of conflict and the twists of
character, was manoeuvred into the false position of seeming to
defend the modems, so we feel that Swift misplaced himself on the
side of the ancients, whom he doubtless admired but could not
follow. This maladjustment was largely due to Bentleys own
singularly offensive character, and to the wit and charm displayed,
although on a flimsy framework, by his opponents.49 The essential
distinction between ancients and moderns was really not summed
up in the contrast of Politeness and Pedantry : it had been obscured
by the dust of dispute and the clash of personalities.
Many years afterwards, in 1742, Mr. Pope took a belated part
in the battle, bringing a caricature of Bentley into The Dunciad,^^
Bentley himself put this down to the directness (and justice) of his
own criticism of Popes translation of the Iliad: 'a very pretty
poem, but you must not call it Homer. At this juncture scarcely
anything of the original Battle of the Books was left; but the point
of Popes attack, that scholarship without broad humanity is
repellent, still holds good.
14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 287
The third phase of the war takes us back to France, but since it
was fought over nearly the same terrain we need not follow all the
operations in detail. This time the ancients took the offensive.
Madame Dacier (1654-1720), a lady as noble as she was learned,
published in 1699 a translation of the Iliad into French prose, in
which she endeavoured to do the fullest possible justice to the
beauties obscured by other translations. She added a laudatory
preface, in which she took up and destroyed argument 4. Some
years later, in 1714, her work was undone and the argument reasserted
by Antoine Houdar de la Motte, in an abridged translation
of the Iliad, which he altered, abbreviated, and bowdlerized so as
to omit the boring speeches, vulgar words, disgusting passions,
and useless or unpleasant supernatural effects which offended the
taste of the baroque age.^i Madame Dacier replied in a treatise
On the Causes of the Corruption of Taste (1714), which was not only
an attack on contemporary taste in literature but a denunciation
of some of the standards of contemporary civilization. In reply,
Houdar de la Motte prepared a set of Reflections on Criticism
(1715). This argument, like that between Boileau and Perrault,
was reconciled in 1716 by the kind offices of mediators; but not
solved. It has scarcely been solved to this day.
So ended the great Battle. It has been resumed since, but not on
exactly the same ground, or by the same opponents. Although it
was less neatly conducted than the chessboard wars of Vauban and
other baroque strategists, its results were similar : a limited gain
on one side, a smaller gain and a retrenchment of forces on the
other, a certain amount of loss for both, and a general readjustment
of diplomatic weights and counterweights. The ancients won
their contention that the virtues of the great Greek and Roman
writers were not all on the surface, required careful and wellinformed
appreciation, and could not be approved or denied by the
taste of one generation and one coxmtry alone. Critical standards
were constantly improving from the sixteenth century onwards,
and the Battle of the Books did a great deal to refine and sharpen
them. The defenders of the classics thus prepared the death of
rococo and similar trivialities, and helped to create the deeper
understanding of Greek poetry which came with the end of the
eighteenth centuiy. They defended, and expanded, the highest
traditions of the Renaissance.
s88 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
The main damage done by the battle was that it created, or
widened, a gap between scholars and the general public. It confirmed
certain pedants in their exclusiveness; and it encouraged
the belief that the man in the street is capable, without any conscious
training of his taste and knowledge, of deciding what is and
what is not a good work of art.
The 'modems, on the other side, carried the essential point

which their opponents had never sincerely disputed^that modern

books can be just as good as anything written in Greece and Rome.
They did not succeed in convincing anyone that modern literature,
even if elevated by Christian doctrine, must be better than the
classics. But the real benefit of the battle for both sides was that
it discouraged slavish respect for tradition, and made it more
difficult for future writers to produce Chinese copies of classical
masterpieces, in which exact imitation should be a virtue and
original invention a sin. (Had some such broadening of the significance
of tradition been possible in Rome, the literature of the
later empire would be far more valuable.) The idea of progress
may sometimes be a dangerous drug, but it is often a valuable
stimulant ; and it is better for us to be challenged to put forth our
best, in order to surpass our predecessors, than to be told the race
is hopeless.
15
A NOTE ON BAROQUE
The word baroque^ comes from the Portuguese harroco or the
Spanish barocco, a large irregular pearP. A regular pearl is
a perfect sphere ; an irregular pearl is a sphere straining outwards
at one point, bulging and almost breaking, but yet not bursting into
fragments. Therefore baroque means beauty compressed but
almost breaking the bounds of control.^
Renaissance art is the perfect pearl. The art of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, during the period between the Renaissance
and the age of revolutions, is the baroque pearl. The essential
meaning of the word is the interplay of strong emotion and stronger
social, aesthetic, intellectual, moral, and religious restraints. What
we, nowadays, usually see in baroque art and literature is its
formality, its symmetry and frigidity. What the men and women
of the baroque era saw in it was the tension between ardent passion
and firm, cool control. This conflict appeared in their own lives
and characters. It was epitomized in the Grand Monarch himself,
turning from the voluptuous Montespan to the serene and spiritual
Maintenon. It has been finely described by Macaulay in his
character of William the Third
:
He was born with violent passions and quick sensibilities : but the
strength of his emotions was not suspected by the world. From the
multitude his joy and his grief, his affection and his resentment, were
hidden by a phlegmatic serenity, which made him pass for the most
coldblooded of mankind. Those who brought him good news could
seldom detect any sign of pleasure. Those who saw him after a defeat
looked in vain for any trace of vexation. He praised and reprimanded,
rewarded and punished, with the stem tranquillity of a Mohawk chief;
but those who knew him well and saw him near were aware that under
all this ice a fierce fire was constantly burning. It was seldom that anger
deprived him of power over himself. But when he was really enraged
the first outbreak of his passion was terrible. It was indeed scarcely safe
to approach him. On these rare occasions, however, as soon as he
regained his self-command, he made such ample reparation to those
whom he had wronged as tempted them to wish that he would go into
a fury again. His affection was as impetuous as his wrath. Where he
loved, he loved with the whole energy of his strong mind. When death
5076 u
290 IS. A NOTE ON BAROQUE
separated him from what he loved, the few who witnessed his agonies
trembled for his reason and his life.^
That same tension characterizes the work of the baroque artists
and writers. It can be seen
in their satires and epigrams, venomous but polite
;
in their tragedies, passionate but stilted and formalized
;
in the statues of female saints and mystics, yearning, swooning,
almost expiring, almost flying up to heaven, but richly
and conventionally draped and elegantly posed
;
in the solemn, strictly symmetrical churches, cathedrals, and
palaces, where a grand and austere design is blended with
soft, charming decorationflower-and-leaf motives, graceful
statuary and portrait-heads^with sumptuous colours,
crimson, purple, and gold, with elaborately curving pillars
and swooping arches, with brilliant lighting and rich
fabrics
;
in music, in the contrast between the free and emotional Bach
prelude or toccata, and the rigidly formal and intellectually
disciplined fugue which follows and dominates the dual
composition; and again, in the unbelievably intricate
cadenzas through which the voice of the opera-singer, like
a bird struggling to escape, fluttered upwards, soared, and
sank at last, returning to the keynote and the waiting
orchestra, to complete the formal aria.3
The greatest baroque artists, who most intensely characterize their
age, are these
:
Adam in architecture
The brothers Asam in interior
decoration
Bach in music
Bernini in architecture
Bcileau in satire and criticism
Bossuet in oratory
Churriguerra in architecture
Corneille in tragedy
Dryden in tragedy and satire
Fielding in the mock-heroic
novel
Gibbon in prose history
Gdngora in poetry
El Greco in painting
Handel in music
Lully in music
Metastasio in operatic tragedy
Moliere in comedy
Monteverdi in music
Pope in satires and poetic
epistles
Poussin in painting
Purcell in opera
Racine in tragedy
Rubens in painting
15. A NOTE ON BAROQUE 291
Alessandro and Domenico ggir- Titian in painting
latti in music Vanbrugh in architecture
Swift in satire Veronese in painting
Tiepolo in painting Wren in architecture.
In the work of all these diverse artists, in so many countries,
what part did Greek and Roman influence play }
First, it supplied themes, which ranged all the way from tragic
stories to tiny decorative motifs on a vase, a wall, or a cabinet.
Despite the resistance of the moderns^ Rome was reborn in the
gorgeous palaces, the immense cathedrals, the long straight roads
and geometrically designed towns which grew up all over Europe
during that era. (Some of the 'moderns, like the architect Perrault,
actually helped in the rebirth.) Racines greatest heroine
was a prehistoric Greek princess. Purcells finest opera is about
Dido and Aeneas. Handels best-known song comes from an opera
about Xerxes. Pope and Boileau both strove to reincarnate Horace
in themselves, and partially succeeded. Gibbon spent his life
writing the history of the later Roman empire, in cadences which
themselves were consciously Roman.
Secondly, it supplied forms^the forms of tragedy, comedy,
satire, character-sketch, oration, philosophical dialogue, Pindaric
and Horatian ode, and many more.
More important, it acted as a restraining force. As such, it was
welcomed. The men and women of that period felt the dangers of
passion, and sought every proper means of controlling it. Religion
was one: the greatest. Social prestige was another: to display
extreme emotion was ungentlemanly. No less powerful was the
example of Greco-Roman morality (particularly Stoicism) and of
Greco-Roman art, with its combination of dignity and purity.
Greek and Roman art is very, very rarely grotesque and ignoble,
as much medieval art is. (Compare the punishments of the damned
in the classical underworld, with the more terrible but often mean
and filthy tortures of the damned in Dantes hell.) Therefore its
example can help modern men and women to ignore or minimize
the baseness which lies in every human heart, and, even at the
apparent sacrifice of individuality, to achieve nobleness. Those
subtle psychologists the Jesuits knew that, properly taught,
classical literature will purify the heart and raise the soul; and they
became the greatest group of classical teachers the modern world
has seen. A list of the pupils whose minds they developed through
292 15. A NOTE ON BAROQUE
the classics would include an astonishing number and variety of
geniuses: Tasso, Moliere, Descartes, Voltaire. . . .
To use classical literature and fine art as a moral restraint was
well judged. Its use as an aesthetic control was at first well judged,
too, and then was exaggerated until it became, not a moulding
principle, but a numbing and paralysing force. For instance,
baroque tragedy subjected itself, in the name of Aristotle, to a
number of rules which Aristotle had never conceived as rules, and,
as part of the same restraining movement, to many others which
would have amused or appalled him. This exaggeration is sometimes
called classicism^ which is a good enough name in English,
provided it is not taken to mean The use of classical models in
general.4 Later, the revolutionary era was to discover that Greco-
Roman literature and thought can mean not only restraint, but
liberation ; and when it cast off the classicism of the baroque age
it was not discarding Greece and Rome, but exploring them more
deeply.
Lastly, classical literature, myth, art, and thought helped to
produce the intellectual unity of Europe and the two Americas.
Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they provided
a common realm of imagination and discussion in which minds
separated by language, distance, and creed could meet as equals.
It transcended nationality and bridged religious gulfs. Like the
Roman Catholic church in the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages,
it was a spiritual, and therefore a more lasting, rebirth of Greek
and Roman culture in the form of an empire in the souls of
western men.
16
BAROQUE TRAGEDY
I
N poetry the most considerable production of the baroque age
(excluding the latest of the Renaissance epics, Paradise Lost)
is a body of tragedies in English, French, and Italian. The finest
of these are tlie work of Pierre Corneille (producing from 1635 to
1674), Jean Racine (producing from 1664 to 1677, with two later
works on biblical subjects), and John Dryden (producing from
1664 to 1694). There are also a number of interesting singletons
such as Miltons Samson Agonistesy Addisons CatOy and Johnsons
Irene ; there is a large body of operatic dramas by Metastasio ; and
there were thousands of mediocrities now forgottensuch as
Voltaires tragedies, which would still be buried had they not been
disinterred and momentarily galvanized into ludicrous life by
Lytton Strachey in Boohs and Characters. All these tragedies are
in a form very closely resembling that of GrecoRoman tragedy,
and many, including the greatest, are on subjects taken from
Greek mythology or Roman history. Some, such as Racines
PhedrCy are actually on themes already worked out by Greek and
Roman dramatists, and use ideas originated by classical playwrights.^
Baroque tragedy was what Spengler calls a pseudomorphosis:
the re-creation in one culture of a form or activity
created by another culture distant in time or space.
Baroque tragedy was more intensely classical than almost any
other type of modern literature. Certainly it depended much more
on Greco-Roman literature and mythology than the great bulk of
English, French, and Spanish Renaissance drama. There were
several reasons for this : all important, because they mark significant
changes in the society and civilization of western Europe.
The authors were much more thoroughly educated than those
who produced Renaissance tragedy, and even after the end of their
schooling they continued to steep themselves in the classics.
Corneille was educated by the Jesuits, which means that he had
a sound and sympathetic classical training. Although he was the
least well read of the three chief tragedians, his knowledge of
ancient literature was far wider than that of Shakespeare: it was
he who founded French classical tragedy by seizing the essentials
294 16. BAROQUE TRAGEDY
and discarding the unusable elements in Greco-Roman tragedy.
Although we cannot measure a poets gifts and achievements by
the quality of his learning, still it is interesting to know that Racine
was much more learned than Corneille. Racine could be called
a skilled hellenist, whereas Corneille, like many of his contemporaries,
had much Latin and small Greek. Even in character
Corneille was a Roman, proud, simple, rather inarticulate, while
Racine was a sensitive, thoughtful, and complex Greek.
Racine was educated very well and carefully by the Jansenists at
Port-Royal. They got him late, at the age of seventeen, but they
did a remarkable job of making him understand and love the
classics. We hear of his roaming the woods of Port-Royal alone
with his Euripides, and learning Heliodorus Aethiopica^ off by
heart. The feat sounds very improbable; yet the book, which
contains a story of a proud king meditating the sacrifice of his own
daughter (as in Iphigdnie) and another of a stepmother in love with
her stepson (as in PMdre)^ must have affected him deeply : one of
his early plays was on a theme frankly borrowed from it. We have
said that Corneille was the Roman, Racine the Greek. The
difference reflects the difference in their education, for the Jesuits
did little to encourage Greek studies while the Jansenists specialized
in them. It is strange to see how the tragedians of the modern
world, having started to understand classical tragedy through the
latest of all the tragic poets, Seneca, gradually work their way
back from the estuary to the source, from the Roman back to the
Greeks. Corneilles early Medee is the only baroque tragedy in
French which comes from Seneca, and except in the Latin tragedies
written by Jesuit playwrights Senecan influence shrinks rapidly
in this period. But even Racine did not penetrate farther upstream
than Euripides.
Only one poet of the period knew and assimilated all three
Greek tragedians. This was John Milton, who has left us one
tragedy on a hero like himself, blind and surrounded by Philistines.
Samson Agonistes^ unlike the other dramas of the baroque era, is
a pure re-creation of Greek tragedy. Like Paradise Lost^ it blends
classical technique and emotion with Hebrew and Christian
thought. While its parallelism to Miltons own life and to the
apparent defeat of the cause which he served is clear, it is far less
contemporary in feeling than the plays by professional dramatists
like Corneille and Dryden. It is also less dramatic ; and it is far less
16. BAROQUE TRAGEDY 295
effective than its Greek models. 3 The conflicts are less urgent and
the subordinate characters more shadowy than in Aeschylus
Prometheus Bound (which was Miltons chief pattern), and there
is a subtlety in Sophocles which Milton could scarcely achieve.
Although the conception of the play is majestic, and the single
character of Samson is grand, and several speeches and choruses
contain immortal poetry, the work was written for the study and
not for the theatre, so that it lacks the tension of Greek drama, and
of all true drama.
John Dryden was educated at Westminster School and Trinity
College, Cambridge. Both the style of his prefaces and prose
writings, and the frequent quotations in them, made without
affectation, show that he knew ancient literature familiarly and
held it dear. His translations from Roman and Greek classics are
of a purity rare at any time, and of a range which many professional
scholars could not now equal.
Johnson, like Corneille, was a poor Grecian; but he was an
excellent latinist. He read a great deal by himself in his fathers
bookshop, was well educated by the time he reached Pembroke
College, Oxford, and as an undergraduate turned Popes The
Messiah into Latin verse. One of the earliest of his many literary
plans was to edit the poems of the Renaissance humanist Politian
and to produce a history of modem Latin poetry ; and he made
his name with an adaptation of Juvenals third satire.
Addison went to Charterhouse, and then to Oxford, where he
became a fellow of Magdalen and wrote admirable Latin verse.
Among his early work in the field of classics are a translation of the
fourth book of Vergils Georgies and an archaeological Essay on
Medals written during his tour of Italy.
As for the phenomenal Metastasio (1698-1782), he translated the
Iliad into Italian verse at the age of twelve, and wrote an original
tragedy in the manner of Seneca at fourteen.
This mass of learning comes out not only in the plays these men
wrote but also in their prose works : Drydens Essay on Dramatic
Poesy
^
Corneilles Trois discours sur le poeme dramatique, Racines
careful commentaries on Pindar and Homer, Addisons essays on
Milton, and Miltons superb Areopagitica.
But the audiences, although better educated than those of the
Renaissance, were not nearly so well educated as their poets. Few
of the ladies, whose taste had so much to do with the success of a
296 16. BAROQUE TRAGEDY
play, knew their classics. Few of the gentlemen were more than
amateur scholars, like Charles Perrault, with a strictly limited
range of reading. Baroque tragedy is not the first literary type,
nor the last, in which classical influence has led to the adoption of
artistic standards too high for a contemporary audience.
On the other hand, the audiences were far from unsympathetic.
Society had now lost many of the vivid, vital qualities of the Renaissance
; but it acquired, or retained and enhanced, those which
were suited to encourage the new style of drama. In France, and
to a less extent in England, Italy, and elsewhere, society was now
becoming much more urbanized. For the first time since the fall
of Rome, western European societies were organized around great
capital cities, each with a regal court at its heart. Where such
cities did not exist, it was necessary to create themas the Prussian
monarchs created Berlin, as Peter the Great both built St. Petersburg
as a city and inaugurated it as the centre of government. The
leisured classes in these cities provided a keen and permanent
audience for the dramatists.
Grandeur was the ideal of western Europe. It was an era of
magnificent display. We see this in architecture^not only great
buildings like Versailles and Blenheim but elaborate formal
gardens and vast parks, entire sectors of cities, even whole towns
were laid out on a hitherto-unexampled scale which recalled Rome.
We see it in interior decoration. The grandiose conception, the
very size, of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles would have staggered
any Renaissance prince. Social and diplomatic ceremony also
show it, and so does costume, where there were many nonfunctional
adjuncts such as wigs, lace, and dress swords. It
appeared in music : this was the age of the organ, when the counterpoint
of Bach built an invisible Versailles to the glory of God, and
it was the age of the enormous trained choirs. Stage design, too,
showed it: production, decor
^
and costumes reached a new peak of
elaboration and opulence. Nowadays we are apt to think that,
behind all this magnificence, beneath the periwigs and the jewelled
orders, people were empty shells. Some were ; but the letters and
memoirs and portraits of the time remain to show us that many still
felt and suffered deeply^perhaps all the more intensely for the repressions
that surrounded them. It was this combination of formal
grandeur and passionate emotions which made tragedy and opera,
with all their conventions, the truest expression of the baroque era.
16. BAROQUE TRAGEDY 297
(Always close, the kinship between tragedy and opera now
became closer still, Dryden joined Purcell in writing King Arthur,
The works of Metastasio were scarcely less fine when viewed as
pure tragedies than when they were sung as operas. The Franco-
Italian composer Lully collaborated closely with Moliere, and
himself felt that his work was allied to that of the dramatists : he
said, Tf you want to sing my music properly, go and hear la
Champmeslea favourite actress of the Comedie who had
received lessons in speech and acting from Racine himself.)
Baroque tragedy was, in its day, greatly admired. Its actors and
actresses, together with the famous virtuosi singers, almost raised
the stage to the dignity of a profession. Its achievements in stagedesign
and production are still unequalled. It produced some
interesting critical discussions, a few marvellous plays, and many
fine speeches. But can we say that it was a success ? Can it be
equalled with Greek tragedy, or with the tragedy of the Renaissance
?
Clearly it cannot. Not as a whole. In France, the baroque
tragedians did produce finer plays than any of the French Renaissance
playwrights; but we must survey the tragedy, not of one
country, but of the entire epoch. Not only did the genus fail to
produce a sufficient number of good plays to offset the enormous
bulk of bad plays born from it ; not only do few of its products hold
the stage to-day ; but its own poets, from Metastasio to Dryden,
abandoned the stage before finishing their careers, and sank into
a silence which confessed a sense of failure.
Two reasons can be assigned for this failure. The first is social
and cultural, the second aesthetic ; but they connect.
Socially and culturally, the error of the baroque tragedians was
that they addressed too small an audience, and that they themselves
limited the audience still further. The greatest drama has usually
appealed to, and drawn its strength from, a broad section of the
nation that gives it birth. That does not mean that it cannot be
aristocratic in tone. Usually it is, but it appeals to the middle class
and sometimes to the working class as well ; and what gives it real
fertility is a large literate public with good taste. But the audience
of baroque tragedy was (except for Italian opera) confined to the
upper classes, 'the court and the capitah, and not all of those.^
And its themes were on an even loftier social plane, moving among
298 16. BAROQUE TRAGEDY
princes, kings, emperors, and their faithful attendants. It has been
suggested that this was due to a misunderstanding or exaggeration
of Aristotles advice that only great men should be made the
subjects of tragedies, but it is easier to believe that it was a reflex
of the monarchical structure of society. Nor can it be said that, in
spite of this, the problems of baroque tragedy are all universal
problems. On the contrary, many of the plots concern the dynastic
struggles of autocratic monarchs. Consider Racines Iphigenie.
Some fathers, it is true, do sacrifice the happiness oftheir daughters,
and so far the problem is a universal one ; but very few fathers have
to decide whether to have their daughters liquidated as part of
a political and military operation. Drydens Aureng-Zebe is an
intricate story of intrigue and power-politics in the Mogul court,
and every major character has a band of trusty mutes or a private
army.
The learning which the baroque playwrights displayed also
alienated some of their audiences. Although their works are rarely
pedantic, they do presuppose a knowledge of the classics more
considerable than that possessed by some of the men and nearly
all the women in the aristocratic audiences. Poetry written by
scholars has this inevitable weakness, that even when it is good it
creates a feeling of discomfort and even resentment among those
who are not classically educated. The basic conflict which lies
beneath this feeling is the conflict between art as education and art
as amusement. Most of the audiences of baroque tragedy felt,
when they saw a classical play, that it was elevated, but in danger
of becoming pedantic. Quinault, with his lyrical dramas, and
Thomas Corneille, whose romantic Timocrate was the greatest
success of the era, were really more popular than the great Pierre
Corneille and the subtle Jean Racine.
The second, or aesthetic, reason for the failure of baroque
tragedy is a peculiar one. It is often misunderstood by modem
critics. They are apt to think that the seventeenth-century and
eighteenth-century tragedians were hampered and limited by their
obedience to Greek and Roman mles of form. But the tmth is that
they imposed limitations on themselves which were far more
complex, far more rigid, than anything to be found in classical
drama.
These limitations were not so much a reproduction of the conventions
of the Greco-Roman stage as a reaction against the
16. BAROQUE TRAGEDY 299
extravagances of the Renaissance. The baroque era despised
the Renaissance drama for bad taste : for its wildly confused plots,
unbelievable incidents, vulgar buffoonery, ranting speeches,
eccentric and incredible characters; for offensive morality^with
its obscene jokes and its tortures, lusts, and treacheries ; and for
improbabilities which insulted not merely scholarship but ordinary
common senseas when Macbeths porter (who lived in a.d. 1055)
made up-to-the-minute jokes about Elizabethan London. But,
more important than that, the baroque conventions were social
restrictions. To make a good play is to create a work of art. To
observe les hienseances is to conform to an aristocratic social code.
The baroque playwright had to do both. He could not do the
former without doing the latter. About his artistic success
opinions might differ; but if his work was socially offensive he
was surely damned. His task was therefore excessively, unnecessarily
difficult : and, except for the greatest geniuses, and not
seldom even for them, impossible.
One of the chief social limitations which interfered with the
work of the baroque playwrights was the rule that low words
could not be used. Had this meant the avoidance of obscene or
repulsive words, it would have been a limitation possible to accept.
(It carried with it the condemnation of Hamlets
Ill lug the guts into the neighbour room,^
of much of his denunciation of Gertrude,^ and of many great
speeches not only in drama but in other kinds of poetry such as
Roman satire.) The Greek and Roman tragedians and epic poets
on the whole avoided such words too, although Homer and
Aeschylus, Seneca and Lucan, all permit themselves to employ
one or two for special effects. But in the baroque age the vocabulary
was limited much further than the great classics had ever
imagined necessary, by the exclusion of working-class words.
Dr. Johnson objected to Lady Macbeths tremendous invocation:
Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes!
on the ground that a knife was an instrument used by butchers
and cooks in the meanest employments.^ Shakespeare well knew
that it was used by butchers. Yet he did not think Lady Macbeth
300 16. BAROQUE TRAGEDY
any less a queen for saying the word. Racine himself recognized
that in this the language of his contemporaries was much more
confined than that of the Greco-Roman poets, who did not find it
shocking to hear the word cow or dog.^
The reader who compares baroque drama with the tragedies of
the Greeks or the Elizabethans will notice another strange limitation
: the avoidance of vivid imagery. Sometimes this may be put
down to the avoidance of objectionable wordsfor instance,
Aeschylus comparison of the Greek fleet attacking Troy to an
eagle striking a pregnant hare^ would be impossible in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Part of it was due to the wish not
to fall into the extravagance of the Renaissance; and part to the
desire for complete concentration on the character and emotions
of the personages. Still, even those metaphors which do occur are
uncomfortably often like cliches : brows are clouded, tendernesses
are frozen, and every now and then a startling image proves to
have little real imaginative force, but to be a clumsy mixture of
two accepted metaphors. A crowned flame is a strange and evocative
idea, which might come from Dante; but in Racine it only
means love triumphant.
Then the metre of the baroque tragedies was far more strictly
limited than anything in Greek, Latin, or Renaissance tragedy.
It has its virtues: tautness and tension. But it never allows a
character to make a great, long, rich, continuous speech, with
emotion surging and welling and falling back and urging upwards
again: because every line must hesitate for the caesura in the
middle, and pause at the end of the line, and halt at the end of
the couplet. On the whole, the English tragedians are freer than
the French, but still less fluent than their predecessors. In French
there is another constriction. Two lines with a masculine rhyme
must be followed by a couplet with a feminine rhymeso that
every long speech is broken down, by the listeners ear, into neat
four-line packets. It is astounding that the playwrights managed
to produce such powerful effects as they did with such a metre.
It is a splendid vehicle for expressing rapid changes of purpose and
conflict of motives (provided they are clearly realized and described)
within the mind of one character; and for giving the rapid
thmst-and-parry of altercation ; but it can never rise to the heights
of imaginative rhetoric that are possible to freely moving blank
verse, as in Clytenmestras beacon-speech in Agamemnony
16, BAROQUE TRAGEDY 301
Clarences dream in Richard ///, Prosperos dismissal of the spirits
in The Tempest ; and it can never portray the incoherent wanderings
of a tormented soul on the edge of madness, as in Hamlets soliloquies,
or the ravings of Lear when he calls on the thunder to
destroy mankind. In many passages it becomes straight prose,
without even the complexity which is possible for prose
:
Clytemnestre
:
Ma fille, il faut partir, sans que rien nous retienne,
Et sauver, en fuyant, votre gloire et la mienne.
Je ne metonne plus quinterdit et distrait
Votre p^re ait paru nous revoir a regret:
Aux affronts dun refus craignant de vous commettre
II mavait par Areas envoye cette lettre. . .
Greek tragedy and Renaissance tragedy are full of varied
emotion. There are crowd scenes in both ; the Greeks have choric
songs and dances; the Elizabethans have comic relief. Seneca,
more restricted than either, still kept a chorus and introduced
ghosts and furies. Compared with them all, the baroque tragedians
are monotonous, with an intense monotony which reflects the
smallness of the court society for which they worked. The
technique by which they compensated this limitation was the use
of magnificent decor
^
costumes, and stage effects; but of all that
little survives in their poetry.
The symmetry of baroque tragedy was a thing unknown to the
Greeks. It is virtually impossible to guess who were the chief and
who the subordinate characters of a lost play by Euripides, far less
of an Aeschylean tragedy. But after one has read or seen a few
baroque tragedies, the grouping of the characters, with their carefully
balanced loves and hates, confidants and rivals, becomes
familiar and even obvious.
Lastly, the rules. The Unities, above all. It cannot be too often
repeated that these were not laws laid down by the Greeks. There
were few if any laws restricting the Greek poets. There were only
customs, and the customs were often broken. Aristotle says that
a play must have unity of action, because any work of literature
must ; but he cares little for the unity of time, and still less for the
unity of place, except in so far as they assist the drama. It was the
Italian theorists of the Renaissance who first established these
principles as laws:^^ that essentially second-rate character, the
elder Scaliger, proved to be ultimately the most influential among
302 16, BAROQUE TRAGEDY
them ; yet his judgements (as that Vergil was superior to Homer)
were not based on the opinion of classical antiquity but on his own
prejudices. It is true that, as a contemporary scholar has pointed
out, ^3 discipline is necessary for the artist, and the limitations
which a great genius accepts and surmounts purify and intensify
his work. But the rules of the baroque pedants went much farther
than this. Combined with the savage criticism whichsometimes
for reasons purely social and personal^was levelled at many great
tragedies on their appearance, the rules at first hampered and finally
silenced the tragedians whom they ought to have assisted. As a
code of laws, these rules did not exist in Greece and Rome. They
were extracted, elaborated, and exaggerated from hints in Aristotle
;
and what gave them their legislative force was not classical precept
or example but the fear of anarchy and the love of social and
political order which were the ruling motives of the baroque age.
These, then, are the reasons for the comparative failure of
baroque tragedy. It was not caused by excessive admiration for
classical models or the laws of Aristotle, but by social and
political limitations. The baroque poets were far more limited
than the Greek playwrights they admired; and their classicism
was unappreciated by most of their public. Even at that, it was a
wholesome influence on their work. We can see that by comparing
Corneille and Racine, in whom it was strong, with the shallower
Dryden, in whose dramas it was less strong; and by contrasting
these three with the balderdash which was poured out by their less
educated contemporaries to divert the admirers of Scuderys
romantic adventure-stories. Louis XIV once asked Boileau who
was the greatest contemporary French poet. Boileau gave him a
name. Louis replied Really? I should never have believed it!
But Boileau was right. The finest product of the baroque stage
came from France. It was in a genre where classical precision of
form is invaluable and where the excesses of classicizing pedantry
are excluded by definition. That was the comedy of Molifere.
17
SATIRE
The word "satire has nothing to do with satyrs, but comes
from the same root as "saturate, and means "a medley full of
different things. Originally it had none of the sense of invective
which we now associate with it. It was simply* a catch-all term
like "revue, or melange^ or "farce,^ Imprecise as its name might
be,'satire was the only literary form invented by the Romans ; and it
was a Roman satirist who gave it its modem sense and purpose.
In Latin there were two main groups of satirists.
{a) The more important were the satiric poets, usually specializing
in invective against clearly identifiable or thinly disguised
"^personalities. (The verse, in all the complete poems that have
survived, is hexameter^the most flexible and interesting hexameter
in Latin literature.) The inventor of this vein was Lucilius {fl,
150--102 B.C.), whose works unfortunately did not survive the Dark
Ages. He was followed by Horace (65-8 B.c.), who began with
rather sour social criticism and gradually mellowed into philosophical
and aesthetic discursiveness ; towards the middle of his life
he gave up satires for his gentler epistles.^ The next extant Roman
satirist is'Persius (a.d. 34-61), a rich young puritan who was a
passionate admirer of Stoicism, and wrote remarkably realistic
satires in a strange, vivid, crabbed, slangy style. The last and
greatest is Juvenal {c, a.d. 55-130, publishing c. 100-130), who
produced the most bitter and eloquent social satires ever written
:
his best-known and oftenest-imitated works are Satire 3, on the
horrors of megapolitan life, Satire 6, a thoroughly relentless attack
on women, and Satire 10, a sombre but noble meditation on the
vanity of human hopes.
(b) The others were the Menippean satirists, writing in prose^
with short interludes of verse which are often parodic. This style
was invented by the Greek (or rather Syrian) Cynic philosopher
Menippus of Gadara {fl, 290 B.c,), who apparently used it for
making fun of his philosophical opponents. Ciceros friend Varro
(116-27 brought it into Latin, but his work is lost. One
whole Menippean satire survives, theJoke on the Death of Claudius
or PumpMnification by Seneca {c. 4 b.c.-a.d. 65), a cmel but very
304 17. SATIRE
funny parody of the deification of the drooling old emperor
Claudius. 3 We also have a fragment of a huge Epicurean satire in
the form of a picaresque romance, the Satirica of Neros friend
Petronius (d. a.d. 66) but the main part of it was not discovered
until 1650, so that it has had little effect on modern satire.
Apparently there was no essential difference of function between
the two types of Roman satire : although as far as we can see the
Menippean satire is looser, more slangy, less often serious and
eloquent than satire in verse.
On this Roman form, it is possible to trace certain Greek
influences which are still active in modem satirical works.
The desire to improve society and purge its abuses by attacking
notorious fools and villains was taken by the Romans from Athenian
Old Comedy, whose only surviving representative is the brilliant
and fearless Aristophanes. This is a natural enough function of
poetry. Since the Romans had no drama suitable to fulfil it, they
used satire (which was originally semi-dramatic) for the purpose.
The Romans also borrowed many -devices used by the Greek
street-preachers, usually Cynics and Sceptics, to attract and hold
attention. These men used to give ostensibly improvised sermons
(called diatribes) on themes drawn from their own doctrines

usually on paradoxes which would attract a crowd; and they

illustrated and decorated them with anecdotes, character-sketches,
fables, dialogues against imaginary opponents, topical references,
parodies of serious poetry, obscene jokes, and slang phrases,
/However, the moral seriousness, the direct violence, and the
cruelty of satire are rather more Roman than Greek, and come out
most en^hatically in the most Roman of the satirists.
From late in the Roman empire^there survives the work of one
philosophical satirist writing in Greek prose. He was bom in
Syria about a.d. 125, and his name isXucian. His tone is one of
amused disillusionment. Lord! he says, what fools these mortals
be!but there is more gentleness in his voice and kindness in his
heart than we feel in his Roman predecessors. His work is unlike ^
nearly everything else that survives from Greco-Roman literature.
It forms a bridge between the dialogues of creative philosophers
like Plato, the fantasy of Aristophanes, and the negative criticism of
the satirists. He was Rabelaiss favourite Greek author. Swift may
have recalled his fabulous travel-tales when he wrote about Gulliver
;
17. SATIRE 305
and'Cyrano de Bergerac certainly did when he went to the moon.
With such distinguished descendants, Lucian has earned the right
to be called by the title which would have amused him, immortaF.
A definition of Roman satire, largely applicable to modern satire
in so far as that is still a form in itself, would be :
Satire is a continuous piece of verse, or of prose mingled with
verse, of considerable size, with great variety of style and
subject, but generally characterized by the free use of
conversational language, the frequent intrusion of its
authors personality, its predilection for wit, humour, and
irony, great vividness and concreteness of description,
shocking obscenity in theme and language, an improvisatory
tone, topical subjects, and the general intention of
improving society by exposing its vices and follies. Its
essence is summed up in the word airov^oyeXoLov = ridentem
dicere uerum = joking in earnest.
Like the gift of song and dance, the urge to make fun of fools
and scoundrels always exists in all kinds of barbarian, half-savage,
and fully civilized societies. Although the men of the Middle Ages
understood neither the pattern nor some of the important devices
of the classical satirists, they wrote many satirical works. Sometimes
they spoilt their material by putting it in inappropriate forms.
For example, the second part of The Romance of the Rose is full of
satirical thinking and satirical expressions, even of translations
from Roman satires ; but they are painfully out of place as digressions
in a visionary love-story, s During the Middle Ages there was
more satire written in Latin than in the vernacular languages

evidently because learned clerks were more likely to possess a sharp

critical intellect, and because the Latin classics provided them with
ready-made turns of thought and expression. The twelfth century
produced some very remarkable poems of this type. One of the
most powerful invectives against the moral corruption of society
ever wTitten is the poem On the Contempt of the World by Bernard
of Morval, a monk of Clunyfjl, 1150). We know it only from a
few brief passages which have been translated to be sung as
hymns (Jerusalem the Golden is one), but in intensity of feeling and
deftness of language it is a masterpiece which does not deserve its
neglect. But the authors of these works do not draw a clear
S076 Y
3o6 17, SATIRE
distinction between satire and didacticism, they think they are
preaching sermons, and wander off into long descriptions and
digressions which weaken the force of their satire by dispersing it.
I
Vernacular satire, during the Middle Ages, is almost always either
temporary lampoon or else disguised in the peoples own favourite
forms : as a collection of anecdotes, like Tyl Ulenspiegel, or a group
of animal-fables, like Reynard the Fox.
As we have seen, one of the main effects of the rediscovery of
classical literature in the Renaissance was that men learnt much
more about the precise character of the various literary types, and
about the methods appropriate for each. They came to realize that
it spoilt the desired effect if they mixed up satire and other types
of writing unsympathetic to itlove-poetry, for instance, or high
philosophical argument. And they saw more clearly than ever
before^partly through study ofthe Roman satirists, partly through
reading the epigrams of Martial (which are akin to satire and in
particular to Juvenals satires), and partly through their own
increased experience of the subtleties of stylehow the damage a
satirist can do with a loud and long denunciation can be exceeded
by a short, biting, and memorable epigrammatic sentence. Juvenal
himself has never been surpassed in the craft of etching on the human
heart with pure acid. It was he who created many phrases which are
now household words, such as bread and circuses, panem et
circenses.'^ There are hundreds of such utterances in his work : they
have the permanence of a great inscription and the ring of sincere
and perfect poetry. The tragic irony of his attitude to life, and the
superb style that enables him to comment on an eternal problem in
three or four words, have reached many modem poets who have
worked in quite different media. It is traceable, for instance, in
Donne: a bracelet of bright hair about the bone could come
straight out of Juvenal. It is certainly obvious in the lyrics of Housman
(who made his scholarly reputation in part by a careful edition
of Juvenals text). For instance, in the sixty-second poem of A
Shropshire Lad he recommends his readers to digest his bitter
poems, in order to immunize themselves against the bitterness of
lifelike the Asiatic king Mithridates, who
gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
17. SATIRE 307
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up
:
They shook, they stared as white 's their shirt
:
Them it was their poison hurt. I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.
The tale is told in many places, but it was Juvenal, in the last words
of his satire on womens treachery, who gave it to the luckless lad.^
In another of his most powerful poems he wishes for death,
crying that
All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain ;
Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation

Oh why did I awake ? when shall I sleep again

That indignatiofiy the last of the emotions mentioned and the most
constantly powerful, is the driving force which Juvenal himself
says made him a poet, and which Swift wrote on his own tomb as
the worst of his torments.
However, our special interest is the influence directly exerted on
modern satirists by their Roman predecessors.. The first thing to
observe is that the effect of verse satire was primary, the effect of
prose satire only secondary. There was not enough classical prose
satire known to tempt many modem writers to emulate it ; and in
any case the form itself seems to have been too vague and loose to
provide real technical standards to adapt. Therefore modem
satires written in prose have usually adopted the form of some other
branch of literature, and injected satiric matter and spirit into it
:
as Lucian did before them. For example, Swifts Gulliver^s
Travels is a parody of the travellers tale ; his Battle of the Books
pretends to be a prose translation of a fragment of heroic epic
;
Voltaires Candide is a picaresque travel-romance, and so is
Der abenteurliche Simplicissimus; Rabelaiss work is a distorted
romance of chivalry, ending in a parody of the Grail quest. The
advantage of this is that it gives great freedom and variety to the
authors of satire. The disadvantage is that it tends to diffuse the
satiric spirit, so that it becomes confused with the peculiar attitudes
308 17. SATIRE
and methods of other literary types ; and so nowadays few authors
write complete satires in prose, but tend to produce novels like
Bleak House and Bouvard et Pecuchet which contain some satiric
elements but are not completely transfused with satire.
One ofthe most vigorous ofmodemsatiric writers working in prose
was a preacher whose sermons represent an interesting synthesis
of the spirit of classical satire, with its profound cynicism, and the
spirit of Christianity, with its ultimate optimism, and of many of
the methods used by the Roman satirists with modern devices,
equally striking and genuine because derived from the inexhaustible
treasury of popular language. This was'Abraham a Sancta Clara
(1644-1709), a peasant boy from a Bavarian village who was
outstandingly clever at school, was trained as a Catholic preacher
in the order of Barefooted Augustinians, and at a remarkably early
age was appointed court preacher to the Imperial Court of Vienna.
In such a post one might think such a man would be solemn,
learned, and orotund, like Bossuet and other baroque preachers.
On the contrary, Abraham is serious only at the most serious
momentsand then he is overpoweringly impressive. But for
the rest of the time he is a laughing philosopher, a brilliant wit,
who (like the Greek philosophical preachers) uses every device to
attract, interest, hold, and dominate his audience: puns, funny
stories, dialect jokes, riddles, parodies of poetry and of medical
prescriptions and even of Christian rituals, frequent quotations
from his vast reading in both the classics and the literature of the
church, ingenious rhythmical patterns, which a good speaker, as
he was, could make absolutely gripping and enthralling. His
audience must have been constantly amused and stimulated, and
yet they were being edified all the time: perhaps that is the only
way to teach Austrians. He is almost unknown to-day. There is,
however, an imitation of his style by ISchiller, in the Capuchin
monks sermon in Wallensteins Lager
,
taken over by Piave in his
libretto for Verdis Forza del Destino. Unjustly neglected, he is a
memorable and brilliant writer, an important voice of the baroque
era, and, in his use of the system of teaching through joking in
earnest, solidly within the tradition of Greek and Roman satire.^^
Verse satire
Most modern satirical prose owes little directly to any classical
satirist except Lucian. Indirectly, the natural indignation of its
17. SATIRE 309
writers gained additional force and variety of expression from the
study of Greco-Roman satire in general. Most of the modern
satirists whose work has lived were well-educated men ; and most,
having read the classical satirists, had been stimulated by their
immense moral energy, and encouraged to emulate their ironic
amusement, their vigorous brevity, their surgical economy of effort.
Most modern verse satire, on the other hand, was directly
inspired by the form, or the matter, or both the form and the
matter, of the Roman verse-satirists. Probably this is the reason
for the comparative scarcity of verse satires in the high Renaissance,
and for the absence of great satiric writers in countries which were
partly outside the Renaissance, like Spain and Germany. Greco-
Roman drama, elegy, ode, pastoral, and romance were studied and
understood fairly early ; the first appearance of these literary types
in western European literature closely follows the publication of
the first editions of each classical model. But satire is a difficult
and eccentric form, which was mixed up with the satyric play, and
not fully understood until Isaac Casaubon in 1605 published an
elucidation of its history and meaning, attached to his edition of
Persius.^?z . The Italians, who discovered most of classical antiquity, also
discovered and emulated classical satire long before Casaubon
wrote on it. It suits their nature : they have produced many brilliant
satirists, working in every key from the high classical to the improvisatory
and popular. The earliest verse satires we hear of are
six poems of general moral reflection by Antonio Vinciguerra
(1480-1502). Luigi Alamanni (1495-1556) included thirteen
Juvenalian satires on the woes and vices of Italy in his Opere
Toscane, Ariosto himself, between 1517 and 1531, wrote seven
satiric discourses on social corruptioncovering boorish patrons
and wicked women, corrupt priests and immoral humanistsand
blended the honey of Horace with Juvenals acid. He was followed
by Lodovico Paterno, the first modem satirist to use blank verse.
However, the most successful Italian satirist of the Renaissance
was certainly Francesco Bemi (1498-1535), who was not an imitator
of the classics, but used verse-forms worked out during the
Middle Ages. He specialized in farcical effects obtained by the
accurate description of incredibly sordid places, objects, adventures,
and people ; in parodies, even of such great poetry as Dantes
Comedy
;
and in wildly bizarre subjects^for instance, a eulogy of
310 17. SATIRE
eels. His harsh realistic attitude, which made a valuable corrective
to the sometimes hypertrophied nobility of the Renaissance, was
really a survival from the Middle Age.
Another largely medieval satirist was the Alsatian scholar
Sebastian Brant (1458-1 521). Born in Strasbourg, he was educated
in Basle and trained as a lawyer. A fluent Latin poet and a fervent
supporter of the Holy Roman Empire, he stood, like Rabelais, with
one foot in the Middle Ages and one in the Renaissance. His chief
work was The Ship of Fools, which was published in 1494, went into
six editions during his lifetime, and was translated into several
other European languages, including Latin. It is a rambling,
staccato, planless collection of short character-sketches, describing
and denouncing the various types of fools in the world. Although
numerous translations of epigrams from Latin verse-satirists and
other poets show that Brant knew their subject-matter, he had not
mastered their form.^*^ Even the idea of putting all the fools in one
boat appears only towards the end, and is not carried through. The
Ship of Fools reminds the reader of the huge catalogue-pictures by
Pieter Brueghel, in which dozens and dozens of little figures and
groups are engaged in playing diflferent games or exemplifying
different proverbs, all over the canvas, with no principle of unity
except their one common genus and the four sides of the frame.
But, as one can spend long hours looking at these pictures, so one
can enjoy reading The Ship of Fools for its crisp and lifelike
photographs of the manners of a distant age.
An English translation and adaptation of this satire, under the
same name, was made in 1 509 by a Scots priest, Alexander Barclay
;
Skelton and others took ideas from it ; and, also in 1 509, Erasmus
wrote his fine Latin satire. The Praise of Folly, containing a long
procession of fools like those described by Brant, but binding them
together with a stronger central plan, including many more
important types, and treating the whole subject with far more
grace and wit. Because Erasmus wrote it in the international
language, Latin, it falls outside the scope of this bookan idea
which would have amused Erasmus greatly.
Verse satire in the Roman style reached England rather late,
because the models were little known. Sir Thomas Wyat (i 503-42)
was moved by Alamannis example to write three satires (published
after his death) on the thanklessness of ambition and court life and
the rewards of retirement. Reminiscences from Horace, Persius,
17. SATIRE 31 1
Juvenal, and Alamanni are blended, without any trace of ostentation
or pedantry, in these rather immature, but easy and sincere,
poems.^s Not long afterwards, George Gascoigne published The
Steel Glass, the first English blank-verse satirea long tirade
against many varieties of vice and folly, from which classical
influence and the sense ofform are equally absent. Then suddenly,
just before Casaubon published his definitive essay, a small group of
young Englishmen began to write thoroughly contemporary satiric
poems, stimulated by their discovery of Roman satire. Their chief
model was an eccentric youngster like themselvesPersiusbut,
like him, they also took much from Horace ; and one of them knew
and followed Juvenal. The most famous now is John Donne, who
wrote three grotesquely warped and wry-mouthed satires in 1593
and several others a few years later. Then there was Joseph
Hallaccording to his own claim, the first satirist in English

who published six books called Virgidemiarum, three issued in

1 597 being toothless satires modelled on Horace and Persius,
and three in 1598 biting satires modelled on Juvenal, with many
resounding echoes from his work. These are good poems, suffering
only from a youthfully excessive bitterness which becomes a little
shrill, but which long afterwards no less a man than Milton thought
fit to reprimand.^7 John Marstons Scourge of Villainy (1598), an
attack on Hall and others, was even more bitter. But in June
1599 the archbishop of Canterbury ordered that no satires or
epigrams be printed hereafter ; and so closed the first period of
modern British satire.
In France of the Renaissance there were several spirited outbreaks
of the satiric spirit. We have already met the greatest French
satirical writer, Rabelais, and discussed his debt to the Greco-
Roman writers.^ ^ The religious wars produced two invectives
against the Roman Catholics, one amusing, one deadly solemn, both
effective. The first was the Menippean Satire, written in 1 594 by
a group of supporters of Henri IV against the Catholic League.
The name refers to the fact that it is a mixture of prose and verse,
and indeed of languages : the papal legate speaks both Latin and
Italian. Its many topical allusions make its interest mainly historical.
A much finer work is Les Tragiques of Agrippa dAubigne,
published in 1616: a successful attempt by a very remarkable
genius to raise the satiric spirit higher and blend it with the heroic
312 17. SATIRE
and divine spirit of epic : the poem is too lofty to allow us to call it
a true satire.
The first regular French verse-satirist was Mathurin Regnier
(i 573i6i 3).2^ He himself, in phrases which remind us of Ronsard,
boasts of it
:
This highway has felt many poets tread,
but by French rhymers is unvisited;
I enter it, following Horace close behind,
to trace the various humours of mankind.
He is a competent and interesting poet, much better at satire
than his contemporary Donne, knowing more of life, and owning
a sparkling sense of humour. Five different interests combine to
enrich his work, making it reflect both his character, his education,
and his era.^3
Most important is his knowledge of human nature: he was a
courtier, a traveller, and a versatile lover. His portraits, of fops
bores, and hypocrites are predecessors of those in the comedies of
Moliere.
His philosophy is a gentlemanly liberalism, rather like that of
Montaigne, though less mature, and traceable ultimately to Horace
and the Epicureans.
Latin literature, particularly satire, he knows well: he quotes
from it and assimilates its ideas freely and unpedantically and
naturally. Who could guess that, when he complains T am unemployable
at court, because
I do not know the courses of the planets
;
I cannot guess another courtiers secrets . .
he is translating and adapting Juvenal Many of his most vivid
phrases, such as
the darlings of their age, sons of the white hen,
are just as effortlessly borrowed ; while the main ideas of his third,
seventh, eighth, tw-elfth, thirteenth, and fifteenth satires are taken
from Rome.^s Although once he calls Horace too discreet, and says
he will follow the free Juvenal, both his character, with its innate
drollery and friendliness, and his style are much more reminiscent
of Horace ; and on the whole he quotes Horace more extensively.
He visited Italy six times, in the retinue of the cardinal de
Joyeuse, French representative at the Vatican. Evidently he did
17. SATIRE 313
not like it much better than Du Bellay, but it stimulated him more.
He was very struck by Bernis comically photographic descriptions
of repulsive people and things, and by the work of Bernis follower
Caporali. His tenth satire is a Bemesque description of a frightful
dinner, which begins by being like the bad meal in Horace, and
then goes on to such details as this
:
Next, an enormous plate of soup arrives,
where famished flies are swimming for their lives.
This is followed by an equally amusing description of a terrible
lodging for the night, where one of the people he meets is an old
woman fearfully, unbelievably thin :
so that through her bones
we saw quite clearly right inside her head
how her ideas prompted all she said.^s
And with incredulous horror he details all the squalid things he
found in his room, including
three teeth from a corpse's mouth, wrapped in blank parchment.^^
Lastly, Regnier was a true Frenchman, and thought a great deal
about rAmour. He wrote more about it than any other modern
satirist ; he struck out a new line by incorporating into the satiric
tradition themes which he first found in Latin love-elegy. It is
significant that Jean de Meun, the author of the second part of
The Romance of the Rose, made a similar innovation by introducing
themes from Latin satire into what was fundamentally a poem about
ideal love; and in fact Regnier borrowed some of Jean de Meuns
ideas, which thus, at second hand, returned to their original home
in satiric poetry,
* Most of the good baroque satires in verse were written within
the classical tradition, enriched by ideas from modem sources
outside it. The cultural predominance of France is obvious ; but
tuo less obvious is the moral and intellectual vigour, the superior
gusto, of Britain.
After Regnier there came many satirists in France. There was
no gap between Regnier and his formidable successor Boileau.
Men like Furetiere and Boileaus own elder brother Gilles were
writing satire with unremitting zest and, if anything, with excessive
violence, through the first half of the seventeenth century. But the
314 ' 17. SATIRE
greatest of all was Nicolas Boileau, called Despreaux, whose satires,
modelled closely on those of Horace and Juvenal (with the main
emphasis on the former), were mostly published between 1657 and
1667. Some epistles in the manner of Horace and three larger
satires appeared later; and his most considerable achievement was
his Horatian Art of Poetry and his mock-heroic poem on an
ecclesiastical dispute, The Lectern (both 1674); but he made his
reputation by his earlier satires, and never surpassed them.
Dryden was middle-aged before, in quick succession, he produced
the satires that place him high among the worlds best.
Absalom and Achitophel (part i) appeared in November 1681 ;
part
2 (mostly by Nahum Tate) a year later; The Medal was published
in March 1682 and MacFlecknoe in October 1682. Thereafter he
wrote no more straight satire; but, with some assistance, he did
produce the best English version of Juvenal (i693),3i headed by
a well-written and instructive preface based mainly on Casaubons
essay. The relation between the baroque satirists and the Roman
satirists was so close that the moderns not only imitated and
adapted but often translated their models. However, Drydens
satiric poems were more quickly produced than the usual baroque
satire, dealt with exceptional subjects, and were more original than
those of Boileau and Pope.
{d) Absalom and Achitophel and MacFlecknoe are mock epics,
with identifiable characters as their mock heroes. This is new.
Mock-heroic episodes do occur in Roman satire, but they are only
a few dozen lines longwith one exception, Juvenals description
of an imperial council held by'Domitian on a ridiculously trivial
subject, related in grandiose terms appropriate to Homeric or
Vergilian heroes. But there is no mock epic on this scale in
classical literature known to Dryden which deals with political
criminals like Absalom or dunces like MacFlecknoe. Dryden
himself told Dean Lockier he was indebted to Tassonis Ravished
Bucket and Boileaus Lectern, It may not be extravagant to conjecture
that he had been attracted to the powers of epic, serious
or comic, by that which he had tried, some years before, to turn into
an opera: Miltons Paradise Lost,
(&) ' Classical satire^ particularly the poems of Juvenal, contains
a number of character-sketches ; but none so independent and full
as those in Drydens satires, which were followed by the more
sharply incised, if less bold, portraits drawn by Pope. The
17. SATIRE 315
ancestry of these character-sketches is complex. To begin with,
they were created by Dryden himself, who knew and disliked his
subjects. In literary tradition they go back to the humours of the
late Middle Ages, and to the interest in psychology shown by the
writers of the Renaissance (e.g. Montaigne). In satire, such
character-portraits appear both in Donne and in Butlers Hudibms ;
in psychological essays, they are beautifully exemplified in the
baroque age by Earles Microcosmographie (1628) and La Bruyeres
Characters (1688)themselves based on the work of Aristotles
pupil Theophrastus. Perhaps these are the greatest contribution
of English satire to the literature of the world. There is nothing
in other languages, ancient or modern, like Drydens Og and
Popes Sporus, the painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings.
Alexander Pope produced the prettiest of all mock-heroic
satires, and one of the earliest of rococo poems, in The Rape of the
Lock (1712)^forty years after Boileaus Lectern^ which, with hints
from Ozells translation of The Ravished Bucket, had inspired it.^^
*His Dunciad, a larger and coarser mock-epic, out of Dryden by
Swift, appeared in^iyzS;^^ and the Imitations of Horace at various
times from 1730 on.^s Like Boileau, Pope also produced a number
of milder didactic Epistles, as well as poetic Essays on the principles
of literature and life.
^ Samuel Johnsons two fine imitations of Juvenal appeared
towards the middle of the eighteenth century: London, adapted
from Juvenals megapolitan satire 3, in 1738, and The Vanity of
Human Wishes, built on Juvenal 10, in 1749.26 His publisher paid
him ten guineas for the former, and, for the latter, fifteen.
As the era closed, an Italian produced one of its finest satires.
It was a complete description of the daily routine of a young
Italian dandy, done with cruelly accurate attention to every detail
and a venomous pretence of awe and admiration for the useless
gentry. This was The Day, by Giuseppe Parini (1729--99), a social
revolutionary poem if ever there was one. Part i. Morning, came
out in 1763, part 2, Midday, in 1765, and the others after his death,
Parini was well read in the classics, and published a number of
competent classicizing odes, but his reputation depends on this
remarkable satire. Its relation to the Roman satires has not yet
been fully examined; but it appears to have been inspired by
Juvenals brief chronological account of a day in the clients life
and by Persius ironical address to a lazy young nobleman. This
3i6 17. SATIRE
inspiration does not lessen its striking force and essential originality,
which put it on the same level as the work of those great realists
Crabbe and Hogarth.
^^"Boileau, Dryden, Pope, and other baroque satirists are universally
known as ^classicaF satiric poets, heirs of the Romans. It is
held that both their weaknesses and their virtues derive largely
from the fact that they imitated Roman models. This is a dangerous
half-truth. The differences between their work and that of the
Roman satirists are very considerable, and the relation between the
two is substantially the same as that between the baroque tragedians
and Greco-Roman tragedy. This is apparent in several aspects of
their poetry.
First, take metre. All the Roman verse-satirists write in a bold,
free-running hexameter, which has a range unequalled by that of
any other metre except perhaps English blank verse at its fullest
development. They can make it do almost everything from comical
light conversation to sustained and lofty declamation. But the
verse satirists ofthe baroque age (except Parini) write in the stopped
coupleta metre capable of great delicacy and wit, but quite
unable to attain a wide range of emotion, or a copious variety of
effects. Compared with their classical models, therefore, the
baroque satirists are severely limited in their choice of medium.^
The Romans did use couplets for certain poems which had a
purpose not far removed from satire : notably for invective epigram.
Juvenals friend Martial developed the metre and the genus almost
to perfection. But such poems have a much more constricted field
than that of satire proper, which ought always to be able to sink
to coarse farce, to burst out into virtuoso sound-effects, or to rise
to proud and sombre pessimism. The stopped couplet has so much
in common with the Latin elegiac couplet that its use was probably
authorized in part by the example of Ovid, Propertius, and Martial,
who were popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
But the poets themselves sometimes felt its limitations. Boileau
complained that his most difficult task was managing the transitions.^^
He thought in couplets, and rode Pegasus on the snaffle.
Another awkwardness of the stopped couplet is that it inevitably
makes its users over-indulge in certain arrangements of thought.
Its logical pattern is a pair of balances. The statement made in
line I is exactly balanced by the statement made in line 2 : the two
17. SATIRE 317
are linked and the second is driven home by the rhyme. Then
within each line there is a caesura, which more or less divides the
single line into halves: into precise halves in the French alexandrine.
The result of this is that antithesis between line i and line 2,
and antithesis between the ideas expressed in the halves of each
single line, are used far more than any other stylistic and logical
patternso much so that point becomes almost syijonymous with
antithesis, and satire becomes the art of finding crushing or
piercing antithetical contrasts. Here is Pope:
Beeves, at his touch, at once to jelly turn,
And the huge boar is shrunk into an urn
:
The board with specious miracles he loads,
Turns hares to larks, and pigeons into toads.
Here again is Boileau :
Cet animal, tapi dans son obscurite,
Jouit Fhiver des biens conquis durant Fete.
Mais on ne la voit point dune humeur inconstante,
Paresseuse au printemps, en hiver diligente.
Affronter en plein champ les fureurs de Janvier,
Ou demeurer oisive au retour du Belier.
Mais Fhomme, sans arr^t, dans sa course insensee,
Voltige incessamment de pensee en pensee
:
Son coeur, toujours flottant entre mille embarras,
Ne sait ni ce quil veut ni ce quil ne veut pas.
Ce quun jour il abhorre, en Fautre il le souhaite.^^
And here is vigorous John Dryden:
From hence began that Plot, the nations curse,
Bad in itself, but represented worse;
Raised in extremes, and in extremes decried;
With oaths affirmed, with dying vows denied;
Not weighed or winnowed by the multitude;
But swallowed in the mass, unchewed and crude.
Some truth there was, but dashed and brewed with lies,
To please the fools and puzzle ail the wise.^^
Where the two halves of a couplet are not antithetical, they are too
often composed of a statement redoubled into a tautology. As long
as verse is subject to such strict and monotonous control it cannot
reproduce the full variety, energy, and flexibility of human thought
and emotion.
3i8 17. SATIRE
Turn to the question of vocabulary. The Roman satirists did
not shrink from low words'. On the contrary, they all used words
which can be found nowhere else in Latin literature, only in actual
echoes of the slangy talk of the common people, in private letters,
in inscriptions scrawled on walls, in curses and jokes. Their
vocabulary is very large indeed, very varied : it is full of the charm
of the unexpected, it interests even when it shocks. Among the
baroque satirists, Boileau refused to do this. He would not use
a vulgar word. Indeed, he probably thought that by using ordinary
words like rabbit' and hammer' he was being daringly vivid. In
his Art of Poetry, after surveying the Latin satirists and his predecessor
Regnier, he concluded that both Regnier and the Romans
were too free with their language.
Le latin dans les mots brave I'honnetete,
Mais le lecteur fran^ais veut etre respecte;
Du moindre sens impur la liberte Foutrage,
Si la pudeur des mots nen adoucit Fimage.-^^
It is significant to compare this refinement with Boileau's attitude
to comedy: he said that Molifere would have been the greatest of*
comedians if he had not been so much a friend of the people,
blending the polite Terence with the farcical Tabarin.^^ And it is
worth observing that, by looking with distaste at the vulgar
vocabulary of the Roman satirists and shunning it in his own
practice, he is in fact making a tacit admission of argument 4 used
by the modems in the Battle of the Books : he is agreeing that the
ancients are vulgar.^ Similarly, although his picture of the horrors
of Paris is modelled on Juvenal's description of the horrors of
Rome, he tones the whole picture down : instead of giving a dmnkard's
insults verbatim, he merely mentions two lackeys abusing
each other' and bandits shouting Your purse F^s
-"ryden, however, and (partly under Swifts influence) Pope,
both used a certain number of low words with great vigour and
effectiveness. Dryden calls Og
A monstrous mass of foul corrupted matter,
As all the devils had spewed to make the batter.^^
Mr, Pope is more refined, and actually makes his vulgarities
melodious
:
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings,^^
17. SATIRE 33:9
'However, all the ^classicaF satirists of the baroque period
avoided the oddities, the neologisms, the metrical and verbal tricks
which the Roman satirists enjoyed, and which were cultivated in
modern times by satirists like Butler and Byron. Sound-effects do
occur in Dryden and Pope, and occasionally in Boileau, but they are
rare, and there is nothing so effective as the line (one among many
such) in which Persius reproduces the bubbling sound made by a
soul sunk, like the melancholy in Dantes hell, deep in the mud
:
demersus summa rursus non bullit in unda.^^
It is not only that the baroque limitations on the vocabulary of
poetry made the satirists too polite. Sometimes they made baroque
satire dull, by compelling it to be abstract instead of concrete and
real. This can be seen by comparing the many imitative passages
with their Roman originals/' In Boileaus largest and most realistic
satire, the tenth, on women, he warns the husband to wait until his
wife takes off her make-up
:
Dans sa chambre, crois-moi, nentre point tout le jour.
Si tu veux posseder ta Lucrece a ton tour,
Attends, discret mari, que la belle en cornette
Le soir ait etale son teint sur la toilette,
Et dans quatre mouchoirs, de sa beaute salis,
Envoie au blanchisseur ses roses et ses lis."^^
Here the lowest words are cornette^ blanchisseur, salis, and the
infamous mouchoir. But listen to Juvenal on the same subject, in
the passage which Boileau is adapting
:
Meanwhile, a foul and funny show, her face
bulges with bread, or steams with fat Poppaean
creams, that smear the lips of her poor husband.
(Shell clean them off to visit her adulterer.)
Tell me, that thing, so overlaid and dosed
with drugs and medicines, covered with lumps of moist
newly baked doughis that a face, or an ulcer
With this fearful vividness, contrast Boileaus abstractions and
politenesses: the verbs etaler, salir, envoyer with bulge, steam,
smear, dose; the nouns teint, toilette, beauU, roses, Us with bread,
dough, lumps, ulcer \ Again and again this reserve ruins modem
satire, particularly that of the French. Juvenal says
This criminal gains the gallows, that a crown,
320 17. SATIRE
and Regnier translates it
Lun est justicie, Tautre aura recompence.si
In this artificial limitation of the vocabulary of what must be a
brutally realistic type of poetry, Boileau and other baroque satirists
may have been classicists, but they were not following the example
of the Romans.
Consider, lastly, the subject-matter of the baroque satires.
Dryden wrote only a few, on rather limited and special subjects.
Regnier wrote more, but still his field was not broad. Boileau was
a professional satirist; yet his themes do not cover the whole of
life or even of Parisian society, nor do his attacks on fools and
knaves include very many of his contemporaries. The subjects he
might have chosen are fascinating to think of. What would we not
give for a mock-heroic description of the contest for Louis XIVs
love, between Montespan and Maintenonlike Ajax and Hector
fighting over the body of Patroclus! or an account of the dinner
given by Conde, where the chef Vatel killed himself because the
fish was late in arriving; or, instead of the abstract disquisition
against Jesuitry called Equivocatioriy^^ a factual account of a day
in the life of a high Jesuit official; or a court-satire, showing
Colbert and Louvois as good and evil spirits fighting for the soul
of France; or a satire on the building-mania of the king and his
nobles, ending with a description of Versailles as being grander
than heaven itself and making the Almighty envious
:
et bientot le bon Dieu lui-m^me aura b^ti
sa Versailles au ciel, pour imiter Louis!
Contrast the limited range of Boileau with the absolute fearlessness
of Rabelais and dAubigne in an earlier generation; or with the
ruthlessness of his own contemporary Saint-Simon. Only Pope,
who had more courage, who lived in a freer country, and who was
a friend of Swift, lashed out as freely as the great Romans did ; and
even Pope became infected by the disease of abstract moralizing
which overcame Boileau and paralysed his initially mordant wit. 5
1
So then, with the exception of Pope, the chief baroque verse
satirists were narrow in style and limited in subject. They missed
opportunities ; they avoided describing crimes and naming criminals
; they shrank from strong themes : as Pope said of Addison,
they were willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike. s4 They
used a painfully constricted metrical scheme, a narrow gamut of
17. SATIRE 321
poetic and emotional effects, and too often a tame and abstract
vocabulary, to deal with a relatively small range of material.' Theselimitations
were not the direct result of their imitation of the
classical satirists, since Roman satire is much bolder and richer.
They were created by two rather complex and difBcult situations.
The first of these was the realization on the part of poets in the
Renaissance, and still more, much more, in the baroque era, that
the standards set for them by the poets of Greece and Rome were
extremely high; and that those high standards were achieved by
amazingly subtle versification, fastidious choice of words, and
quintessential compression of both thought and emotion. In the
effort to attain similar standards, the baroque poets concentrated
on regularity and tightness of form and purity of language, and
often (as in the case of satire) introduced that regularity and purity
into literary forms where they were deleterious to the poetry.
The second was the aristocratic and authoritarian structure of
society in the baroque age. This made it difficult for the language
of satire to be suitably forceful in England, and impossible in
France. It also made it unwise for a satirist to attack the nobility
and impossible for him to attack the monarch. Dryden was
cudgelled by Rochesters thugs in 1679. Voltaire was put in the
Bastille in 1717, was cudgelled by Rohans thugs in 1725, and lived
much of his life in the safety of exile. Pope was threatened several
times, and perhaps only his being a cripple saved him. Boileau,
who had suffered much in youth, from his harsh upbringing and
from his painful operation at the age of fourteen, was a timid soul,
assez faible de corps, assez doux de visage.ss
Dryden gave up satire after his brief triumphant excursion into the
field, and spent the end of his life on translations. Boileau
abandoned it too, and spent many years on writing a history of
Louis XIV.
The formality of baroque art comes from its attempt to emulate
the dignity and the tension of Greco-Roman art. The limitations
of baroque art are products of the peculiar character of seventeenthcentury
society. Most portraits of baroque monarchs show them
wearing the Greek laurel, Roman armour, and a wig. The Romans
too portrayed their rulers as divinities or armoured warriors ; but
it took the baroque age to invent, and to respect, the curled, horned,
and dyed periwig.
5076 Y
18
BAROQUE PROSE
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been called
the age of prose. Certainly the prose then written was
superior in quality (although probably not in quantity) to the
poetry produced by thousands of amateur and professional poets
throughout western Europe. Recognizing this, Fenelon suggested
that verse should be abolished. The reason for the superiority of
baroque prose is plain, and may sound like an over-simplification
;
but no better has been suggested. It is that intellect predominated
over emotion and imagination in the life of the time, and controlled
them : prose is the language of the intellect. This is the age
in which a best-selling love-romance began with a neat map of the
Land of Tenderness;^ in which Lord Chesterfield laughed only
twice or thrice in his life and Fontenelle never; in which young
Edward Gibbon, ordered to give up his sweetheart, sighed as a
lover but obeyed as a son.
We have discussed the relation of baroque tragedy and baroque
verse-satire to the classical poems they were emulating, and have
endeavoured to show that they were in fact much more limited
than their models. The prose of the baroque era also imitated
and emulated Greco-Roman prose, but with fewer limitations, more
variety, and more marked success. To begin with, its authors were
more familiar with the books they set out to rival; and so were
their audiences. Then the models were much more often Latin
than Greek. Greek prose has many beautiesflexibility, subtlety,
precision, brevity, and the power to rise from ordinary conversation
or logical analysis to poetic excitement without the appearance of
artificiality and strain. But the structure of western European
languages is very much more closely akin to that of Latin than to
Greek: it was well, therefore, that Latin provided the principal
models on which modern prose was formed.
PROSE STYLE^
There were two different schools of prose style in the baroque
age. Both turned to classical models for inspiration and to
classical theories for authority. Both were continued in the prose
18. BAROQUE PROSE 323
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ; and both were actually
re-creations of rival schools of prose-writing which had flourished
in Athens, in the empire of Alexander, in Rome, and in the early
Christian church. The history of European prose demonstrates
perhaps more clearly than that of any other branch of literary art
that contemporary literature can be neither understood nor
practised unless it is seen as part of a continuous and permanently
vital tradition.
One of these styles was of course founded on the work of the
greatest master of prose who ever wrote; the Roman Cicero
(106-43 B.C.). He himself had a number of stylescolloquialism
in his private letters, half-formal dialogue in his philosophical and
critical treatises, and a tremendous variety of modes of oratory in
his speeches. But the style in which he is most powerful and most
fully himself is a full, ornate, magnificent utterance in which
emotion constantly swells up and is constantly ordered and disciplined
by superb intellectual control.
Even while Cicero was reigning as the greatest orator in Rome,
his style was attacked by his friends and critics. They pointed out
that it was a development of the manner of the Athenian orator
Isocrates, which in its careful symmetry is often painfully aiTected
;
and that the tricks of Isocrates had been taken over and elaborated
and pumped full of even more artificial emotionalism by the Greek
orators and rhetorical schools of Asia Minor. They called it
Asiatic^ and set up against it their standard of Attic^ brevity,
simplicity, sincerity. 3
After Ciceros death the writers and orators of Rome, realizing
that they could go no farther in elaborating his characteristic style
of balanced orotundity, turned towards the ideals of Atticism.
Sentences now became brief. Clauses were curt, often jolty in
rhythm. Connectives were dropped, balance avoided ; the thoughtcontent
became denser; where Cicero built up his paragraphs to
a crescendo of crashing sound, the writers of the early empire
ignored harmony, cultivating epigrammatic brilliance and preferring
paradox to climax. This was not pure Atticism, There was
little or nothing like it in the work of the Athenian orators and
prosateurs. But in its short sentences, its simple vocabulary, its
apparent informality, it was quite Attic : its less likeable exaggerations
were force-grown in the hot competition of the rhetorical
schools and the literary salons of the empire. Its greatest master
334 18. BAROQUE PROSE
was Seneca (c. 4 b.c.-a.d. 65) ; and something of it can be seen in
the poetry of his nephew Lucan, who turned away from Vergils
mellifluous harmonies as Seneca had turned away from Ciceros
organ-tones. A generation later the historian Tacitus {c, a.d. 55-
c. izo) worked out an even stranger style, within the same
school, based on the calculated surprises of asymmetry. And in
the writings of the early church fathers the same contrasting
schools appearedone sonorous and complex, symmetrical and
smooth and richly nourished, the other brief, vigorous, thoughtloaded,
often eccentric, sometimes obscure. Lactantius was the
Christian Cicero, and the other school was headed by the brilliant
Tertullian.
With the beginning of the Renaissance, the amazing strength
and flexibility of Ciceros style was recognized once more. It was
copied by writers of Latin prose on almost every subject. For
centuries the diplomacy of the European chanceries was carried on
not only in the language, but in the precise vocabulary, and wordorder,
and cadences of Ciceros speeches. There was a long and
fierce dispute between scholars who held that Cicero was an unchallengeable
authority and that no modern writer could use
Latin words or constructions not found in his works, and those,
more liberal, who pointed out that Latin was still a living language
which modem authors could expand and alter to their own needs.
Since this was a dispute about the use of the Latin language, it does
not come within the scope of our book. But it was closely connected
with another dispute which does.
Many writers in the vernacular languages felt that the big
bow-wow style of speaking and writing was bogus. All style is
artificial, no doubt; but they held that prose should at least give
the appearance of being natural. They therefore turned away from
Cicero and most of the devices he had developed, and, as models
for modem prose, picked Seneca and Tacitus. Some of them went
farther back, to Demosthenes and Plato, The aim of them all was
to be personal, to avoid formalism. On the models of Senecas
moral essays and Tacitus historiesand, to a much smaller
extent, Demosthenes plainer speeches and Platos quieter
dialogues^they created the prose of most modem essays and
character-sketches, the prose in which some great modem sermons
have been written.
18. BAROQUE PROSE 325
Of this second style^the chief masters were
:
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82)
Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy
(1577-1640)
Jean de La Bruy^re (1645-96)
John Milton (1608-74)
Michel de Montaigne (1533-92)
Blaise Pascal (1623-62).
The prose of this school has again been subdivided into two
typesthe loose manner, in which short clauses are built up into
larger sentences and paragraphs by light and informal connexions,
with little symmetry; and the curt manner, where there are no
connexions whatever, and thought after thought is dropped from
the writer^s mind as it is formed.^ The reader supplies the links.
Here is a beautiful example of the loose manner, from Burtons
Anatomy of Melancholy,^ Burton is talking about the dangers and
delights of building castles in the air, and how the habit grows on
those who indulge in it
:
So delightsome these toys are at first, they could spend whole days
and nights without sleep, even whole years alone in such contemplations,
and fantastical meditations, which are like unto dreams, and they
will hardly be drawn from them, or willingly interrupt, so pleasant their
vain conceits are, that they hinder their ordinary tasks and necessary
business, they cannot address themselves to them, or almost to any
study or employment, these fantastical and bewitching thoughts so
covertly, so feelingly, so urgently, so continually set upon, creep in,
insinuate, possess, overcome, distract, and detain them, they cannot,
I say, go about their more necessary business, stave off or extricate
themselves, but are ever musing, melancholizing, and carried along, as
he (they say) that is led round about a heath with a Puck in the night,
they run earnestly on in this labyrinth of anxious and solicitous melancholy
meditations, and cannot well or willingly refrain, or easily leave
off, winding and unwinding themselves, as so many clocks, and still
pleasing their humours, until at last the scene is turned upon a sudden,
by some bad object, and they being now habituated to such vain meditations
and solitary places, can endure no company, can ruminate of
nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects.
It is a style, not for speaking, but for reading and lonely brooding:
it gives the impression of overhearing Burtonsor the
326 18. BAROQUE PROSE
melancholiacsactual thoughts as they ramble on and grow out
of one another and become ever more intricately involved in a
world of their own. Its modern descendant is the profoundly
meditative, luxuriantly evocative style of Marcel Proust.
The curt manner is more pithy, more drastic
:
In the great Ant-hill of the whole world, I am an Ant; I have my part
in the Creation, I am a Creature; But there are ignoble Creatures. God
comes nearer ; In the great field of clay, of red earth, that man was made
of, and mankind, I am a clod; I am a man, I have my part in the
Humanity; But Man was worse than annihilated again.
^
However, most of the anti-Ciceronian authors passed fairly freely
from one of these manners to the other, according to their subjectmatter,
and some were not averse to an occasional flight of
Ciceronian rhetoric, provided they could return to firm ground
after it.
This style, in its two developments, loose and curt, was not
only a method of arranging words. It was a way of thinking. It
carried with it some potent moral and political implications. Since
Ciceronian style was that of the church, of the universities, of the
Jesuits, of the foreign offices, and of orthodoxy generally, this
Senecan and Tacitean manner was associated with unorthodoxy
and even libertinism. It was the voice of Seneca the Stoic, boldly
independent and subject to Gods will alone, the philosopher w^ho
was driven to death by a tyrant. It was the voice of Tacitus, the
bitter historian who denounced tyranny by describing it, whose
books were often made a cloak for the exposition of Machiavellian
political theory.'^ Pascals brilliant letters against the Jesuits were
partially modelled on the Stoic discourses of Epictetus, in which
thought appears, like an athlete, stripped and ready for the
contest. Seventeen centuries earlier a pupil of the Stoics had
upheld simplicity of style against Cicero, and the rights of the
citizen against Caesar: he was Brutus, the champion of the
republic.
This was the style used by most of the great seventeenthcentury
prose writers. With the eighteenth century its eccentricities
were planed down, and its wilful asymmetries discouraged: it
began to assume the tone of polite semi-formal conversation; in
time, it merged into the unassuming, straightforward, graceful
simplicity of light eighteenth-century prose.
18. BAROQUE PROSE 327
Meanwhile another style had been building up, a perfect echo
of Cicero in vernacular prose. Varying from one language to
another, varying also between authors and between subjects, it still
was so fundamentally Ciceronian that it is often easier to detect the
Roman cadences in a page of it than to tell which of the baroque
stylists wrote the page. The greatest names in this field are :
Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1597-1654)
Jacques-Benigne Bossuet (1627-1704)
Louis Bourdaloue (1632-1704)
Edmund Burke (1729-97)
Fran9ois de Salignac de La Mothe-Fenelon (1651-1715)
Edward Gibbon (1737-94)
Samuel Johnson (1709-84)
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745).
They were all highly educated men. As Johnson said of Greek,
Learning is like lace: every man gets as much of it as he can.
Some of them hated the institution to which they wentlike
Gibbon; or the people who taught themlike Voltaire; some, like
Addison, loved the university ; some did badly at it through bad
discipline, like Burke and Swift; but all did a great deal of quiet
solitary thinking and reading in large libraries (poor Johnson in his
fathers bookshop), usually enough to form their minds before they
were twenty years of age.
The most obvious benefit derived from their classical reading is
shared by both schools of baroque writers, Ciceronians and anti-
Ciceronians alike. This is a rich variety of imaginative and
intellectual material derived from Greco-Roman literature. All
the works of all of them are full of it. They could not keep it out.
They would not keep it out : any more than a well-educated man
nowadays would choose to suppress his knowledge ofart and music.
It makes a bond between them all, whether they are separated by
time, like Browne and Burke, or by country and religion, like
Bossuet and Gibbon. They seem to belong to a single society of
cultured men. Sometimes their membership in that society
appears to exclude those of us who know no Greek and Latin.
That may be one reason for the comparative neglect of these
authors nowadays, when we would rather read a biography of
Gibbon than his history. Yet it gave their writings much beauty,
328 18. BAROQUE PROSE
a fund of noble and powerful allusions, memories, and comparisons
for which no satisfactory modern substitute has been found, a richness
of imagination which offsets their cool rational style, and an
impersonality which, by taking them out of their immediate
present, helps to make them immortal.
Baroque prose was as full of classical allusions as the poetry of
the Renaissance. Sometimes these were direct historical parallels.
When the House of Commons was discussing British policy towards
Russia, in 1792, the town of Ochakov at the mouth of the Dnieper
was mentioned. It was regarded as the key to Constantinople, but
few of the debaters had ever heard of it. The whole strategic
situation was at once made clear when the speaker referred to
Demosthenes fourth Philippic^ citing the paragraph in which
Demosthenes told the Athenians that the northern towns whose
names they scarcely knew were the keys by which Philip would
enter Greece to conquer it.^ The danger of Napoleons insatiable
aggressions was much more easily realized by those who knew the
story of the Macedonian conqueror of the Greek statesfor there
was no parallel in recent European history. The earliest work of
the German scholar Niebuhr was an anonymous translation of the
first Philippic^ published in Hamburg in 1805, with a dedication
to the Tsar and an explicit comparison of Napoleon to Philip of
Macedon: a work which, like the Demosthenic speeches of the
younger Pitt, formed a bridge between the baroque age and the
oratory and political sentiments of modern times. ^ When Burke
impeached Warren Hastings for misgovernment in India he
modelled his attack on Ciceros successful prosecution of Verres,
the corrupt Roman governor of Sicily; and the whole court knew
it. When Voltaire wished to publish his own unorthodox deistic
views on religion, he wrote them in the form of letters from Memmius
to Cicero, Tound by Admiral Sheremetof in the Vatican,
and translated from the Russian rendering by Voltaire and
when poor Calas w^as condemned to be tortured, broken on the
wheel, and burnt alive, Voltaire, at the head of the movement for
annulment and legal reform, denounced the tyranny of his own age
as compared with the Roman courts, where the witnesses were
heard in public, face to face with the accused, who could answer
and cross-examine them either personally or through his counsel.
That was a noble, generous system, worthy of the magnanimous
Romans. Among us, everything is done in secret.^^ One last
18. BAROQUE PROSE 329
example. In March 1775 Burke was speaking with great emotion
on the most important event in modern historythe impending
dissolution of the political bond between Britain and the British
colonies in North America. He examined three possible methods
of dealing with the complaints of the colonists. One suggestion
was to blockade them. Burke warned the House that this would not
remove the cause of complaint, and that their discontent would
increase with their misery; and he ended with a formidable
epigram from Juvenals warning to a tyrannous Roman governor:
Beggared, they still have weapons.^
^
All thoughtful men in the House recognized the phrase and saw its
implications.
Indirect allusions were even commoner than direct parallels.
Under the pen of a great writer, in the mouth of a brilliant speaker,
such references can, like quotations in epic, ^3 give an additional
and unexpected grace to the subject, can intensify the emotion of
prose discourse into that of poetry. Sir Thomas Browne, discussing
the medical and psychological fact that the sense of smell is
dull during sleep, makes it not only memorable but beautiful by
saying that the sleeper, though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly
with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.^^ The younger Pitt
was trained by his father, who caused him to translate aloud, and
at sight, passages from the Greek and Latin classics. It was largely
to this that he owed his immense command of language and his
fertile imagery. During the peroration of his great speech on the
abolition of the slave-trade, even his opponents listened to him as
to a man inspired. The debate had lasted all through the night,
and the rays of the rising sun were streaming into the House of
Commons, when he closed a splendid passage on the coming dawn
of a brighter day for the natives of Africa, with the fine quotation
from Vergil
:
On us breathes early dawn with panting horses
:
for them red evening kindles her late lamps.^s
It is scarcely necessary to point out how all these writers were
stimulated by contact with the great minds of Rome and Greece.
Even when they did not quote the classics directly, they grew
greater by their consciousness of eternity. Before writing his
finest sermons Bossuet used to read the best of classical poetry, in
330 18. BAROQUE PROSE
order to raise his thoughts to the highest attainable pitch of
nobility ; and, preparing himself to compose the funeral sermon on
Queen Marie-Therese, he shut himself up alone, and for many
hours read nothing but Homer.
Besides this, the Ciceronian writers all used, in very various
degrees, a number of stylistic devices derived from Latin and
Greek prose, which through their work have now become naturalized
in most modern languages. Their aim was to produce an
impression of controlled power. They chose to do this by making
their prose sonorous; rich; and, most important, symmetrical.
To achieve sonority they used long words derived directly from
Latin, rather than short ones derived from Anglo-Saxon or
smoothed down by passage through Old French. Bossuet, for
instance, speaks of the Virgin as chair angilisee (a phrase taken
straight out of Tertullian); he is the first to use the word apprehensify
and one of the first to write regime^ sapience^ locution}-^
Samuel Johnsons predilection for ponderous Latin nouns, adjectives,
and verbs is well known : bipartition, equiponderant, vertiginous,
expunge, concatenation, irascibility, and his favourite,
procrastination.^^ Boswell observed that he actually thought in
simple Saxon terms, and then translated into Latin, or rather into
Johnsonese. ^The Rehearsal*
,
he said, has not wit enough to keep
it sweet; and then, after a pause, it has not vitality enough to
preserve it from putrefaction.^ 9 This was what Goldsmith laughed
at when he said that if Johnson were to write a fable about little
fishes he would make them talk like whales. It should be remembered,
however, that few of the baroque prose-writers introduced
many new words from Latin, On the contrary, they cut many out
which had been tentatively brought in by the men of the Renaissance.
What they really did was to apply their taste to those already
introduced as experiments, and to select and naturalize those which
we now use. Johnsons mistake was to use so many words of Latin
derivation and heavy intellectual content closely together without
relief to the ear or the mind.
This mistake was not made by the French prosateurs. Balzac,
chief of the founders of French baroque style, set his face sternly
against every kind of word that kept French from being clear and
harmonious: provincial expressions, archaisms, neologisms, and
latinisms^not all words of Latin derivation, but those which, to
a sensitive ear, sounded strange, heavy, pedantic, incompletely
18. BAROQUE PROSE 331
naturalized.^ By such careful discernment he and others forged
the fine, sharp, glittering steel of French prose, one of the best
tools of thought ever created by man.
Yet prose is not only a tool. It can also be an instrument of
music. The most skilful, least monotonous, and subtlest of the
baroque musicians in words was Browne, who produced his finest
effects by blending simple Anglo-Saxonisms with organ-toned
words from Rome
:
We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are
providentially taken off from such imaginations; and, being necessitated
to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto
thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration
of that duration, which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all
thats past a moment. . . . Gravestones tell truth scarce forty years.
Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three
oaks.
For the sake of richness the baroque prose-writers chiefly cultivated
repetitioneither the use of synonyms, which is repetition
of meaning, or the use of homophones, which is repetition of
sound. Of this style, synonyms in twos and threes are a sure mark
and unmistakable characteristic:
supporting, assisting, and defending
;
22
deliberate and creeping progress unto the grave
la vertu du monde; vertu trompeuse et falsifiee; qui na que la mine
et Iapparence
the bonds and ligaments of the commonwealth, the pillars and the
sustainers of every written statute ;2s
de donner (aux rpaux) un grand cours, et de leur faire une ouverture
large et spacieuse
read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for
granted ; nor to find talk and discourse ; but to weigh and consider .^7
Homophones are more difficult to manage, but often very
powerful
:
we are weighed down, we are swallowed up, irreparably, irrevocably,
irrecoverably, irremediably
prose admits of the two excellences you most admire, diction and
fiction
and a famous modem example
:
government of the peo|)ie, by the people, for the people. 3
332 18. BAROQUE PROSE
An effective variation of this device, practised by none more
magnificently than by Cicero, and learnt from him by most
modern orators, is anaphorarepetition of the same word or
phrase in the same position in successive clauses, hammering the
idea home. Thus
:
Ce nest la que le fond de notre misere, mais prenez garde,
en voici le comble
en voici Texces
en voici le prodige
en voici Tabus
en voici la malignite
en voici Tabomination
et, si ce terme ne sufEt pas,
en voici, pour mexprimer avec le prophete, Tabomination de la
desolation. 31
The noblest achievement of the baroque writers of prose is
symmetry. Symmetry does not necessarily mean i == i balance,
although it can mean that. A baroque cathedral, with a single great
dome in the centre of its structure, is symmetrical. In prose as
elsewhere, symmetry means a balanced proportion of parts corresponding
to their importance in the general structure. Cicero was
such a master of this art that he could extend it all through a long
speech, balancing clauses in a sentence, sentences in a paragraph,
paragraphs in a section, and sections one against another throughout
the entire oration. This is not an external trick. The essence of it
is logic; and it was during the baroque age, from the study of
Ciceros oratory, that the leading speakers became fully familiar
with the necessity for dividing each subject into large, easily distinguished,
easily correlated aspects, and then subdividing those
aspects into smaller topics to be handled separately. Bad speeches
by uneducated men usually fail in this. Adolf Hitler, for example,
had very little idea of it, and never wrote a good speech except
when he happened to hit on a good idea for a framework before
beginning; but emotional as they were, most of his speeches (public
and private) were rambling and ill digested. Jesuit orators, on the
other hand, are particularly skilful in the art of division, or logical
analysis, which is emphasized in their training. A good instance
is the second retreat sermon in Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young but any Jesuit sermon will show it. In his sermon
On the Kingdom of God Bourdaloue says the kingdom of God is
18. BAROQUE PROSE 333
1 like a treasure, hidden away;
2 like a victory, to be fought for;
3 like a reward, kept in store
;
and then subdivides each of these divisionsfor instance, in 2, the
victory must be won, first over the flesh, then over the Devil, then
over the world. 3 3
On a smaller scale, the commonest methods of achieving symmetry
in sentences and paragraphs are antithesis and climax. Both
are familiar to us; we use them constantly; but it was the writers
of the Renaissance and the baroque age who learnt them from the
Greco-Roman prose authors, and developed them for us.
Antithesis can range all the way from the opposition of single
words to the opposition of clauses, sentences, and paragraphs. 34
*No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main;35
Cette lumiere esclaire la simplicite et la soumission du coeur, mais
elle aveugle la vanite et Teslevation de Fesprif ;36
(The plan of having doctors to attend all legislators would) open a
few mouths which are now closed, and close many more which are
now open ; curb the petulancy of the young, and correct the positiveness
of the old, rouse the stupid, and damp the pert. 3
7
Of course the baroque poets, both dramatic and satiric, are full
of it:
Danm with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer. 3 3
Climax, which means ladder, is the enlargement and elevation
of one thought through a graded description of its various aspects,
in balanced words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs rising to a
powerful termination. Thus

But, my Lords, who is the man that, in addition to these disgraces

and mischiefs of our army, has dared
to authorize and associate to our arms the tomahawk and scalpingknife
of the savage ?
to call into civilized alliance the wild and inhuman savage of the
woods ?
to delegate to the merciless Indian the defence of disputed rights?
and to wage the horrors of his barbarous war against our brethren
And here is an overwhelming address to the atheist, by Dr. Donne
T respite thee not till the day ofjudgement, when I may see thee upon
334 18. BAROQUE PROSE
thy knees, upon thy face, begging of the hills that they would fall down
and cover thee from the fierce wrath of God, to ask thee then, Is there a
God now ? I respite thee not till the day of thine own death, when thou
shalt have evidence enough that there is a God, though no other evidence
but to find a Devil, and evidence enough that there is a heaven, though
no other evidence but to feel hell; to ask thee then, Is there a God now ?
I respite thee but a few hours, but six hours, but till midnight. Wake
then ; and then, dark, and alone, hear God ask thee then, remember that
I asked thee now, Is there a God ? and if thou darest, say No.
Within climax there is one symmetrical device which is so
natural and adaptable that it can be used on almost every level of
speech without seeming artificial. And yet it was invented by
Greek teachers of rhetoric; not all the Romans adopted it or
managed it with confidence ; but Cicero above all others made it
his own; and, although it is not native to the modern European
languages, it has now, without leaving the realm of artistic prose,
entered the ordinary speech of western nations. This is the tricolon.
Tricolon means a unit made up of three parts. The third
part in a tricolon used in oratory is usually more emphatic and
conclusive than the others. This is the chief device used in
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and is doubled at its conclusion
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate^we cannot consecrate
we cannot hallow this ground.
We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain

that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedomand
that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth.
Although Lincoln himself knew no Cicero, he had learnt this and
other beauties of Ciceronian style from studying the prose of the
baroque age, when it was perfected in English, in French, and in
other tongues.
Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and
Pharaoh is sold for balsams.^^
La gloirel Quy a-t-il pour le chretien de plus pernicieux et de plus
mortel ? quel appit plus dangereux ? quelle fumee plus capable de faire
tourner les meilleures tetes
The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had
it been early, had been kind ; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent,
and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am
known, and do not want it.^3
18. BAROQUE PROSE 335
Such devices (as is evident from the examples quoted) were not
used separately but in combination. And there were many more
of them. The art lay in combining them aptly. A piece of good
baroque prose was planned as carefully and engineered as elaborately,
with as many interlocking stresses, as bold a design, and as
strong a foundation as a baroque palace or a Bach Mass. And
although modern prose is seldom constructed so systematically,
these devices are now among its natural instruments. The best
writers and speakers use them freely. Audiences remember them.
Every American recalls the tricolon in wEich Roosevelt stated the
country's need of broader social assistance
:
, one-third of a nation, ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.
And, acting by instinct, the popular memory of both Britain and
America has condensed Churchills most famous phrase from its
original shape into another immortal tricolon
:
blood, sweat, and tears.
The debt of English to the King James version of the Bible, and
through it to Hebrew literature, is very great ; but such phrases as
these show that the debt of English and the other western European
languages to the classical critics, historians, and orators is much
greater. The best modern prose has the suppleness of the Greeks,
the weight of Rome.
FICTION
Three famous stories, written in the baroque age, influenced
modern literature profoundly, and, at the same time, received and
transmitted the influence of certain types of classical fiction, which
at first sight seem to be far enough away from them. The three are
interconnected by various links of purpose, imitation, and emulation,
and can conveniently be examined together. They are
:
Telemachus (TMemaque), by Francois Fenelon (published 1699-1717),
Pamela^ by Samuel Richardson (published 1740),
Tom Jones
^
by Henry Fielding (published 1749).
Briefly, the classical connexions of these books (all best-selling
stories in their day) are that Telemachus is a composite of Greek
and Latin epic, Greek romance, Greek tragedy, and much else
from Greco-Roman literature blended into a continuous and new
prose story; Pamela^ often called the first purely modern novel.
336 18. BAROQUE PROSE
grows partly out of Greek romance and Greek ideals of education
;
and Tom Jones is described by its own author as a comic epic on
the model of Homers extant Iliad and the lost burlesque Margites.
But there is more in it than that. Let us look at the books
separately.
Fenelon was an aristocratic bishop, with a fine classical education
: he was a better Grecian than most of his contemporaries, and
his work shows that he had exquisite taste. In the Battle of the
Books he was neutrallargely because he thought there was little
to be said on the side of the moderns, and yet felt that the arguments
used by or forced on the ancients did little justice to their
cause. At the age of thirty-eight he became tutor to the duke of
Burgundy, son of the dauphin and second heir to the throne of
Louis XIV. According to Saint-Simon, who perhaps exaggerates
for the sake of eifect, he found him a Hyde and made him a Jekyll.
By nature the boy was proud, violent, almost intractable. After
Fenelon had dealt with him he was calm, energetic, and genuinely
interested in the best of art and conduct. Doubtless most of this
was due to Fenelons subtle and charming character. (Bossuet
was tutor to the dauphin, and had much less successhis character
being quite as noble, but less winning.) Yet some of the improvement
was the result of the care with which Fenelon instilled in his
pupil, as easily and pleasantly as possible, the real meaning of
history, of culture, and of the well-balanced morality of the Greeks.
Bishop though he was, his moral teaching as seen through his
books leaned more heavily on Hellenic than on Christian examples.
He wrote special schoolbooks for his pupil: first some animal
fables, and then a series of Dialogues of the Dead, conversations
(based on Plato and Lucian) between famous and interesting
people on political, moral, and educational themes. Mercury and
Charon talk, Achilles interviews Homer, Romulus confronts his
virtuous successor Numa.
His best book was ostensibly meant for the duke of Burgundy
too; but it reads as though it had a wider educational purpose.
This was Telemachus, the story of the son of Odysseus. Perhaps it
was written in 1695-6. In 1697 Fenelons tutorship of Burgundy
ended. In 1699 four and a half books of his Telemachus were
published, having apparently been stolen by his copyist and sold
without permission to an enterprising publisher. In 1699, because
18. BAROQUE PROSE 337
of Fenelons extreme views on the subject of mysticism, Louis XIV
ordered him to be struck off the strength of the duke of Burgundys
household, and confined to his diocese. After this, further parts of
his book continued to appear, although the first authorized edition
was only published in 1717, by his grand-nephew. It had a
phenomenal success. In 1699 alone there were twenty editions of
it: buyers threw gold pieces at the booksellers; and it was often
imitated.'*'^
In form, Telemachus is a romance, like the fashionable tales of
chivalry, set against vaguely classical backgrounds and decorated
by apparently classical names and usages, which were then the
height of fashion: for instance, Scuderys Clelia^ a book partly
descended from dUrfes Astraea^ which we have seen as a combination
of pastoral and romance.^s These romances are fairly
direct products of the Greek, or Greco-Oriental, romances which
have come down to us from the later Roman empire. With the
sources of the stories used by the Greek romancers we did not deal
;
and indeed their ancestry is now impossible to trace, being chiefly
folk-tales orally transmitted, the stories told at caravan-fires and
tavern-tables which only rarely, and by good luck, get themselves
written down. Still, the romancers did take much of their subsidiary
material from higher Greek literature : epic descriptions of
storms, battles, shipwrecks and the like, tragic soliloquies and
reversals of fortune, rhetorical and elegiac descriptions of processions,
works of art, landscapes, and crowd scenes, and many other
moving themes. Clearly the authors were educated men. In the
same way, but on a much loftier plane and for a higher purpose,
Fenelon took over many of the finest scenes and motives from
Greco-Roman epic, Greek tragedy, and other fields of classical
literature.46 The actual story of Telemachus is parallel to the
Odysseyy but much fuller. It relates the adventures of the young
prince Telemachus during his search for his father. It takes him
all over the Mediterranean to even more landfalls than Odysseus
himself, so that it rivals not only the Odyssey but the Aeneid (with
the adventurous wanderings of the exiled Aeneas) and the romances
of love and travel. It looks backward to the Comedy of Dante,
which depends on Vergils Aeneid as this depends on the Odyssey;
it brings in so many episodes copied from non-epic sources that
it is also comparable to one of the earliest pastoral romantic
stories, Sannazaros Arcadia and, strangely enough, it was an
5076 2
338 18. BAROQUE PROSE
unconscious ancestor of Joyces Ulysses. The story is told in
limpid, harmonious, gently poetic prose, whose chief faults
are its intolerable monotony and equally intolerable nobility;
yet its invention, its breadth of view, and its well-designed
alternation of conversations, descriptions, and adventures are
admirable.
Like all Fenelons works, Telemachus was written in order to
educate. (His letters to Madame de Maintenon on improving her
character, to the young Vidame dAmiens who asked for advice on
how to live virtuously at court, and to other correspondents, are
fine educational documents.) But herein lies its chief fault. It
educates too obviously. Like Odysseus in the Odyssey
^
the hero
Telemachus is accompanied by the goddess of wisdom. Although
she is disguised as old Mentor, her presence is much more constant
and obtrusive than in the Odyssey, She is to Telemachus as
Fenelon was to Burgundy. Telemachus is constantly being exposed
to moral dangers of every intensity, from the temptation to
talk too much about himself to the temptations of lust (his loveaffair
with Eucharis was so warm that it provoked protests at the
time) and of war; while Mentor is always drawing the moral.
Mentor also draws moralsor Fenelon draws them for uswhenever
the young hero sees a happy nation or visits the kingdom of a
wicked monarch. Now, although the Iliad and the Odyssey^ and
for that matter the Aeneid, are nobly educational works, the lessons
they give are nearly always indirect, and so more penetrating and
more lasting,^^
But this frankness was daring at the time the book was published.
Fenelon was strongly opposed to many of the chief tendencies of
Louis XIV and his courthis love of war, his pride, his weakness
for flattery, his sexual laxity, his absolutism, his luxurious extravagance
and in particular his building mania, and his neglect of
the prosperity of the common people.^^ There are many wicked
kings in Telemachus^ and they nearly all resemble Louis XIV and
other baroque monarchs of his type. When Telemachus visits the
next world, he finds there are many kings in hell and few in the
Elysian fields. Therefore Telemachus was, for the young Duke of
Burgundy, directly and rather superficially educative: it was
designed to make him a different kind of king from Louis. But for
its other readers it was indirectly educative, because, by describing
luxurious courts and badly run countries long ago in the Bronze
18. BAROQUE PROSE 339
Age, it stigmatized the vices and follies of the baroque kingdoms.
It was for this that people bought the book so eagerlythey thought
it was a satire on Louis the Great and his court. To some extent it
was, although without the humour which is essential to satire.
(As early as 1694 Fenelon had written a scathing letter to Louis
criticizing his entire regime for its love of war and its mismanagement
of the economics of France.) It was because of that interpretation
that the book was constantly being republished, and that
Fenelon himself never re-entered the royal favour.
In fact, Telemachus is the satire on the baroque age which
Boileau might have written, and to which he never rose. That kind
of satire is not needed now, so that the book is partly dead. Yet it
has its own life. It is not merely a disguised reflection of contemporary
mannerslike Montesquieu^s Persian Letters, which
are far more French than Persian, It makes sense as an adventurestory
about Telemachus, and the seventeenth-century personalities
come out only now and then in the big episodesas when the hero
is described as hot-tempered and proud, when the original Telemachus,
Odysseus son, was rather quiet and simple. The traditional
criticism of the book is that it belongs to a false literary species
:
prose romance crossed with epic hybridized with instructional
manual. But many great books have belonged to false or confused
species. The real fault of Telemachus is that it is too obvious, and
too gentlemanly, and too sweetly equable. Passion is wrong, and
emotion maddens: and so Fenelon will not introduce passion
and will seldom (except in bad characters) allow the emotions to
be roused. And yet passion is sometimes necessary in a book,
Telemachus had a long progeny. Edifying historical romances
were written all through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
on its pattern, and are still appearing. A guide to Greece and Greek
history and politics was published in 1787, in a similar fictional
form: Travels of Young Anacharsis in Greece, by Jean-Jacques
Barthelemy, who worked on it for thirty years. It had an enormous
success, and helped to deepen the passion for ancient Greece
which inspired the generation of the French Revolution. In the
great educational expansion of the nineteenth century such books
became common. Many scholars of this century were introduced
to the manners of ancient Rome through Beckers Gallus and to
those of ancient Athens through his equally dull and mechanical
Charicles. *But at the same time historical romances, stimulated by
340 18. BAROQUE PROSE
the success of Scott, had become a more real and energetic type of
fiction ; and the offspring of Telemachus include The Last Bays of
Pompeii, Ben-Hur, /, Claudius, and Thornton Wilders recent The
Ides of March^which, like Dares Phrygius, pretends to be a
mass of authentic contemporary documents. The past becomes
more real as fiction than as fact.
The printer Samuel Richardson published Pamela, or Virtue
Rewarded anonymously, because the design was so humble, and the
style (he thought) so low, that it would make no great impression
except among a few quiet lovers of virtue. It was a tremendous
successin England, in sentimental Germany, in France (Oh
Richardson! thou singular genius! broke forth the impassioned
Diderot), and elsewhere. It is sometimes called the first modern
novel, but erroneously. The modern novel is not so limited a
creation that it can have only one ancestor; and there were many
other contemporary character-stories before Pamela. Still, Pamela
made the growing novel more real.
In form it is a series of letters, telling how a young girl resisted
all the attempts on her virtue made by a rich, powerful, and unscrupulous
social superior in whose house she was a servant ; and,
despite her humble birth, managed to marry the man who had
tried to deceive and seduce her. Thus she acquired the position
of lawful wife, a reward which often, even in this life, a protecting
Providence bestows on goodness, and vindicated bourgeois
morality against the proud and vicious aristocracy. And Pamela
lived long enough to become the mother of the Victorian age, and
of its ornaments : Mr. Podsnap, and Mr. Chadband, a large yellow
man, with a fat smile, and a general appearance of having a good
deal of train-oil in his system.
Contemporary in scene and characters, ahead of its time in form
and in morality, what has Pamela to do with classical influence ?
The story is told by poor sweet Pamela herself, a simple maid with
no pretensions to learning, scarce indeed to any knowledge except
that of virtue, and religion, and the policy of Dont let him.
Nevertheless, Richardson her creator knew something of the
classics: he knew Homer and Cicero, in translation; he knew
Vergil, Horace, Lucan, Juvenal, Ausonius, Pmdentius, and
Shakespeares school-author Mantuan.^i But these are only the
external ornaments of culture. What is more fertile and important
18 . BAROQUE PROSE 341
for his work is the influence of Greek romance. This reached him
in two ways.
First, he knew and respected Telemachus, Even Pamela herself,
bent on self-improvement, is found trying to read in the French
Telemachus\s2 The parson, Mr. Williams, says he is reading the
French Telemachus, which was a sign of both French and classical
culture. In Richardsons second novel, Clarissa Harlowe, among
the books found in the closet there are the following not illchosen
ones: A Telemachus in French, another in English. 5+
And the general pattern of Telemachm and Pamela is similar: a
young person is exposed to every possible kind of temptation,
resists them all, and is rewarded by worldly success and the affection
of someone dearly loved but hopelessly distant. Young
Telemachus suffers his temptations while making the Grand Tour;
Pamela hers while staying at home in her masters house : that is
the difference of their sex and rank. The moral purpose which
inspires both books is the same.
Then there is a link with Greek romance through Sir Philip
Sidneys Arcadia This book had recently been brought up to
date, as Sidney^s Arcadia modernized (1725), and The Spectator
mentions it as indispensable in the catalogue of a ladys library. s
6
Richardson had certainly read it with care. Two of its incidents
are echoed in his other novels, Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles
Grandison,^^ And the name of his heroine, Pamela, is taken from
Sidneys Arcadia, where it is the name of the daughter of King
Basilius and his Queen Gynecea. By choosing it Richardson no
doubt meant to show that, although a rustic, his heroine was really
a princess at heart. 5 8
The romances of Greece and Romewere still alive in the baroque
age: much read and often copied. Fenelon took their pattern,
enriched it with much of the finest of classical literature, and, from
Greco-Roman epic, gave it an aristocratic moral purpose. Richardson
(at second- and third-hand) took the same pattern, kept the
excitement and the hairbreadth scapes, and made it the vehicle for
the morality of the rising bourgeoisie^ of which he was himself a
pattern.
Henry Fielding was well educated, at Eton, but went to Leyden
University instead of Oxford or Cambridge. He was fluent in
Latin, French, and Italian, competent in Greek.^^ After beginning
342 18. BAROQUE PROSE
his literary career with a translation of part of Juvenals satire
against women {All the Revenge taken by an Injured Lover), he
went in for the theatre, with some success; and then found his
vocation through Richardsons Pamela, The book amused him
and disgusted him. In 1742 he published a parody of it called The
History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews,
Pamela, resisting her masters entreaties and evading his
stratagems, at last became his wife. Joseph Andrews (supposed to
be her brother) was a servant too, and resisted the seductions of his
employer Lady Booby until he at last won the heart of sweet Fanny
Andrews. For he proved to be the kidnapped son of a local squire,
and Fanny to be the kidnapped sister of Pamela; and they all,
including the seductive Lady Booby, lived happily ever after.
Fielding followed this in 1749 with a fine original novel, Tom
Jones, the History of a Foundling, to which he owes his reputation.
The two novels together are milestones in the history of prose
fiction. He himself well knew this, and added long disquisitions
on the theory which he meant them to exemplify. Their material
was thoroughly modern. Their form, he said, was an adaptation
of a classical form. They were prose epics. The only features in
which they differed from the Iliad and the Aeneid were, first, that
they were in prose ; second, that they did not introduce the supernatural;
and, third, that instead of being heroic they were funny.
This parallelism Fielding emphasized several times, in digresr
sions which were aimed at readers as scholarly and as much
interested in literary theory as Richardsons public was interested
in sex, morality, and social success. He drove it home by using
quotations from Ajristotle and Horaces Art of Poetry at chapterheads,
and by inserting frequent parodies of heroic battles, of
Homeric similes, and of the epic descriptions of the lapse of time.
It was not merely an empty boast. Fielding was a good classical
scholar and widely read. In 1895 Austin Dobson found the catalogue
of his library reposing in the British Museum : it is surprisingly
large, and contains almost every one of the classics from the
greatest to the most obscure. But it is safe to say that, if he had
not parodied epic conventions and digressed on the resemblance,
very few modern readers would ever have thought his novels were
epics. It was at least daring, and perhaps it was pedantic and
ridiculous, for the author of a couple of light romantic stories to
say he was emulating Homer. Was Fielding justified ?
18. BAROQUE PROSE 343
To begin with, it was pointless to claim that his books were
written on the pattern of the classical comic epic like the Margites
attributed to Homer: for we know virtually nothing about the
Margites, of which only a few words survive, and the only ancient
poem which could be called a comic epic is The Battle of Frogs and
Mice, containing no human characters.
Perhaps Fielding meant that his novels were parodies of epic?
They have mock battles, unheroic heroes, ignoble adventures,
great aspirations that end in ridiculous catastrophes. Yes, that was
in his mind ; and yet Joseph Andrews began by being a parody,
not of a classical epic, but of a recent work of prose fiction. And
in Tom Jones the mock-heroic episodes are less important than the
love-story and the travel-adventures, chance meetings and evasions
and unexpected recognitions, which are not epic at all in quality,
but belong to another literary type. They are the stuff ofromance.
The main plot of both Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones turns on a
favourite device of Greek romancethe kidnapped child brought
up in a low social rank or in ignorance of its parentage, who
eventually proves to be well bom ; and both, like a romance but
unlike an epic, culminate in the wedding of two often-separated
lovers. These devices appear in the Greek romances like Baphnis
and Chloe ; they recur in the long romantic love-stories of the late
Renaissance and the baroque age, Astraea and Clelia and many
others; Fenelon decorated his Telemachus with some of their
interest and variety; and in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones
Fielding sometimes parodied them, sometimes used them straightforward,
but essentially made them contemporary and real.
Nevertheless, by claiming that his books were epics Fielding did
state an important truth, perhaps without fully realizing it. This
was that the poetic epic was dying, and that the forces it had once
possessed were to flow into the modern novel. The transfusion
had begun before Fielding. Cervantess Don Quixote took the
fantastic heroic aspirations of epics like The Madness ofRoland and
brought them into contact with real life and prose speech. Fenelon
in Telemachus, writing the first ofmany modern stories of growingup
and education, interwove classical epic and romance, and took
prose as his vehicle. Fielding explicitly refers to Telemachus as
an epic comparable to the Odyssey and indeed it is more like an
epic than is Tom Jones.
So then Fielding saw in theory and felt in practice the two chief
344 18- BAROQUE PROSE
classical currents which flowed together to make the modern novel.
One of these was Greek romance. The other was Greco-Roman
epic. Romance gave the novel its interest in young love, plots full
of travel and exciting adventure, chances and changes, disguises
and coincidences, its long episodic story-line. In Fieldings day
the novel was not yet ready to receive the full force of the epic
spirit, but later it became able to contain the bold construction of
epic, its large scale, its crowd-scenes, its political and historical
profundity, its grand spiritual meanings, and its sense of the
hidden mysteries that make human destiny more than its individual
adventures and private lives. In the nineteenth century classical
romance and classical epic, acting on the modem consciousness,
produced David Copperfield and Crime and Punishment^ Salammbd
and War and Peace.
HISTORY
One of the greatest intellectual and artistic achievements of the
baroque age was a study of the conflict between the Roman empire
and the forces that destroyed it. This was Edward Gibbons
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon was an
Englishman of independent means and poor health, born in 1737,
well schooled but mainly self-educated by reading, reading, reading:
he himself stated that the year in which he made his greatest
intellectual progress was his twelfth. His short stay at Magdalen
College, 0:rford, was largely wasted.^^ It terminated abmptly
when he was converted to Roman Catholicism. His father sent him
away to French Switzerland, where he was soon reconverted, and
then resumed his self-preparation for the task he dimly foresaw.
His first published work was an essay in French (then the main
culture-language) on the advantages of classical study. In 1764 he
conceived the idea of his great history, which covers more than a
thousand years^for the Roman empire did not fall until less than
forty years before the discovery of America, Volume i appeared
in 1776, with enormous success: Gibbon said it was on every table
and on almost every toilet. Five more volumes appeared at
intervals, the last in 1788 ; and, after writing an admirably short
autobiography, Gibbon died in 1794, expiring simultaneously with
the age of baroque.
The Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Empire is a book of the highest
importance. As a symbol of the interpenetration of the Greco18.
BAROQUE PROSE 345
Roman world and the modern world it is comparable to Miltons
Paradise Lost or Racines tragedies, Versailles or St. Pauls
Cathedral. Although written by an Englishman, it was an international
product. It used the researches of scholars from nearly
every country in Europe (particularly the Frenchman Tillemont);
it was conceived in Rome; it was written partly in England and
partly in Switzerland ; its style was a rich fusion of English and
Latin, clarified by French (the language in which Gibbon had
already started two historical works) its spirit was partly that of
the English Whig gentry and partly that of the French and English
Enlightenment.
It had two distinguished predecessors. Bossuet, who was tutor
to the dauphin, heir to the throne of Louis XIV, wrote for him
a Discourse on Universal History (i68i). This is a chronological
summary and synthesis of the histories of the Jews, the Near
Eastern empires, the Greeks and Romans, and the invaders and
successors of Rome until Charlemagne (a.d. 8oo), combined with
a much longer exposition of Gods providence in guiding the
course of events towards the establishment of the true faith.
Bossuet knew a good deal of history; and he was skilful in combining
his facts to produce a single grand picture ; but his complete
dependence on the Old and New Testaments as the single central
unified document of ancient history rendered his work more
edifying than reliable. In his concluding chapter he says that all
historical facts are the result of Gods direct intervention : not only
does God decide the event of wars and the fate of empires, but it
is God who causes individual men and groups to be lustful or selfcontrolled,
stupid or far-sighted: there is no such thing as chance,
nor, apparently, human will or wisdom. This moral is no doubt
excellent as a reminder for the heir of an absolute monarch, but
changes history into theology.^'
Fifty years later one of the finest minds of the eighteenth century
wrote a much greater book on ancient history. This was Secondat
de Montesquieus Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of
the Romans and of Their Decadence (1734). Already known through
his Persian Letters as a penetrating critic of society and history,
and even then preparing his greatest work, On the Spirit of the
Laws, Montesquieu achieved something in his Roman book which
was possible only to the age of reason. In a short, admirably
arranged book of limpid clarity and elegant precision, he combined
346 18. BAROQUE PROSE
a broad survey of the essential dates, facts, individuals, and
institutions of Roman history from the days of Romulus to the
Turkish conquests, with a cool, confident, and yet not oversimplified
analysis of the moral and social, personal and strategic
factors which enlarged, consolidated, and destroyed Rome. It
helped to form the work of Gibbon ; and indeed, although many of
the historical data now need correction and expansion, it is still
impossible to read the little work without admiration, and a renewed
confidence in the power of the human mind.
Gibbons book exceeds one of these two in art, and the other in
scope. It could well be described as a culmination of Renaissance
scholarship, of the admiration for Greco-Roman art, political
wisdom, and humanism that began to vivify the nations of western
Europe four hundred years earlier. Looked at from another point
of view, it was the end of the age of Rome in modern Europe.
After it came the age of Greece.
A majestic book. It begins in the second century of our era, and
ends in the fifteenth. It covers not only Rome and Byzantium, but
the successor statesthe Franks, the Ostrogoths, the Lombards

and the invaders, Tartars, Saracens, Huns, Vandals, many more.

A modern admirer notes that on all good critics the work has made
the same impression, of great power and superb organization.
Walter Bagehot compares it to the march of a Roman legion
through a troubled country ... up hill and down hill, through marsh
and thicket, through Goth or Parthian ... an emblem of civilization;
Sainte-Beuve to 'a great rearguard action, carried out
without fire or impetuosity ; and Harrison to a Roman triumph,
of some Caesar returning, accompanied by all the pomp and circumstance
of war: races of all colours and costumes, trophies of
barbarous peoples, strange beasts, and the spoil of cities. It is
striking to compare this work, which grasps and sums up so much
of ancient history, arranging it in a centuries-Iong perspective,
with one of the earliest little works of art that have come down to us
from the very Dark Ages described by Gibbon : the Franks Casket,
which compresses all the heroic past into pictures of the founding
of Rome, the capture of Jerusalem, the sufferings of a northern
hero, and a horse-headed monster from a forgotten legend.
Still, its structure, although magnificent in scale, is not uniform.
It could be called incomplete. As Bury points out, the first part,
covering rather over five-eighths of the whole, fully describes the
18. BAROQUE PROSE 347
period from a.d. i8o to 641, from Trajan to Constantine, from
Constantine to Heraclius*; while the second, treating 641-1453, is
summary and episodic, compressing some long developments into
brief surveys and describing certain significant events at disproportionate
length. Gibbon justifies this by saying that it would be
an ungrateful and melancholy task to describe the last 800 years
of the eastern empire in detaillargely because he dislikes both
organized Christianity and an elaborate empire, a succession of
priests, or courtiers. Here, however, his personal preferences
have caused him to distort his subject. It was then a common set
of prejudices, but it damaged the truth.
Gibbons great range would be useless without his analytical
power. He had a highly developed sense of intellectual and
aesthetic structure. Through this he controlled the enormous and
shapeless mass, a thousand processes and a million facts, so that
they arranged themselves in large but manageable groups, seventyone
of which made up the entire work, and, uncluttered by appendixes
and excursuses and annexes, formed an architectural
whole of truly baroque grandeur.
Then there is what has been called the immortal affectation of
his unique style. Yet it is not unique. Individuality was not one
of the chief aims of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stylists. It
has often been praised, and it is truly praiseworthy as a feat of willpower.
The difficulty is that, as the lady in Bojleau said of Chapelains
poetry, no one can read it.^i It is not that Gibbon is too
polysyllabic. Nor is he unremittingly solemnon the contrary,
his text is sometimes elegantly witty, and his footnotes, especially
for those who are able to penetrate the obscurity of a learned
language, often scandalously gay. But his sentences are monotonous.
Two patterns, with minor variations, are his obsessions.
He will say X; and Y, His next sentence will be X; and Y; and
Z. Sometimes he will interpose X; but Y, Then, regularly and
soporifically as waves on the beach, roll back X; and Y; and
The result of reading a few score pages of this is eloquently
described by Dickens. After listening to Decline and Fall Off
the Rooshan Empire, Mr. Boffin was left staring with his eyes
and mind, and so severely punished that he could hardly wish
his literary friend Good-night.^s Gibbon overworked the two
devices of antithesis and tricolon until they became almost synonymous
with the Gibbonian manner. Montesquieus sentences
348 18. BAROQUE PROSE
are more flexible. Before him in England, Donne and Browne
were more varied and not less weighty. The two greatest Roman
historians themselves would have shrunk from such a limited range
of rhythms. Livy is sonorous and dignified in his narration of
complex strategic events, breaks into short irregular sentences to
relate battles, sieges, conflicts, diplomatic struggles, or disasters,
flames into fiery rhetoric when a hero or a villain delivers one of
those character-revealing and emotionally moving orations with
which he punctuates his action : as a result, he is far more individual,
far less expected and monotonous than Gibbon. Tacitus,
writing a history of hidden rivalries, complex motivations,
treachery, suffering, hatred, and inexplicable folly, made his
sentences as obscure, almost as patternless as the events he described.
Gibbon thought, perhaps, that he was writing Ciceronian
prose; but it was the rolling prose of the perorations only; while
in a single speech Cicero covers four or five other methods of
expression, rapid, humorous, sharply interrogative, fiercely expostulatory,
all untouched by Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire is a perpetual peroration.
The character of Gibbon's style, however, is partly a matter of
taste. The objective faults of his book are important and instructive.
Two of them were the faults of his age, the third was his own.
Gibbon was more a Roman than a Greek. His Latin was excellent,
but he himself says that he did not feel at ease with Greek
books : in that he was at one not only with many other distinguished
writers, but with the general current of culture since the Renaissance.
People often admired Greek literature from a distance, like
an Alp, but they were at home in Latin. The effect of this on
Gibbons work was that he misconceived and misrepresented
the power of the eastern Roman empire, centring on its capital,
Byzantium, and the relations of that empire both to the west and
to the barbarians. What made Rome great was that it formed a
culture out of its own virtues of energy, discipline, freedom bound
by self-made law, with the fertilizing influence of Greek thought,
art, science, and literature, and that it communicated that culture
far and wide over the world to what had been only barJbarian
tribes. At its greatest Rome was both Roman and Greek. Although
at one extremity the empire was mainly Roman, and at the other
almost wholly Greek, yet the two elements interfused at the critical
points and were blended throughout. After the division of the
18. BAROQUE PROSE 349
empire into two, the western unit was Latin-speaking 'and the
eastern Greek-speaking. Nevertheless, the eastern empire was
still Roman in many respects. It called itself Roman, it united
military power and civilizing influence, it kept many Greco-
Roman cultural traditions alive and developing while the western
world was struggling out of a darkness shot with blood and fire.
As Bury points out,
mediaeval historians, concentrating their interest on the rising States
of western Europe, often fail to recognize the position held by the later
empire (i.e. the Byzantine Roman empire) and its European prestige.
Up to the middle of the eleventh century it was in actual strength the
first power in Europe, except in the lifetime of Charles the Great, and
under the Comneni it was still a power of the first rank. . . , Throughout
the whole period, to 1204 (when it was sacked by the Crusaders), Constantinople
was the first city in the world. The influence which the
Empire exerted upon its neighbours, especially the Slavonic peoples,
is the second great role which it fulfilled for Europe. ^4
Gibbon gave a false impression of the cultural and political importance
of the eastern empire, both in comparison with all other
European states and as a bulwark against the barbarians. It was
through Byzantium that Christianity and Greco-Roman culture
first penetrated to the Russians and the Balkan Slav peoples; and
it was because of the diplomacy, wealth, organization, and fighting
powers of Byzantium that Europe was not far more gravely
threatened, perhaps ruined, by savage oriental invasions. The
empire had faults, some very grave ; they were such as to irritate
Gibbon to the point of distorting or obscuring his vision ; but they
were far less than its virtues and its powers.
The second fault of the book is even more fundamental. When
you start to read the history of a long and eminently important
process such as the fall of an empire, you expect to be told what
cause or combination of causes was responsible for it. And you
expect that the causes will be shown operating in various intensities,
sometimes accelerated and sometimes held back by conflict
or resistance, through the various stages of the process which the
historian describes. This you will find in Montesquieu, but not in
Gibbon. Coleridge excoriated him for this, in terms characteristically
exaggerated
:
And then to call it a History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire! Was there ever a greater misnomer,^ I protest I do not
350 18. BAROQUE PROSE
remember a single philosophical attempt made throughout the work to
fathom the causes of the decline or fall of that empire. . . . Gibbon was
a man of immense reading; but he had no philosophy.
On the contrary, you find, scattered here and there through the
narrative, a number of different reasons, not interconnected, and
sometimes mutually contradictory.
The earliest suggestion we meet is a version of the idea propagated
by Gibbons contemporary Rousseau: savages are strong
and virtuous, civilized people are vicious and weak. Thus, in
chapter 6, Gibbon contrasts
the untutored Caledonians [of Ossians times], glowing with the warm
virtues of nature, and the degenerate Romans, polluted with the mean
vices of wealth and slavery .76
Very early in his work Gibbon accepts this idea, and implies that
the barbarian invasions were a good thing for the world, since
(although after a thousand years) they produced modern civilization
:
The giants of the north . . . restored a manly spirit of freedom; and,
after the revolution of ten centuries, freedom became the happy parent
of taste and science. 77
Yet when he turns to describe the internal troubles of the second
and later centuries, he concentrates on the excessive power of the
army, and in particular of the Italian garrison, the praetorian
guards, whose licentious fury was the first symptom and cause of
the decline of the empire. 7 ^ At this point he seems to conceive
that the empire was broken up from within by the predominating
power of the army and the unscrupulousness of the military
adventurers who used it. Yet the eastern empire had a powerful
army, and did not break up from within. In his second and third
volumes Gibbon lays much emphasis on the despotism of Constantines
system, and on faction spirit. In chapter 35 he produces
a socio-economic reason^the maldistribution of wealth through
bad taxation and the difficulty of financing the vast imperial
administration.^^ Finally, having reached chapter 38, he produces
General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the
West, an essay composed long before, introducing some quite new
reasons, and using terms taken from a letter he had written to
Hume in 1767. In this he states that the Roman empire fell by
its own weight ; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman empire
18 . BAROQUE PROSE 351
was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted
so long. (Christianity, however, was partly to blame.)
This is a much deeper thought, which had already been
advanced by Moyle in his Essay on the Constitution of the Roman
Government^ and which reappears on a grand scale in Spenglers
The Decline of the WestJ^ It is the idea that civilizations, like
animals and men, have a natural rhythm of growth, maturity,
and decay, beyond which they cannot prolong their lives. But,
without careful application to the facts and without support from
a thorough philosophical discussion, this suggestion is only a confession
of failure on the part of the historian. Sometimes Gibbon
openly admits his failure to find reasons. For instance, in describing
the Gothic invasion of the Ukraine he remarks that its cause
lies concealed among the various motives which actuate the conduct
of unsettled barbarians.^^ And, when he mentions the
formidable plague of 250-65,^3 Re does not draw the necessary
conclusions which followed from it.
Since Gibbons day, many general explanations have been offered
for the fall of the civilization of Greece and Rome.^^ Rostovtzeff
held that the main cause was the hatred which the half-barbarous
countrymen serving in the Roman armies felt for the city-folk who
fed on them and bled them ; but some have thought that he was
unconsciously reasoning from the overthrow of the Tsarist government
by soviets of peasants and soldiers. Seeck thought the best
stock of Rome was killed off by the emperors, leaving only inefficient
and cowardly weaklings ; and both he and others pointed
to the introduction of bad agricultural and financial systems which
crushed the free yeomanry out of existence. Clearly, whatever
explanation is brought forward must account not only for the fall
of the western empire, but for the survival of the eastern empire.
It would seem that the men of the west stopped having new ideas,
while the Byzantines continued to develop new administrative
policies, new spiritual activities, new scientific inventions, for
many a generation. In the seventh century, for instance, they produced
liquid fire and flame-throwers to repel the Arab attack on
Constantinople. In Toynbees phrase, they responded successfully
to the challenge of the barbarian attacks, while the western Romans
did not. But Gibbon found the actual narration of the vast process
so difficult and so complicated that he had no energy left to
analyse its causes.
352 18. BAROQUE PROSE
The third fault of the book is its bias against Christianity. It
was conceived, he himself tells us, as he sat in the ruins of the
Capitol and listened to the barefooted friars singing vespers in the
Temple of Jupiter.^s Even in that brilliant little picture appears
the contrast which obsessed him: the contrast between a. polite
and powerful empire and the half-savage fanatics who refused
their allegiance to it, divided it, sapped its energies by teaching
patience and pusillanimity, and destroyed it. Chapters 15 and 16
are famous as the cleverest and most striking attack on the spirit and
the traditions of Christianity which has ever been executed. They
pass from apparently respectful narration of the stories told about
the early church, through passages of Voltairian irony in which he
reproaches the pagan scientists for failing to notice the innumerable
prodigies which accompanied the establishment of the faith, to the
conclusion in the melancholy truth that the Christians . . . have
inflicted far greater severities on each other than they had experienced
from the zeal of infidels. These chapters in particular have
evoked many counter-attacks ever since they were published:
But the same attitude recurs again and again throughout the book :
as when Gibbon points out with the hint of a smile that the
Christians, who had been so fervent in denouncing the Romans
and Greeks for worshipping images, no sooner established their
own religion than they filled their churches with pictures and
statues, holy icons and holy relics. Even his account of the
origins of Mohammedanism is anti-Christian in effect : it shows
how close was the parallelism between Islam and Christianity in
their early stages, and then emphasizes the fact that Islam (unlike
Christianity) rejects all visible portrayals of God and His Apostles.
Gibbons book closes with the famous epigram: I have described
the triumph of Barbarism and Religion.^ It is impossible to read
his history without recognizing that he viewed these two forces as
equally destructive and equally despicable.
Gibbons motive for making his history a prolonged attack on
Christianity was that^like many great and good men, Montaigne,
for instance^he feared and hated religious intolerance. He himself
had been a Roman Catholic, and had become a Protestant once
more. As a Catholic he had felt some of the rigours of Protestant
intolerance. During his reconversion his pastors had no doubt
emphasized the attacks on Protestantism carried out by Catholic
crusaders and inquisitors. When he lists and expounds the various
18. BAROQUE PROSE 353
merits of Roman civilization, the very first he mentions is religious
toleration, flowing from the mild spirit of antiquity. When he
praises the emperor Julian (called the Apostate), it is because he
extended to all the inhabitants of the Roman world the benefits of a free
and equal toleration; and the only hardship which he inflicted on the
Christians was to deprive them of the power of tormenting their fellowsubjects.^^
But Gibbons bias against Christianity led him to falsify history.
It caused him to underestimate the achievements and to misconceive
the character of the eastern empire, which was both
Roman and Christian. It made him skim lightly over the work of
Saints Cyril and Methodius and their successors, in civilizing
and Christianizing the savage Slavic tribes. The sentence quoted
above contains the worst falsification of all. The triumph of
Barbarism and Religion is a false description of the fall of the
empire. Instead of summing up the entire process, it can at most
be a partial description of the troubles in the second and third
centuries a.d. But Constantine, the first Christian emperor,
gained the throne early in the fourth century. Thenceforward
Rome was predominantly, and from 380 completely and officially,
Christian. It is true that, before this period, the primitive Christians,
firm in their belief that the world was about to end, and
despising the obscenities and absurdities of paganism, had withheld
allegiance to the emperors, disrupted the imperial administration,
and refused to take part in any of the activities of the state.
But after Christianity became the official religion, it ceased to be
a powerful disruptive force within the Roman world.
The reverse is true. The barbarian invasions and infiltrations
were one of the main causes of the fall of the empire. Christianity
was one of the main causes of the survivalnot indeed of the
western empire, but of Greco-Roman civilization in many of its
best and most permanently vital aspects. Gibbon may be right in
despising the wild ascetics of the Thebaid, the grass-eating
anachorets, and the hysterical sectaries of Byzantium but would
he prefer the Tartars, the Turks, the Northmen, and the Huns?
The history of nearly every Roman province shows how the successive
waves of savages that broke over the walls of the empire
were resisted by Christians, and, even when they burst the dikes
and flowed in, were at last, through Christian teaching and
S076 A a
354 18. BAROQUE PROSE
example, calmed and controlled and civilized. Perhaps it was
inevitable for Gibbon in the eighteenth century to believe that
Christian fanaticism was one of the most dangerous of all evils,
and to despise Christianity for inspiring it. A more complete
explanation is that, even if Christian creeds sometimes gave an
outlet to the forces of savagery, Christianity was always exercised
to repress them or to canalize them. And to us in the twentieth
century, who have seen the barbarities of highly organized contemporary
pagan peoples and who are likely to see more, Christianity
is very clearly a greater thing than Gibbon could understand, one
of the greatest constructive social forces in human history.
19
THE TIME OF REVOLUTION
1 . INTRODUCTION
I
N the second half of the eighteenth century, literature, for ever
changing, once more changed its character and methodsthis
time very decisively. Philosophy and history gave way to fiction.
Prose gave way to poetry. Intellectualism gave way to emotion.
The ideals of wit, politeness, and self-control were discarded as
artificial. People turned to admire sincerity, sensitivity, and selfexpression.
Fresh literary patterns were developed, and subjects
formerly negligible or repulsive became exciting. Because of the
new admiration for the Middle Ageswhen tales of chivalrous
adventure were known as romances^some of the spiritual and
aesthetic ideals of the time were named romantic. It is customary
now to call it the Romantic Revival. The authors of the period are
often known as romantic writers^whether, like Scott, they
actually preferred medieval subjects or, like Shelley, cared little
for the Gothic past. It has become a cliche of criticism to contrast
romantic and classical principles, and to assume that the great
poets of that age despised and shunned Greek and Latin literature.
This is a misconception which prevents many modern readers from
understanding the period.
In fact, the new thought and literature did not turn away from
Greek and Latin. It is impossible to believe that the movement
which produced Shelleys Prometheus Unbound, Keatss Ode on
a Grecian Urn, Goethes Roman Elegies, Chateaubriands The
Martyrs, and the tragedies of Alfieri was anti-classical. On the
contrary, most of the great European writers of the epoch 1765-
1825 much more about classical literature than their predecessors,
and were more successful in capturing and reproducing
its meaning, Shelley knew more Greek than Pope. Goethe knew
more Greek than Klopstock. Leopardi, Hblderlin, Chenier were
good scholars. The classics were not neglected during this period.
Instead, they were reinterpreted : they were re-read with a different
emphasis and deeper understanding.
The element of medievalism and romance in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries was, although striking, relatively
356 19, THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: INTRODUCTION
unimportant and superficial. The real moving force of the period
was social, political, religious, aesthetic, and moral protest. It was
a time of revolt, and it would be better called the Revolutionary
than the Romantic era. The changes in literature which marked
it were part of a wider spiritual change. Its writers were in rebellion
against conventions, or prejudices, or abuses of power, or limitations
of the scope of the human soul. Most of them were political
rebels : so much so that when Wordsworth and Goethe and Alfieri
turned against the French Revolution, they seemed to be deserting
the ideals of their age. The social structure of the baroque period
was disintegrating from within and was being attacked from
without. The influence of aristocracies was being curtailed. The
temporal power of the Roman Catholic church was diminishing.
The tide was setting away from monarchy towards republicanism.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to consider this as the collapse of
Greco-Roman ideals, the disappearance of a classicaF age. On the
contrary, in the general movement of revolt, the examples of
Greece and republican Rome were among the most urgent forces.
Ossian was less vital than Plutarch. The revolutionaries believed
themselves to be more classical than their opponents, and what they
chiefly attacked was the survival of medieval institutions such as
the feudal privileges of the nobles. Even Napoleon, the revolutionary
ruler, was an emperor in the Roman style, with his laurels
and his eagles, as contrasted with Louis, the last of a long procession
of medieval monarchs.
Is it, then, entirely wrong to say that the revolutionary period
was marked by a reaction against the classics ? If so, why was such
an erroneous description ever accepted and how has it persisted ?
If not, how much truth is there in it}
It was not wholly false. There was, particularly in England,
a reaction against one of the bad effects of classical influence in
literature; the habit of letting the Greek and Roman myths and
the Greek and Roman poets do the work of creation. Instead of
writing something fresh, instead of looking at the world with an
observing eye, instead of producing newer and more subtle echoes
of thought in language, the baroque poets were too often content
to use a classical image, already hackneyed, or to imitate a classical
stylistic device too well known. Instead of describing a moonlit
garden with its nightingales, they would say that the sweet influence
of Diana fell over the groves of the nymphs, who were silent,
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: INTRODUCTION 357
listening to the complaint of Philomel. Now, the nymphs, the
moon-maiden, and the legend of Philomela are powerful imaginative
stimuli, and have been evoking beautiful poetry for nearly
3,000 years.2 But myths, however beautiful, are not enough to
make poetry without fresh imagination ; and in the baroque period
too many writers were unimaginative copyists. Therefore the
reaction which occurred in the revolutionary era was not against
the classics as such, but against the lack of imagination characteristic
of the baroque age and in particular against the habit of
using classical cliches as short-cuts to imaginative expression.
This is what Macaulay means when, in his essay on Frederick
the Great, he speaks of Prometheus and Orpheus, Elysium and
Acheron, . . . and all the other frippery, which, like a robe tossed
by a proud beauty to her waiting-woman, has long been contemptuously
abandoned by genius to mediocrity. ^ Once the
garment of genius, the robe of classical imagery was, for the time,
outworn. Its colours were to be revived by greater artists.
Another reason for speaking of the revolutionary period in
literature as anti-classical is that some of the emotional and
artistic ideals it upheld were opposed to the ideals of Greco-Roman
life and literature: at least, to those ideals as interpreted by the
men of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In particular,
restraint of emotion was now decried in favour of strong
expression of feeling
; polished workmanship was held inferior to
improvisation and the gush of natural eloquence; and symmetry
of the parts within a complete artistic whole was felt to be artificial,
unnatural, dead. Poets published unbalanced works like Fausty
unfinished works like Childe Harold, Hyperion, Christabel, and
Kubla Khan,
The former ideals had been held in various degrees by the
classical authors most admired in the baroque period, and were
educed from them as rigid principles by the baroque critics^who
then abused the other Greek and Latin writers for not following
them. They called Homer vulgar; they called Aeschylus mad. In
time, as baroque society became more rigid, the principles became
more purely external; many were added which had nothing to do
with the classics, but which entered into a general pattern of
correctness falsely thought to be derived from the authority of the
Greeks and Romans. There is an amusing passage on them in
Macaulays review of Moores life of Byron. He cites the opinion
358 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: INTRODUCTION
of some critics that Milton ought not to have put so many similes
into the first book of Paradise Losty for there are no similes in the
first book of the Iliady and so the first book of an epic ought to be
the most unadorned; or that Othello should not be the hero of
a tragedy, for a hero ought always to be white. He says he might
just as well enact that the number of scenes in every act should be
three or some multiple of three; that the number of lines in every
scene should be an exact square ; that the characters should never
be more or fewer than sixteen ; and that every thirty-sixth line in
heroic couplets should have twelve syllables. Such rulesand
many were laid down which were hardly less absurd^were neither
necessary nor classical. The word classicist, which is not the
same as classical but implies an attempt to emulate the classics,
suggests itself as a suitable name for them.
The three principles mentioned above were indeed observed by
the Greeks and Romans ; but within far broader and more sensible
limits than the baroque critics admitted. For instance, the expression
of emotion was restrained, but only so far as to exclude
vulgarity, incoherence, and intolerable physical frankness. The
hero could go mad on the stage ; he could be dressed as a beggar,
or be cast up naked on a strange island ; he could even abuse his
enemies in porter-like language. Yet, although his manners were
not always those of a baroque peer, he could not do things which
would degrade humanity: he could weep, but not get drunk; he
could go mad, but he would conquer his madness, or die ; he would
find no sordid escape from this world, our prison. The mistake
made by many baroque writers was to believe that the classical
authors admired repression or avoidance of emotion. The great
authors of the revolutionary period, like the Greeks themselves,
felt emotion deeply, but controlled its expression.
There is a further reason for the description of the literature of
the revolutionary period as anti-classical. It is that a number of
new fields of human experience, outside the scope of classical
literature, were now thrown open to poets and their readers. Folkpoetry;
peasant life; the Middle Ages and their survivals, ghostly,
adventurous, or amorous; wild nature; the mysterious East;
political revolutions; the sinister depths of human passionall
these and other motives came surging in on the revolutionary
writers. Baroque poets, with all their self-accepted limitations,
had usually had too little to write about. Now the revolutionary
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: INTRODUCTION 359
poets had too much. Most of them cracked under the strain. Don
Juan was never finished ; The Recluse was never finished ; Goethe
had to make titanic efforts to finish Faust at the age of eighty;
Schiller never managed to produce a book on any classical subject
to satisfy himself, and died ill-content with his work; Coleridge,
after the first year or two, never finished anything. The baroque
period had concentrated chiefly on classical myth and history,
human psychology, and certain fundamental philosophical problems;
but now vast new fields were opened up. Superficial
observers are therefore apt to interpret the revolutionary period
as one in which the interest of poets was entirely turned away
from the classics towards something else. But, as their lives show,
most of the revolutionary writers loved and understood classical
literature better than their predecessors.
We should therefore revise the shallow conception of this period
as one of reaction against classical poetry and classical standards.
Most conceptions of history, art, or psychology which are based
on action-and-reaction are shallow : they are patterns of thought
borrowed from physics, and from a physics which is now known to
be inadequate. As soon as the sciences completely free themselves
from the domination of physics, it is likely that organic chemistry
will provide far more illuminating metaphors to describe the
activities of the human spirit. History is not like a clock ticking
or a pendulum swinging. Instead of viewing this age as one of
reaction, let us describe it as one of expansion and exploration.
It could even be called an explosion. The energies it set free
were at first uncontrollable. The symbol of the baroque period
was a pearl, straining outwards under the pressure of the forces
which its smooth but irregular surface contained (p. 289). The
revolutionary age was the explosion of the pearl. Its activity was
not conflict, and tension, and difficult control, but release. The
forces it released, after issuing in startling cruelties, terrible
disasters, amazing beauties, and grand spiritual aspirations, reformed
in a new shape and became subject to new controls. But
the form of the old age was gone for ever.
We can then reach a deeper understanding of the revolutionary
era by comparing it with the Renaissance. Like the Renaissance,
it was an epoch of rapid and often violent political change, in
which long-established structures were quickly broken into fragments;
of brilliant and unexpected artistic creations; of fierce
36o 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: INTRODUCTION
conflicts alike between nations, and within societies, and in the
souls of individuals ; of the discovery of new realms of thought for
the spirit to explore; of brilliant men who emerged from obscurity
to become world-movers within a few brief ardent years ; of proud
hope for the future and unboimded trust in the soul of man, often
ending in cold despair. Like the Renaissance, it destroyed several
systems ofthought which had been in existence for centuries and had
graduallybecome less and less vital, more and more meaningless and
conventional. Like the Renaissance, it gave the world a fresh group
of political and social and aesthetic concepts ; like the Renaissance,
it was succeeded by a long period of rest and development during
which its achievements were assimilated and evaluated. The
period which ended in 1914 was to the revolutionary era what the
baroque age was to the Renaissance. But, in the revolutionary era
as in the Renaissance, one of the great rediscoveries was the world
of classical culture.
The two epochs marked two complementary stages in the
exploration of antiquity. The Renaissance meant the assimilation
of Latin, while the revolutionary era meant a closer approach "to
Greek. Men of the Renaissance, like Montaigne, would speak of
The ancients, but in practice think of the Romans; they would
quote fifth-rate Latin poets like Silius Italicus freely and first-rate
Greek poets like Homer sparsely. This attitude was now reversed.
What stimulated Keats was Homer, more than Vergil. Alfieri
learnt Greek at fifty. When Shelley and Goethe decided to write
great plays, they thought nothing ojf Seneca, but strove to emulate
Aeschylus and Euripides. When the revolutionary poets yearned
for an ideal country, it was usually Greece rather than Rome. The
time of revolution was the time in which the rococo garlands and
rococo cupids copied from Latin adaptations of late Greek art
disappeared, and made way for the Elgin Marbles.
Greece was newly discovered by the men of the revolutionary
age. What did it mean to them?
First, it meant beauty and nobility in poetry, in art, in philosophy,
and in life. For all its worthiness, this sounds an obvious
ideal ; but we should remember that throughout the preceding age
men talked not so much of beauty as of correctness, of les Men--
seames; while nowadays there is a flourishing school of writers and
artists which believes that it is not important for works of art to be
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: INTRODUCTION 361
characterized by beauty and nobility, but rather to be realistically
true, or else to have a certain social or political influence on the
public. The best examples of the cult of beauty and nobility are the
philosophy of Keats, Goethes life, and Byrons death.
Greece also meant freedom : freedom from perverse and artificial
and tyrannical rules. In literature, the poets sighed with relief
when they realized that the existence of the Greek tragedians and
of Aristotles little mutilated treatise did not mean that they were
bound to write in fixed patterns. This was of course true. What
is surprising about the misinterpretation of Aristotle is that it lasted
so long and was so rarely criticized as false. The fact probably
is that every age gets what it likes out of antiquity. Aristotle
became the dictator of correct taste in literature during the
baroque period, just as he had been the master of philosophy
during the Middle Ages, not because he himself established a
system of absolute rules, but because those epochs admired
authority more than freedom. This admiration now disappeared,
and with it much of the belief in correctness and the false attitude
to the authority of the classics.
As applied to morality, the new interpretation of Greco-Roman
culture chiefly meant sexual liberty. Thus, Don Juan and his
adoring Haidee form
a group thats quite antique,
Half-naked, loving, natural, and Greek
It is not very easy to justify sexual licence from the Greek writers
themselves ; but revolutionary society made great play with the thin
draperies and nude statuary of Greek art. In the early days of the
First Republic in France, beauties like Mme Tallien appeared at
parties wearing transparent robes, like the Graces, and Pauline
Bonaparte posed at least half-naked, in a Greek attitude, forCanova.
Keatss Endymion and Goethes Roman Elegies are good documents
for this interpretation of antiquity.
In politics, both Greece and Rome meant freedom from
oppression, and in particular republicanism. The Greece of which
the revolutionary writers dreamed was either the heroic era, when
society was not polluted by exploitation, or the age of the Athenian
commonwealth, when liberty raised the Parthenon and opposed
Philip. The Rome they admired was not the empire, whose obituary
Gibbon had just completed, but the strong, sober, virtuous
362 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: INTRODUCTION
republic, hater of tyrants. Classical art became a symbol of political
liberty and its reflection. The greatest Greek art was produced by
the free republic of Athens, therefore tyranny stifled art. This idea
was voiced under the Roman emperors by Tacitus (in his Dialogue
on Orators) and Longinus {On the Sublime, 44). It was revived
early in the eighteenth century, chiefly by English writers, who,
compared with the subjects of a French sun-king, a German
princeling, or an Italian tyrant, felt themselves to be as free as air.
It was taken up from them by the Germans, the French, and
others. 5 The cult of liberty and republicanism as reflected in
classical art and literature went very deep, and was manifested in
everything from tiny details of interior decoration to great works
of art and political institutions which still exist (for instance, the
United States Senate). It was emotionally intensified by the fact
that both Greece and Italy were then subject to foreign rulers : the
Greeks to the barbarous, corrupt, and fiendishly cruel Turks, and
the Italians to scarcely less detestable despots, foreign or foreigndominated.
In the eyes ofmany Europeans the liberation of Greece
from the Turks meant an assertion of the virtues of classical
civilization over the vices and tyrannies of the modern world. ^ In
literature, the noblest voices of this belief are Byrons The Isles
of Greece, Shelleys Hellas, and Holderlins Hyperion ; while the
loudest is Hugos Les Orientales.
In religion, the admiration of poets and thinkers for the Greco-
Roman world now meant opposition to Christianity. The cult of
paganism vindicated had appeared during the Renaissance, even
within the church, but had never been very influential. Later, in
the Battle of the Books, the first argument of the moderns was that
Greek and Roman books written before the revelation of Jesus
Christ could not be so good as modern books which were Christian.
^ At that time no defender of the classics ventured to reverse
the argument; and indeed many of the ancients, like Racine,
would not have dreamed of doing so because they were sincere
Christians. But now men began to say that Greek and Roman
literature, simply because it expressed the noble, free world of
paganism, was bound to be better than books produced by the
Christian spirit. The Christian God was represented as a tyrant,
crueller and more powerful than any Turk. Jesus was imagined as a
pale impotent Jew, and His mission as one ofsuffering and deaththe
very opposite of the charm and energy of the Olympians. ^ Goethe,
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: INTRODUCTION 363
after his return from Rome, became a militant pagan. Tt is almost
unknown for Goethe to snap and snarl ; but there is no other term
for the tone he used about Christianity between the years 1788 and
1794", says Prof. Butler, instancing his attacks on Kant's Religion
within the Limits of Pure Reason.^ And this was not merely a
passing fad. It entered into his soul. It was one of the chief
reasons for the difficulty which he found in completing Faust and
which many readers have felt in appreciating it. The theme of
Faust is essentially Christian, and medieval at that: sin through
great knowledge, the power of the Devil over mankind, regeneration
through grace, and the love of woman leading on to heaven.
Goethe found this difficult to write because he did not believe in
Christianity. His hero never repents of his sins and never appeals
to Jesus Christ the Saviour, whose work and personality are
virtually ignored throughout the poem. Similarly, the greatest
worshipper of Greece among the English revolutionary writers
began his career by being sent down from Oxford for publishing
The Necessity of Atheism^^ In France, the revolutionaries reconsecrated
the cathedral of Our Lady to the goddess of Reason,
who was conceived as a classical deity and incarnated in the pretty
body of a contemporary actress. We have already seen how
Gibbon, certainly not a revolutionary but a near-contemporary of
the revolutionaries and imbued with the spirit of Voltaire, viewed
the fall of the Greco-Roman world as a tragedy caused by religion
and barbarism. Gibbon admired the culture of that world, but he
could not worship its gods. Some of the revolutionary writers,
however, were quite prepared to do so, and addressed poems to
them, not as relics of obsolete mythology, but as eternal rulers of
the spirit of man. This cult of classical antiquity as anti-Christian
continued throughout the nineteenth century, becoming more
rather than less intense, and culminated in the work of Menard,
the poems of Swinburne, and Nietzsches Antichrist.
Allied to the sense of freedom given by Greece was the cult of
nature. The northern European world, the present day, the art
and poetry of the present and immediate past, came to seem ugly
and unnatural. Only Greece and Italy were, or had been, the true
realm of nature. Above anyone else, the Greek poets had understood
Nature, knowing how to worship her and describe her: the
clothes, the manners, the amusements, the arts, the thought, the
ethics of the Greeks w^ere not artificial, but satisfied the basic
364 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: INTRODUCTION
aspirations of the soul. This must be emphasized nowadays,
because we have the habit of regarding the classical world as a
subject of scholarly research (like Aztec chronology or the habits
of the fruit-fly) rather than a deep spiritual satisfaction ; and people
who do not know Greek and Latin literature sometimes assume
that to love it is to subject oneself to an arid and crippling discipline,
rather than to learn more about the nature of the world and of
beauty. This assumption is confirmed by the common description
of the most strictly limited of the baroque poets as classical and
by the false belief that, when they adopted the rules of correctness,
they were copying the Greeks and Romans. The revolutionary
poets knew better than that.
Together with the general revision of standards, the estimates
of Greek and Latin poetry changed. The reputation of Homer
gained most. He had been attacked as coarse. He was now exalted
as natural. Of the three types of literature most admired by the
revolutionaries, two were believed to be wholly natural in origin
and method, and the third partly so. These were
:
^)lk-poetry : ballads in particular, but folk-songs too
(Coleridges The Ancient Mariner and Christabel, Schillers
The Ring of Polycrates^ and hundreds of other revolutionary
poems are imitation ballads. It was now that highly charged
lyric poems and elaborately self-conscious songs began to
be composed in the simple rhythmic and melodic patterns
of folk-song);
Homer, the blind illiterate minstrel; and, some distance
after him, Pindar and the other Greek lyricists;
the Greek drama, and the freest, noblest Renaissance drama:
chiefly Shakespeare and Calderdn.
But apart from naturalness in poetry, the men of the revolutionary
age admired the naturalness of Greek conduct, in great
as in little things. For instance, in 1769 Lessing published a
pamphlet called How the Ancients represented DeathJ^ This was
a contrast between the Greek attitude to death and that of the
Christian world^particularly during the Middle Agesas seen in
the Danse Macabre, in Brueghels Triumph of Death, in sermons,
in poems, in popular belief. Death, said the medieval men, is the
King of Terrors; the most frightful of the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse; the pallid angel who had accused Satan and could
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: INTRODUCTION 365
never smile thereafter ; or, in other interpretations, the very proof
of the DeviFs power over this world, which but for him would have
held a race of immortal and immortally happy beings. But for the
Greeks death was as natural a process as birth: mournful, no
doubt, but not to be resisted, not to be hated and vainly shunned.
Its symbols were not the crowned skeleton, the corpse crawling
with maggots, the dust-covered chapfallen skull, but the quiet urn,
the marble relief on which the dead and the living clasp hands with
an affection too deep and tranquil for any display of lamentation.
Among the most beautiful funeral monuments ever created are
the fifth- and fourth-century gravestones from Athens, on which
young wives and daughters, although dead, are depicted as they
were when they lived, immortalized in that lovely serenity which in
later ages appears only in statues of the saints and of the Madonna.
Lastly, Greece and Italy and the Greco-Roman world were felt
in the revolutionary age to mean escape. They were beautiful
lands, musical, ardent, full of the warm South ; there was sun, there
were mountains, there were blue seas and blue skies and fruit-trees
and laughing girls. They meant escape from the sombre north

the escape yearned for by Mignon in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister

and by Heine's fir-tree which loved the distant palm, the escape
achieved by so many sensitive northerners : Keats, Byron, Shelley,
Chateaubriand, Landor, Liszt, the Brownings, D. H. Lawrence,
and Norman Douglas. It is remarkable, however, that although
Greece was a spiritual lodestone, few of the revolutionary thinkers
went to it.^'^ Most stopped in Italy. Shelley went no farther.
Winckelmann was offered a trip to Greece and refused. Goethe
felt he ought to go to Greece, but ventured no farther than the once
Greek areas of southern Italy. Some of them were afraid of losing
themselves, of being swallowed up. But the chief reason for their
abstention was the arrogance and corruption of Turkish imperial
rule in Greece, the aridity and poverty of the country, and the
degradation of much of the population. Something of the conflict
between the ideal Hellas imagined by lovers of literature and art,
and the real Greece, a poor verminous oppressed Turkish province,
can be seen in Chateaubriand's Journey from Parts to Jerusalem
(181 1) and Kinglake's Eothen (1844)* But the immortal description
of early nineteenth-century Greece is in Byron's ChiUe HarohPs
Pilgrimage (1812), Byron possessed Greece as though she were
a woman.
366 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: INTRODUCTION
There was something deeper than landscape and lemon-trees in
the urge for escape to the Mediterranean. The story of Goethes
first journey south is well known. On the third of September at
3 oclock of the morning, I stole out of Carlsbad ; they would not
otherwise have let me go.^s The odd tone in which this is written
(particularly odd for Goethe, who loved revealing things others
would have kept secret) shows that it was part of a psychical
conflict : they were part of Goethe. His trip to Italy was an escape
from that aspect of himself, and from the world which it approved.
In Germans this escape is often linked with the most profound
hatred for Germany. Goethe, in a poem written during his
southern tour, said that it was impossible to write poetry in
German.
What did Fate mean to make me? Perhaps the question is too bold:
out of many a man Fate does not mean to make much.
Yet its intention to make me a poet might have succeeded,
if this language had not proved an invincible bar.^^
There is a story that Holderlin, when his mind was going, talked
to some strangers about Greek art, and was asked if he himself
were a Greek. He replied On the contrary: I am a German.
As for Nietzsche, his hatred and scorn of the Germans almost
defied even his eloquence to express.
The escape of the northerners was not only into a world of
natural beauty, but into a world of natural art. More than 500
years before, Italy had become the mother of the arts ; then, for a
time, foreign occupation and the shift of cultural dominance to
France had obscured her from the eyes of the rest of the world ; and
then, in the eighteenth century, her art was rediscovered. Dr.
Bumey made a musical tour of Italy and found the Italians more
truly musical than any other nation in the world, with music which
was not confined to opera-houses and salons, but sung in the
caffes and fiddled in the streets.^ Poetry too the Italians loved
with a sincere affection : the gondoliers sang stanzas from Ariosto
and Tasso, the improvvisatori could spout spontaneous poetry so
rapidly and so splendidly that even Byron was impressed. And the
visitor was surrounded by the Picturesque : Roman ruins, Greek
statues, palaces filled with paintings, lovely Renaissance gardens,
something beautiful in every street. On his trip to Italy Goethe
bought the famous treatise by Palladio (1518-80) in which the
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: INTRODUCTION 367
principles" of architecture are deduced from classical buildings and
classical books. It was a revelation to him. He suddenly realized
that the essence of great art is harmony. He attempted to become
a sculptor himself, he drew a great deal, and he became a better
poet. That, or something like that, happened to every visitor to
Italy during the time of revolution. From a cold ugly world of
intriguing politicians, frowning prelates, and self-satisfied merchants
they escaped to a world of art many centuries old and yet
for ever young.
We have sketched the principal changes in spiritual and aesthetic
ideals and pointed out some of the new interpretations of classical
culture which made the revolutionary period. Now let us see the
concrete effects of the revolution, with its new influx of Greco-
Roman thought, in the literature and symbolism of five great
nations: Germany, France, the United States, Britain, and Italy.
a. GERMANY
All nations have had one Renaissance . . . with one single exception,
namely, Germany. Germany has had two Renaissances: the second
occurs about the middle of the eighteenth century, and is linked with
such names as Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Winckelmann. In
it the Greeks predominate, as the Latins did in the first ; the national
kinship of Germans and Greeks was discovered. That is why the
Germans can be Greek as intensely as the English, French, and
Italians, right down to this moment, can be Latin. We prefer Homer
to Vergil; Thucydides to Livy; Plato to Seneca: that is a fundamental
distinction. Instinctively, we think first of Greece, and then of Rome
;
the men of the first Renaissance and the great civilized nations of the
west do just the opposite ; and perhaps that goes far to account for the
fact that the Germans are so little known and so greatly misunderstood
in the world.
PAUL HENSEL^
What Hensel says here would be important if it were true. Some
of it is true, but much of it is false. Germany did not have two
Renaissances, but one. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
other countries (though not all nations) had both a Renaissance
and a religious Reformation. Germany had only a Reformation,
whose leader Luther helped to crush out those sparks of the
Renaissance flame which did appear at the same time. And the
fire did not catch. In other lands the Renaissance meant an
immense liberation of intellectual energy, a greatly heightened
sense of aesthetic, spiritual, and sensuous beauty, a marked rise in
368 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY
general culture, producing great quantities of books, inventions,
and works of art (many quite worthless but some incomparably
valuable), and the emergence, from comparatively low social
milieux, of a number of indisputable and unpredictable geniuses.
If this had occurred in Germany, the sixteenth century would have
shown us a German Shakespeare or Milton, a German Tasso or
Calderon, a German Rabelais or Montaigne. Instead, we find
nothing except a few humanists writing Latinthe most distinguished
being Ulrich von Hutten, far less original and creative
than his Dutch contemporary Erasmus; a number of vernacular
authors doggedly reproducing outworn medieval forms, poorly
adapted classical ideas, and folk-patterns, notably the figure
Wagner chose as typical of the best in his age, Hans Sachs; and a
great cloud of religious writers, mostly sincere enough but devoid
of real taste and education. Classical culture always produces its
finest effects in the modern world when it penetrates to the ordinary
people and encourages a Rabelais to teach himself Greek, puts
Chapmans Homer in the hands of Keats, or makes Shakespeare
enthusiastic over Plutarch. It was this which did not happen in
Germanypartly because the cultural level of the ordinary public
was too low, and partly because the class-distinctions of German
society kept a gulf fixed between the Latin-reading and writing university
men and the outside world. For these and other reasons Germany
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had no Renaissance.
During the early part of the baroque period the German states
were devastated by the Thirty Years war. Slowly, after that was
over, classical ideals and patterns began to filter into Germany

usually not directly from the originals, but indirectly, through

imitation of French and English literature, French art and architecture,
and Italian music. After Versailles was planned, baroque
palaces went up all over Germany; whole baroque towns and cityareas
were laid out, as in Dresden, Vienna, Munich, and Diisseldorf
; under the creative impetus of the Counter-Reformation many
magnificent baroque churches were built in the Catholic south and
Austria. The baroque ideals of S3nmmetry, richness, and controlled
power had already taken musical form in Italy. Great Austrian
and German composers now emerged to develop these ideals still
further and enrich them with a graver spiritual content : although
the supreme marriage of music and literature could not be achieved
by Germans, and was the work of an Austrian and an Italian Jew.^
19 . THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY 369
In fact, the influence of baroque classicism produced no German
literature of any great importance, and showed itself chiefly in
architecture and music.
The German Renaissance was 200 years late. It began in the
middle of the eighteenth century. It was marked, like the Renaissance
in Italy, France, and Britain, by a new, widespread, popular
interest in classical culture, by the reflection of that interest in new
books written to imitate and outdo the Greeks and Romans, by the
foundation or revival of schools and colleges teaching classical
literature, history, and philosophyand, most important of all, by
the appearance of great poets and men of letters inspired by
classical ideals. This Renaissance in Germany was part of the same
revolution of thought which took place in other European countries
in the eighteenth century, which founded the American and French
republics, and which we shall see working itself out in the literature
of France, Italy, and England. The Germans themselves call
it the Romantic movement, marked by Storm and Stress. ^ We
shall discuss it as part of the general revolutionary trend in literature
; but in the history of German letters it is the one and only
classical Renaissance.
It began, not with literature, but with the visual arts, particularly
sculpture. Its originator was a cobblers son called Johann
Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) who, with the persistence and
penetration of genius, taught himself the essentials of Greco-
Roman culture, supplemented them by a mediocre training in the
existing German educational institutions, and with incredible suffering
learnt the best of Greek literature, Homer, Plato, Sophocles,
Herodotus, and Xenophon, by staying up half the night while
working during the day as a hack schoolmaster.^ Then, as librarian
to a Saxon nobleman in Dresden, he studied both the elaborately
exhibited baroque statuary in the great park and the copies of real
Greek and Greco-Roman statues packed away in the store-rooms.
With superb taste closer to divination than to knowledge, he
evoked the essential qualities of classic art (which were then
obscured by baroque aifectations) in his first book, Thoughts on the
Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755). ^ This
little pamphlet was the beginning of the German Renaissance.
We must not think that meanwhile the rest of Europe was
plunged in baroque blindnesis or Gothic darkness. Continuous
progress was being made towards a truer and deeper understanding
S076 Bb
370 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY
of Greek culture, although misunderstandings were still common
even in such a mind as that of Voltaire. The greatest advances
were undoubtedly made by English writers and amateurs of art.
Before Winckelmann was born the earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)
had published a number of fine essays on art and morals which
might have been written by a friend of Plato. They taught that our
daily life must be shaped according to principles of beauty and
harmony, that the aesthetic sense and moral sense are innate, and
that both together should guide and ennoble the soul. These
ideas flow straight into the books of Winckelmann. ^ A little later,
in 1732, a group of English gentlemen founded the Society of
Dilettanti (or * Delighters in the arts) to explore and appreciate
the treasures of classical art. They sent the painter and architect
Athenian Stuart and the draughtsman Revett to make a long stay
in Athens. The result was a superb work. The Antiquities ofAthens
Measured and Delineated (1762), the first set of accurate reproductions
of Athenian architecture. It led to the adoption of Greek
architectural style in St. Jamess Square, thus introducing a
fashion which spread throughout northern Europe and into North
America.7 The Dilettanti then dispatched the epigraphist
Chandler to explore Greece and what was once Greek Asia. Along
with Revett and Pars he produced two magnificent folio volumes
of Antiquities of Ionia (1769).^ In the same year the distinguished
politician and traveller Robert Wood published the first real
attempt to see Homers life and poetry in its proper historical and
geographical setting with his Essay on the Original Genius and
Writings of Homer, with a Comparative View of the Ancient and
Present State of the Troade,^ These books did more than any
others to create the German Renaissance, by moulding the thought
of its leaders.^
Immediately after publishing his first book Winckelmann went
off to Rome to study classical art in more sympathetic surroundings.
Italy was full of connoisseurs. If the Italians and Italianate
Englishmen like Sir William Hamilton had not been collecting
works of ancient art, not even Winckelmann could have studied
them. On the contrary, large and well-arranged collections existed
long before he arrived in Rome. But he brought a fresh eye to
them. He described them in such a way as to elicit from them
(even though he knew few of the greatest originals) the fundamental
principles of Greek art. He had already summarized its
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY 371
essential qualities as a noble simplicity and a quiet grandeur.^^
These qualities he explained and exemplified in later essays and in
his magnum opus^ A History of Art among the Ancients (1764).^^
This was the first book to treat the history of art^not, as most
previous critics did, as a timeless phenomenon or as the history
of individual artists, but as part of the gro'wth of the human raceV^
or more accurately as a manifestation of the life of the societies
which produce it. Winckelmann described the development of
ancient art from Egypt through Phoenicia, Persia, and Etruria, to
Greece and Rome, connecting that process with the changes in
Mediterranean civilization. He also struck out the fundamental
method w^hich is now used by all aesthetic historians, and arranged
Greek art into periods: primitive, classical, late classical, and
declining. His next important book. Unpublished Ancient Monuments
(1767-8), did a valuable service to both art and scholarship
by showing that a number of scenes from classical art, mainly
reliefs on Roman coffins, were not portrayals of ordinary life but
conventional scenes from mythology. Winckelmann had a grasp
of perspective comparable to that of Gibbon in history.
Winckelmanns remarkable discoveries, the good taste and
intellectual energy which his books embodied, and his example in
going straight to one of the classical countries to study instead of
getting everything from commentaries and translations, produced
a profound effect in Germany. He had the good luck to find in the
world of literature an exponent with considerable knowledge and
unusual critical senseGotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81).
Lessings most distinguished work in this field is his essay on
the famous sculptural group, Laocoon (1766).
For a German book, Laocoon is unusual. It is short, uneven, and
brilliant. Something between a Platonic dialogue and an appreciative
essay, it is still good reading for those who can follow Lessings
allusions. But it is a puzzle to most modemcritics. It is hard nowadays
to understand why so much taste and thought were expended
on what appears to us to be an inferior and repellent work of art.
Laocoon was a Trojan priest. When his countrymen found the
Trojan Horse, apparently a votive statue and really full of concealed
Greek soldiers, and proposed to take it into Troy, he warned
them that it was probably a trap. He even hurled a spear into its
side. He might have persuaded them to leave it outside the walls but the sea-god Poseidon, who
hated Troy and wished it to be
372 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY
destroyed, chose to take the gesture as an insult to his sacred
animal the horse. So he sent two huge serpents out of the sea,
which, before the eyes of the Trojans, seized and destroyed
Laocoon and his two sons.^s Xhe group shows the priest and his
children helpless in the grip and the jaws of the serpents. The
father looks up to heaven for the help he will not get, the boys
look towards him for the help he cannot give, the snakes enlace
them all so cunningly that no escape is possible, neither weapons
nor friends are at hand. The group was carved in Rhodes long
after the great period of Greek art had ended, about 25 b.c.^^ This
date coincides with the Roman interest in tracing back the prehistory
of Rome to Troy. And yet the group shows the torture
and death of a Trojan priest for violating a statue dedicated to
Athena, the most Greek of all goddesses: it would be possible
therefore to interpret it as a death-wish for the Romans who
descended from Troy and conquered Greece, and thus as anti-
Trojan, anti-Roman propaganda comparable to the romance of
Dares Phrygius.^^
Certainly the group is not Greek art at its best. The subject
is hideous, for it shows a cruel and unjust death inflicted by a god
upon an entire family. The treatment is emotional in the highest
extreme: all the figures are undergoing the utmost mental and
physical torture. (Later their physical sufferings will be greater;
but by then their minds will be less tormentingly alive to the whole
situation.) Both to classical Greek taste and to the best taste
of modern times the Laocoon is a clever monstrosity. Why did
Winckelmann, Lessing, Goethe, and many others admire it so
deeply?
The first reason is the most obvious. Technically it is a marvellous
piece of work. The anatomy is superb ; the carving, in spite of the
formidable difficulties of the subject, is masterly. On a higher level
of technique, viewed purely as a pattern, it is a masterpiece. The
figures are beautifully proportioned and balanced. The intricate
interplay of all the different limbs and muscles, at so many different
angles and elevations, might easily have been a confused m61ee,
instead erf the harmonious complex which it is. The group as a
whole, and each of its figures, fall into a balanced shape as graceful
and as various as the triangles formed by the groups in Leonardo's
Last Supper. And the sculptors problem of making his work live
in three dimensions has been perfectly solved, for the struggling
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY 373
figures lean backwards and forv\^ards and aspire upwards while
being held together in a single mass.
Yet this was not what Lessing admired most. He and his contemporaries
praised the group chiefly for the qualities which we
can scarcely see in it : dignity and restraint. Winckelmann and his
followers were never tired of pointing out that the fathers lips
were just parted in an involuntary groan, whereas, had it not been
for the dignity of classical art, he would have been screaming at the
top of his voice. He did scream, in Vergils narrative ; but Lessing
said he would not scream in marble, because his mouth would have
been ugly. This seems to us to leave out the main question: the
entire subject is ugly, and the emotional charge in it is excessive.
And yet Lessing is correct within broad limits. The figures are
suffering, but they are not ungraceful. Five minutes later one of
the children will be swollen and the other vomiting blood as the
grip of the constrictors tightens; the fathers limbs will be twisted
out of shape and his face will be losing even the semblance of
humanity. At the moment, although agonizing, they are still noble
because they are fully human.
Where Lessing was wrong was in treating Laocoon as an
expression of classical ideals. Tension so extreme as this was never
portrayed in Greek art of the great period, when death itself (as
Lessing pointed out) was shown in eternal calm. Greek painters
would not show the face of Agamemnon at the sacrifice of his
daughter; Greek playwrights would not permit Medea to murder
her children or Oedipus to blind himself before the audience. The
Laocoon is a defeat; the highest Greek art preferred to show a
victory, however dearly bought. It would not, like Dostoevsky,
describe a noble and virtuous man becoming a helpless maniac in
the grip of epilepsy.
The truth is that the Laocoon is a work of baroque taste. Lessing
and Winckelmann were not the first, but almost the last, to admire
it. At the very height of the baroque period, in 1667, the Flemish
sculptor Van Obstal told the Royal Academy of France, Of all
the statues which have been preserved, there is not one to equal the
LaocoonJ^^ One of the major ideals of baroque art is tension, the
acute polarity between extreme passion and extreme control.^'^ It
was this tension, rather than the characteristic Greek serenity,
which the Academy admired in Laocoon, and by which Lessing
was still blinded. The closest parallel to the spirit of the Laocoon
374 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY
in modern times is the statue of the saint in a seventeenth-century
Jesuit church: tall, dignified, draped, comely of shape and handsome
of feature, but tormented with aspiration, swirling around in
a gale of passion which twists the draperies and bends the body
and turns the head sideways and draws the eyes upwards in the
last ecstasy of suffering and possession, torn between the dragging
earth and the still distant heavens. Nevertheless, although it was
part of the taste of a dying age, Winckelmann and Lessing looked
at Laocoon with a new insight. They taught the world to see it and
other Greek statues, not with the cool and sometimes patronizing
eye of the Enlightenment, but with the enthusiasm and love which
make great criticism, and which were intrinsic elements of the
thought of the revolutionary era.
In literary criticism also, Lessings active mind produced influential
new interpretations of classical books and classical
principles, particularly in his contributions to Letters on Modern
Literature and his Hamburg Dramatic JournaD^ We have already
pointed out that during the Battle of the Books many supporters
of the moderns denounced the classical poets (particularly Homer)
for being vulgar, and praised modem literature as more correct
in vocabulary and social conduct. In the third phase of the battle
Mme Dacicr turned this argument against her opponents. They
said it was improper for a princess to do the laundry. She replied
that Nausicaa w^as better employed washing her brothers shirts
than wasting her time on cards, and gossip, and other more
dangerous occupations, like contemporary ladies of fashion.^^
Lessing now took up the same argument, and used it against the
upholders of baroque taste. If we think the Greeks were vulgar and
silly, he said, that proves that we are vulgar and silly.
But we need not think that in these critical essays Lessing was
simply applying Greek principles to contemporary literary
criticism. That would have been rather mechanical, even a little
narrow. His achievement was broader. The criterion he applied
was his own sensitive taste. He began quite early with a defence
of Plautus, whom he had translated and was later to imitate.^^
From that he turned to defend the tragedies of Seneca, explaining
the real merits which their glaring faults often obscure. ^4 Then,
after admiring Voltaire for some time, Lessing saw through his
shallow tragedies and glib criticisms. Partly because he was on the
whole a partisan of the modems and partly to commend his own
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY 375
epic and dramatic works, Voltaire asserted that French tragedy was
superior to Greek tragedy. In 1759 Lessing attacked him both
with the blade and with the point, declared that French classicist
tragedy was inferior to both Shakespeare and the Greeks, and
extended his attack to include, not indeed the unquestioned
masterpieces of Racine and Corneille, but Corneille^s Rodogune,
and by implication all the lesser works of the French baroque
theatre.25 Then, some years later, he studied Aristotles Poetics^
and gave an interpretation of it which, although now in some
respects out of date, was a turning-point in German literary
history.26 Lessing proclaimed that Aristotle did not lay down laws
to confine the creative spirit, but offered rules of guidance to make
its creative work easier, surer, and finer. During the baroque age
many men had felt the ancient authors like a mountainous weight
pressing down their minds. Lessing, and those who followed him
in the era of revolution, realized that the Greeks could help them
to grow.
The movement towards Greek in Germany was hastened by
a flood of new translations. Here the chief name was that of
Johann Fleinrich Voss (1751-1826), professor of classics at
Heidelberg, who produced a highly praised version of the Odyssey
in German hexameters in 1781, following it with versions of the
Iliads of Hesiod, of the bucolic poets, and of several Roman
writers (Vergil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius). They are not
great translations, but they were levers to open a heavy door.
At the same time, poets and thinkers were endeavouring to
learn Greek, with all the enthusiasm which in other lands had once
gripped Renaissance youths beginning to read Latin. Goethe, for
example, was started on Greek when he was nine, but gave it up in
his adolescence. And then, aged twenty-one, he got a fresh impetus
from meeting Johann Gottfriedvon Herder (1744-1803). Herder, the
leader of the Storm and Stress movement, is chiefly known nowadays
for his admiration of primitive and natural poetryballads,
folk-songs, Ossian, and Shakespeare. The fact that he inspired
Goethe with a love of Greek shows how mistaken it is to believe
in a direct opposition between classical and romantic. He urged
Goethe to learn Greek, not to penetrate hidden realms of scholarship,
but in order to reach truth, feeling, Nature by reading Homer
and Plato in the original^T So Goethe started on Homer in 1770;
went on to Plato and to Xenophons Memoirs (which give a different
376 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY
view of the life and teaching of Socrates); in 1771 to Theocritus;
in 1772 to Pindar (whom he believed to be writing free verse);
and by 1773 reached Greek tragedy
Authors read in order to write. No creative writer can work on
his own experience alone; and very often a new book will stimulate
an author more than the day-by-day events of his life. But the
stronger the stimulus, the harder it is to receive it without being
numbed. Exposed to the full power of classical poetry, many
promising young writers have either been silenced or become
helpless imitators. The German writers of the revolutionary
period admitted the power of Greek myth and poetry; but most
of them were unable to assimilate it as easily and productively as
the simpler influences of folk-song and medieval romance.
Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller (i759~i8o5) admired the
nobility of Greek philosophy and was deeply impressed by the
power of Greek legend. But he produced no large poem on a
classical theme. His most ambitious work inspired by Greece was
The Bride of Messinaan interesting but not wholly successful
marriage between a horrific Italian Renaissance plot of incestuous
loves and fratricidal hates, with murder and suicide on the stage,
and a classically balanced dramatic structure, with several skilfully
inlaid adaptations of Greco-Roman themes, and a double chorus
composed of retainers. The true successors of this experiment
were not the nineteenth-century poetic tragedies but the early
operas of Wagner and Verdi. Apart from this, Schillers love of
Greco-Roman culture produced only ballads on Greek folk-tales
(such as The Ring ofPolycrates and The Cranes of Ibycusf and odes
to hypostatized moral and emotional ideals, partly drawn from
Greek thought and modelled on the deified abstractions of the
Greek and Roman pantheon. Since Klopstock set the fashion, the
German poets had been writing many such lyrics, in the manner of
Pindar (as they conceived it) but with all the sentimental idealism
of the revolutionary era. Schillers most famous poem in this vein
is his Ode to Joy, which Beethoven took as the words for the
powerful final movement of the Ninth Symphony:
Joy, thou lovely spark of godhead!
Maiden from EiysiumP^
That rapturous lyric had a melancholy counterpart, The Gods of
Greece (1788). Here is Schillers most important Hellenic poem.
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY 377
It is a lament for the dead Greek deities, who have died only
because something within the soul of man has died. Once, nature
was alive, and the whole world incarnated divinities. Within the
tree there was a living dryad. The bird-song in the wildwood was
the poignant lament of Philomela. The thing in the sky, which
scientists now tell us is a ball of burning gas, was then a golden
chariot driven by Helios, calm monarch of the air. The world now,
cries Schiller, is nothing but matter. For the Greeks it was matter
infused with spirit. Then it meant something; now it means
nothing. Then it was both human and humanly divine. Now it is
sub-human, an object in physical motion, as dead as the ticking
pendulum. It has neither life, nor beauty, nor divinity.
This poem is an open attack on modem science and modern
materialism, and an implicit attack on Christianity. The medieval
Christian horror of death is contrasted with the calm Greek
acceptance of Although Schiller does not directly attack the
Christian religion, he expresses horror of the Christian world
which^unlike the pagan worldlies opaque and dead, without
spiritual life. The sorrowful protest of this lyric is echoed in
Wordsworths The World is too much with and is deepened
and intensified in many poems of the advancing nineteenth century.
At the time, many German poetasters published odes intended to
answer The Gods of Greece and to refute Schillers complaint, for
they felt that he was proclaiming a revolt against some of the deepest
values of Christianity, and turning mens eyes away from heaven
towards the beauty of this world. They were right: he foretold
a war of Greek against Hebrew, of pagan against Christian.
The truest Greek of all the German revolutionary writers was
a tragic young man whose career for some time ran parallel to
Schillers^not because he copied Schiller, but because they both
felt the same inspiration. This was Friedrich Hdlderlin (1770-
1802: he lived until 1843, but his life ended in 1802 when he went
mad). 3 3 His first poems echoed Schillers lyrics very closely,
although some of the most important were much more intense and
more truly great. It was partly because of this correspondence
(which must have seemed rather like plagiarism) and partly because
of Holderlins extreme other-worldliness, which expressed such
unbounded adoration of Greece as to be virtually a death-wish,
that the young man was comparatively neglected by both Schiller
and Goethe. However, Schiller did help to interest the publishers
378 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY
in Holderlins prose romance Hyperion, This is the story of a young
Greek of modern times who is inspired by a strong and noble
master (Adamas, a personification of Schiller) to attempt to recapture
the glory of ancient Greece ; he fights for Greek independence
against the Turks, but fails, and becomes a hermit, dedicated
not to the God of religion but to the divinities of nature. The book
thus combines two of the ideals which ancient Greece symbolized
for Holderlins generation. To reach Hellas one might pass through
modern Greece, and struggle to liberate it from tyranny, or one
might cast off society, and find a spiritual home in the Mediterranean
landscape, mountains, sea, and sky.
Like most of the German hellenists, Holderlin attempted a
tragedy. He chose the subject which Matthew Arnold was to treat
later and with more success : The Death of Empedocles. It is full of
lofty thought and fine poetry, but, like so many imitative Greek
dramas, it is incomplete. He also wrote translations of Sophocles
Oedipus and Antigone. But the greatest part of his work was lyric
and elegiac: brief poems in a four-line stanza resembling that
which Horace took from the Greeks, elegies in the manner of the
Greek and Roman love-poets, or large odes and hymns like those
of Pindar and the tragedians. 34 Holderlin understood what men
of earlier generations had not seen: that Greek poetry combines
intense feeling with deliberate objectivity. Because his own
emotions were so acutely sensitive and his life so painful, he found
it all the more difficult to attain this objectivity, and yet all the
more necessary. Even the poems which he wrote when his madness
was approaching him and becoming visible in his words still have
the fundamental nobility of Greece.
The parallel between Hdiderlin and Keats is very striking. 3 5
Holderlin was a better classical scholar, Keats a better poet. But
their love for antiquity, particularly for Greece, was similar in
intensity, and in its quality of melancholy tenderness. Holderlin
had an unhappy love-affair like Keats, but his was far more
wretched. The girl was more sensitive and intelligent than Fanny
Brawne, but was already married, and to a cold business-man
who treated the young poet like a servant. Holderlin wrote poems
to her under the name of Diotima^the half-mythical priestess
from whom Socrates learned that through love the vision of ideal
beauty and goodness may be attained. 36 Neither Keats nor
Holderlin admired the robust energy of Aeschylus as a power that
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION; GERMANY 379
could be assimilated and used to strengthen his own character,
Keats was a happier, and, despite his early death, a healthier man.
He loved life, and found its finest expression in the grace and
nobility of Greece; while Holderlin loved antiquity because he
hated the present day, Keatss Hyperion succeeded, where
Hdlderlins failed. But both poets, the melancholy German and
the enraptured Englishman, had a tragic consciousness of
impending doom. One of them cried:
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain . . .
and the other echoed him :
Only one summer grant me, powerful spirits!
one autumn, one, to ripen all my songs,
so that my heart, sated with sweet
delight, may more willingly die.37
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) acknowledged many
pow^erful influences on his mind: love, travel, science, oriental
poetry, the theatre, the court, his poetic friends, folk-poetry.
Scarcely any of these was stronger than the influence of Greco-
Roman literature. His classical education was limited and uninspiring.
Although competent in Latin, he never felt at ease in
Greek. When he read a Greek book, he liked to have a translation
handy, and often it was only the appearance of a new translation
that would turn his attention to a Greek poet.^s Nevertheless, like
nearly all the creative writers of his age, he genuinely loved Greek
literature and constantly drew strength from it. It was the eulogies
of Herder on Greek poetry, and of Winckelmanns friend and
teacher Oeser on Greek arttogether with Winckelmanns, Lessings,
Blackwells, and Woods analyses of Greek aesthetic ideals ^which really awakened his interest
in the classics 9 and, with
intervals in which other enthusiasms developed other aspects of
his versatile character, it remained active and creative in many
different stages of his career. Homer was his favourite. He thought
about Homer far more than about any other classical author^as
much as he thought about the three Athenian tragedians (his next
favourites) all together.^o By the age of twenty-one he was teaching
himself to read Homer; and thereafter he read on through most of
Greek literature. It meant far more to him than Latin, and gave
him the companionship of the immortals throughout his long life.
38o 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY
The ideal world of the past became a reality for him in 1786,
when he escaped to Rome. He was overwhelmed not only by its
magnificence but by its continuing vitality, especially since he was
a young passionate man and found handsome women there. In
his Roman Elegies he writes that embracing his mistress taught
him how to understand sculpture and it is obvious that having
a love-affair with a fiery Roman girl made the love-poems of the
classical elegists, and even their sometimes abstruse mythological
allusions, immediate and real to him,^^ Previously he had written
some imitations of classical poetry on a small scale^for instance,
the epigram Anacreon^s Grave (1785), which Hugo Wolf made into
an exquisite song, was inspired by Herders translations from the
Greek Anthology. But now began his long series of imitations,
emulations, and evocations of classical literature which, at intervals,
continued until the close of his career.
First he took a prose drama on a classical subject which he had
already written, and remodelled it in verse. This was Iphigenia in
TauriSy published in prose in 1779 and in verse in 1787. In its
first form it resembled a French classicist tragedy in prose, with
five acts, no chorus, and a calm correctitude about the characters.
It was based on Euripides play about Iphigenia among the savages,
and was full of imitations of great passages from the Greek
dramatists.43 gut in the most important matter of all it was more
than an imitation. The morality was modem, almost Christian
:
a change which Racine had felt bound to introduce into some of
the legends he used. Iphigenia escapes, and secures freedom for
her brother, not by opposing the savage Tauric prince, nor as in
Euripides by tricking him, but by telling him the tmth and tmsting
the better nature which, by her own goodness, she helps to create.^^
The success of Iphigenia was doubtful. Though pure, it seems
cold : which Greek tragedy seldom is. But there is no doubt about
the success of Goethes next classicizing work, the Roman Elegies
(1795). These are poems about love and art in Rome, written in
an adaptation of the elegiac couplet used by all ancient writers on
such subjects. In form and size, in their preoccupation with
passionate love, in their vivid and subtle psychology, and in their
frequent allusions to erotic legends, they are directly in the
tradition of the Roman elegists. Goethe admired and borrowed
from Propertius (Schiller actually called him the German Propertius)
; he knew Catullus, and he loved Ovid best of all the Roman
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY 381
love-poets. Reminiscences of the work of all three are frequent
in the Roman Elegies, but so skilfully rehandled and so daringly
juxtaposed in new combinations and with new matter that they
enhance the originality of the book.^5 The classical echoes in them
cannot be called imitations. It would be more accurate to say that
they are original poems, produced under three convergent inspirations
Goethes love-aifairs, his aesthetic experiences in
Rome, and his reading of the classical elegists. They are (except
for one essential factor) extremely beautiful, and are in several
ways superior to the Roman elegiac poems he was emulating. For
instance, one of the limitations of the Roman elegists is that their
poems tend to fall into conventional patterns, no doubt set by the
Alexandrian Greeks : the address to the sweethearts locked door,
the poem on the pet animal, &c. One Roman poet after another
rehandles these themes, seldom introducing more than minor
variations. But Goethe struck out a number of fine new ideas:
such as a monologue by an offended mistress, in which we can
almost hear the angry tearful Italian girl screaming, and see her
stamp on the floor.^^
The weakness of these poems is their verse-form. German
poets had been experimenting for some time with adaptations of
classical metres; the famous Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-
1803) made a great sensation with his first three cantos of The
Messiah in hexameters (1748), while many other writers had
practised the elegiac couplet. Goethe liked this couplet, especially
for short poems of a richer texture and lower emotional tone than
lyrics. But he never managed to make it as musical as it was in
Greek and Latin. Partly this is because of the nature of the German
language, which in long-line poetry sounds heavy and involved;
but partly it is because Goethe was much too lax in using a difficult
metre, which must (as the Romans had discovered after unfortunate
early experiments) be used precisely to attain its best nature.
Technically, the reason for this is that in Greek and Latin the
elegiac metre depends on an alternation of long and short syllables,
whereas in modern languages it must depend on an alternation of
stressed and unstressed syllables. Now, it is composed of dactyls
and spondees, which are fairly easy to find and vary in Greek or
Latin, quantitatively used. But a foot corresponding to a spondee
in a modern language is quite rare, for it must contain two stressed
syllables in succession. Two emphatic monosyllables will produce
382 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY
this effect; but very few dissyllabic words will do so. Therefore
the poet writing this metre in German or English tends to use any
dissyllabic w^ord, leaving it to the reader to slow up the rhythm
long enough to maintain the regular march of dactyls and spondees.
47 But this is too much of an effort even for those who have
the rhythm of the hexameter in their heads. There are many lines
in Goethes elegies which only classical scholars can read with
understanding, and no classical scholar can read with pleasure.
In 1796 Goethe joined Schiller in publishing a collection of
several hundred epigrams on contemporary literature, politics,
and philosophy. The name, Xenia^ means gifts. It was taken
from the epigrammatist Martial, who has two whole books full of
little poems to be attached to gift-parcels ; and the spirit was meant
to be that of Martial. Some of the poems are trenchant enough to
be quoted still. But most of the subjects were ephemeral, and,
what is more important, the elegiac rhythm becomes deadly
monotonous after the first hundred couplets. Martial would not
publish a series of over 300 poems on miscellaneous subjects in
roughly the same shape and exactly the same metre: he knew it
would be unreadable.
By the French Revolution, and by the daemons of disorder and
violence it called up, Goethe was deeply shocked. In a revulsion
from it he produced in 1798 a country love-story in nine books,
called Hermann and Dorothea.^^ The tone is pastoral ; the metre is
the classical hexameter, freely adapted; the manner is that of the
quieter, more conventional aspects of Homerfor example, the
straightforward but ennobling description of good simple things
such as horses and farm-work, the repeated use of the same
epithets for the same characters

the pastor judicious and noble

the long speeches, and the leisurely pace of the story. The same
kind of poem appears later in British and American literature, with
Cloughs The Bothie and Longfellows Evangeline^ both in hexameters.
In one of these the subject and in the other the setting is
poetic, because distant and strange. But in Hermann and Dorothea
we are meant to feel that the simple peasant character and the
simple small-town surroundings and the simple love-story are in
themselves enough to move the imagination. The mood is to be
that of contemporary poems like Cowpers The Task and Words19.
THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY 3^3
worths Peter BelL However, the poetic intensity of the work is
low, and Goethe has not heightened it by his technique. It begins,
for instance, with an almost interminable conversation between
the innkeeper, his wife, the local chemist, and the local parson,
which is poetic in nothing, nothing but the metre. Such easy
narrative and quiet dialogue are intolerable when associated with
a style that constantly reminds the reader of the surge and thunder
of the Odyssey, In music, the parallel is Strausss Domestic
Syfnphony^ where the full resources of the orchestra are called in
to depict a day and night in the life of a happily married couple,
and even the cries of the baby are reproduced. Goethe may have
been attempting to blend Homer with the peasant Hesiod and the
pastoral Theocritus. Or he may have been misled into believing
that, in the simpler descriptive passages of the Iliad and Odyssey^
Homer, as a poet of nature, was merely describing exactly what
all his audience knew and saw every day: and he himself may
therefore have tried to make poetry out of the familiar, the respectable,
and the platitudinous.
Hermann and Dorothea is an epic idyll in an adaptation of the
Homeric manner. Goethe, who had long admired the Homeric poems,
was encouraged to try rivalling them by a book which suggested that
Homer had never existed. This was Wolfs Introduction to Homer,
published in 1795 .
so It was an extremely important work, and determined
the direction of much nineteenth-century scholarship.
We have seen how Homer was disliked and misunderstood in
the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, A decisive step
towards the better comprehension of the Iliad and the Odyssey was
made by Woods Essay on the Original Genius of Homer.^^ The
nobility and gentry of the baroque era had claimed that the
Homeric epics could not be good poetry because Homeric society
was in some ways less polished and precise than their own. This
was a fault in their historical perspective. Wood, by describing
the scenery which Homer knew, and by evoking from the life of
the Near East the kind of life he described, primitive but not
barbarous, simple but noble, helped to show lovers of poetry what
they should really look for when they read the Iliad, Translated
into German in 1773, the essay had a wide public in Germany, as
it did elsewhere. Young Goethe was one of its admirers.
Another admirer was Friedrich August Wolf, who became
384 19, THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY
professor of classics at Halle in 1783. Like Wood, Wolf set out to
put the Homeric poems in their correct historical perspective. But
he did not regard them chiefly as works of art. He was interested
in their historyand in this he was a successor of such scholars
as the great Benedictine, Mabillon, and Bentley, the exploder of
Thalaris .
^ 3 He undertook to trace the various stages by which they
had been transmitted since they were composed. He pointed out
that it was impossible to say there was a single fixed text of the
two poemsin the same way as a modern printed book represents,
in all its many thousand copies, a single text which (barring
accidental errors) is what the author wrote. Instead, there were
many different versions of the Homeric poems, varying not much
in the main lines, but in many important details; and it was
impossible to follow their history back to any time when there was
a single text. The farther we go back (he suggested), the less
likely it becomes that we could ever reach one poet, Homer, and
two solid blocks of poetry called the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The chief reason for this (according to Wolf) is that writing was
virtually unknown at the time when the poems were composed.
Twice in the Iliad significant marks are mentioned, but in a way
more like the runes of the Dark Ages and the heraldry of medieval
times than the written books of civilized Greece, The Homeric
poems were composed about illiterates, in an illiterate age. (In
this argument Wolf acknowledged he was basing his discussion on
Woods essay. 55
) A single epic poem as large as the Iliad could
neither be composed nor be transmitted without writing, It
follows that, until writing was discovered and became widespread
in Greece, there was no Iliad and no Odyssey.
What was there? A collection of lays, short enough to be
carried in the memory, and to be sung after a feastas the bards
in the Homeric epics sing them: a large collection, in fact an entire
tradition, like the ballads of the Middle Ages, loose songs which
were not collected together in the Form of an Epic Poem, till
about 500 years after. s? There was no Homer. There were only
bards, called Homerids or sons of Homer ; and the epics were
agglomerations of folk-poetry.^s
Who then put them together into the form of epics ? Pisistratus,
the tyrant of Athens (/?. 540 B.c.)or poets and scholars who were
working for him,s9 (it is universally agreed that some important
job of editing was carried out on Pisistratus orders, and possibly
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY 3^5
he initiated the first attempt to make a fixed text of the Homeric
poems.)
Wolf did not always go so far as to draw the full conclusions
towards which his arguments pointed, but his reasoning was so
incisive, subtle, and clear that his readers and followers were
bound to conclude
(1) that there had been no epic poet called Homer, but a number
of rhapsodes or minstrels working on a far smaller scale,
and composing numbers of short poems on the adventures
connected with the Trojan war and other events of the
heroic age
;
(2) that the structure of the two epics was the work of editors,
who chose and assembled these short poems after the art of
writing had become widespread
;
(3) therefore, that it was impossible to cite Homer as a single
genius, or to quote any particular line of the Homeric poems
as reliable evidence for the thoughts and manners of prehistoric
Greecesince it was impossible without intricate
research to tell when the line had been written, or
interpolated.
This type of analysis was to be practised on most of the classical
authors throughout the nineteenth century, and still continues.^
It had already been initiated in the criticism of the Bible, by
eighteenth-century editions of the New Testament which pointed
out the important variations in the text of the gospels and epistles;
and during the nineteenth century it issued in the dissolution of
the Old Testament, under higher criticism, into many fragments,
and of the gospels into a number of much-edited narratives.
On scholars this had a stimulating effect. But literary men
found Wolfs book discouraging. It was depressing to think that
what they had taken for a pair of great epics was really two groups
of small-scale poems, and that individual genius counted for
nothing in characterization and planning.
Wolfs theory has now been superseded, although his intelligence
and his acumen are recognized. It has been proved that it is
quite possible for good poetry on the scale of the Iliad and Odyssey
to be composed without the aid of writing, and to be transmitted
faithfully enough from generation to generation. And although it
is clear that poems by many different composers were used in the
SO76 Qq
386 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY
construction of the Iliad and Odyssey, the work of the poet or poets
who built the two epics into their majestic architecture is now
called not 'editing^ but poetic composition of the highest type.
Goethe was at first encouraged by Wolf's theory. He had felt
Homer to be unapproachable ; but if there were no Homer, only
some smaller talents called Homerids, he could endeavour to
rival them. r was in this mind that he wrote Hermann and
Dorothea, Later, however, as he read the Homeric epics with
more and more understandingand also, no doubt, as he attempted
other Homeric poems like his Achilleis and continued work on his
own large-scale drama, Fausthe realized that behind the epics
there stood at least one majestic genius; and at last he published
a formal retractation of his belief in Wolfs solution of the Homeric
problem.^3
Goethe made other plans to write a classical work in German
:
Trevelyan's Goethe and the Greeks describes the many torsos he
left half-finished. He published a number of spirited lyrics in the
Pindaric manner and Greek ideals often appeared in his other
work, as in his play The Natural Daughter, But he wrote no other
important classicizing poem until Part II of Faust, which was
published after his death.
Faust I, issued nearly a quarter of a century earlier, tells the
story of the gifted magician, eternally dissatisfied and yearning like
Goethe himself, who tries the pleasures of the senses, culminating
in physical lovebut without satisfaction. Faust II tells how the
same man goes through the larger activities of the spirit, art, courtlife,
war, and others, to find his real fulfilment at last in working
for the rest of mankind. The form of the play is wildly unclassical
:
there are hundreds of characters, stage-effects which are impossible
except to a trick camera are constantly demanded, there is no
continuity even in the outward appearance of the chief personages,
the metre changes incessantly, the acts are virtually independent
of one another, and there are dozens of symbolic events which are
not only unconnected with each other but excessively obscure by
themselves.
However, one of the main episodes is a highly important
classical symbol. The friendly fiend, Mephistopheles, shows
Faust how to conjure up Helen of Troy. Faust does so, and tries
to embrace her, but she disappears with a shock which knocks
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY 387
him senseless. Later Helen herself seeks the help of Faust to keep
Menelaus, her wronged husband, from sacrificing her in a ritual
of vengeance. Faust now appears in the guise of a medieval noble
in a Gothic castle ; he saves her and makes her his lady ; they have
a miraculous son, who leaps gaily about with superhuman strength
and agility from the moment of birth, and steals or outdoes all the
special gifts of the gods. At last the child Euphorion tries to soar
up into heaven in pursuit of beauty, and falls dead like Icarus.
His body looks for a moment like a well-known form (that of
Lord Byron, we are given to understand), and then it vanishes, and
so does Helen.
Helen is clearly a symbol of classical antiquity, and in particular
of Greece. What does Goethe mean to tell us by her appearance in
Faust} The idea that the magician Faust conjured up Helen of
Troy and made love to her was part of the original medieval
legend; but there it was merely a supreme sensual satisfaction,
possession of the worlds most beautiful woman. In Goethes poem
the episode has many more complex meanings.
1. Certainly she symbolizes Greece as the home of supreme
physical beauty. Other countries have admired beauty together
with wealth or power or pleasure or the service of God. None so
much as Greece has prized beauty above everything else : beauty in
costume, buildings, ornaments, men and women. And Helen, for
whom all Greece and the cities of Asia went gladly to war, is the
image of perfect beauty.
2. But she means something more than the beauty of woman.
The seduction of the lovely but simple Margaret in Faust I left
Faust profoundly dissatisfied. Helens beauty transcends that of
the loveliest mortal girl and is more permanently enthralling.
Faust could not leave her as he left Gretchen. She is spiritually as
well as physically desirable. As Gretchen symbolizes sensual
passion, so Helen represents aesthetic experience, the higher stage
through which Fausts soul must grow towards the highest of all,
the experience of power and of altruistic endeavour.
3. In particular, she represents aesthetic experience^in its
noblest and most complete form^the experience of Greek culture.
No doubt other ages and other countries provide nourishment for
the sense of beauty, but none so completely as Greek art. When
Dante wanted a symbol for the highest influences of classical
culture, he chose Vergil, regarding him first as a poet and then as
388 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY
a thinker.65 But for Goethe Greek culture does not mean thought.
The intellectual genius of Hellas which created science, philosophy,
history, political theory, and so many other intellectual systems,
is not imaged in Helen of Troy.
4. Part of Helens charm is her rarity. Faust makes his way to
her through a classical witches sabbatha phantasmagoria of
obscure demons and grotesque monsters assembled from forgotten
corners of Greek literature. Their multitudinous ugliness sets off
her pure single beauty. It has been suggested that Goethe wanted
them to symbolize the vivid powerful scenery and the physical
energy which characterize the Mediterranean lands, and which
had so much impressed him on his visit to Italy. But there are
darker spirits than those of landscape in the sabbath. Perhaps
Goethe wished to convey his perception of the fact that the art of
the Greeks and the spiritual serenity which marks it were a consciously
idealized achievement, rising above a dark and troublous
underworld full of terrifying primitive forces : the contrast which
Nietzsche was to emphasize, between the raging Bacchantes and
the calm Apollo. Goethe also means that Greek culture is
difficult. It is aristocratic. Few can reach Helen. Faust himself
must put on great state before he can approach her. Even for him
she is difficult to attain. She must not be seized as a passive prize
:
when he grasps her, she vanishes. She must be wooed and won
through knightly service.
5. Even then she is a stimulus, not a possession. She may be
won, but not kept. The child she gives to Faust is too brilliant to
live. And when it dies, she disappears for the second and last time,
like Eurydice returning to the world of the dead: only her garments
remain, to bear Faust upwards like a cloud into regions he
could otherwise never have reached. Goethe means that modem
man cannot live in constant close association with the highest
beauties of artalthough he can and must try to reach them and
make them his for a time.
6. Euphorions name means Energy. He is the result of constant
stimulus, and he responds more actively to every challenge until
the last is too strong, and kills him. He is aspiration, the ambition
of genius, which^when not restrained but called forth by intense
experienceclimbs higher and higher above the earth and grows
more and more wonderful, until, trying to ignore the laws of
humanity, it falls to its death. Goethe was thinking of Byron. But
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: GERMANY 389
Euphorion could be all the geniuses of that age, who were doomed
by their own passionate aspirations to die young. He was born
of the difficult but rapturous union of modern man, energetic,
adaptable, and a little coarse, with the fine spirit of Greek culture.
Therefore he personifies the poets and thinkers of the revolutionary
era, their short ardent lives, their violent self-assertions, their
insatiable hunger for beauty, and their ambitious philosophies and
poemsByron swimming the Hellespont, Shelley liberating
Ireland, Chenier's Hermes^ Holderlin's Empedocles, Coleridge's
Pantisocracy, Goethes sculpture, and the early deaths which they
all challenged or welcomed. Goethe did not believe it was a
romantic revival. He thought the real flow of life in it came from
Greece.
7. But Goethe speaks as a German. Faust personifies Goethe,
and the Germans, and modern man^but modern man stated in
German terms. In order to meet Helen of Troy in a guise appropriate
to her and to himself, he becomes a medieval Germanic
noble ; in order to win her, he exhibits the medieval (and German)
virtue of martial energy, directing the defensive occupation of
Greece by his barbariansGermans, Goths, Franks, Saxons, and
Normans. Goethe means that the Germans, although fascinated
by classical culture and eager to master it, felt themselves foreign
and half-civilized in face of the Greek spirit, and were unable to
have a permanent, sympathetic, productive relationship with it.
There is in this symbol an important truth. The Germans feel
classical civilization too delicate and too intense to assimilate. Their
contact with Greece at its deepest has produced some brilliant
Euphorions, but much unhappiness and a deep sense of frustration.
Winckelmann and Stefan George were homosexuals;
Holderlin and, Nietzsche went mad. The difficulty which Goethe
found in finishing Faust II resembles the general problem of his
compatriots. German critics sometimes talk as though other nations
had the Latin heritage, while Germany alone embodied the Greek
tradition. The paragraph from Paul Hensel on p. 367 is only one
example of this attitude. But the Germans are even farther from
Greece than from Rome. Roman ways they acquired over the
frontiers and through the church and by osmosis from the Latin
lands. The Renaissance scarcely touched them. Their own
Renaissance, in the time of revolution, brought them face to face
with Greece, Its chief product was Goethe, and his chief product
390 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION
was Faust, the last great poem of the Middle Ages. After a short
marriage, Helen vanished, and left Faust to the medieval demon
who was his other self.
3. FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES
These republicans were mostly young fellows who, having been
brought up on Cicero at school, had developed a passion for liberty,
CAMILLE DESMOULINS^
The French Revolution was a rebirth of the spirit of Greece and
Rome. Classical influence on modern life has seldom been so
active, so widespread, so clearly marked, and so eagerly accepted.
In other European countries at the same time, literature and art
were enriched by the new interest in Greek ; but in revolutionary
France the cult of the classics changed all the arts, invaded social
life, moulded political thought, and created monuments for itself
in great institutions which are still part of modern life.
This fact is sometimes misinterpreted or overlooked. Assuming
that classicar means 'imitative* or 'dead*, some writers, who have
little direct acquaintance with Greek and Latin literature, believe
that any recognition of its greatness is reactionary, and therefore
bad. They feel that it would be more romantic, that it would fit
more neatly into the pattern of action-and-reaction, if the French
Revolution had been made by simple farmers, with the Carmagnole
on their lips, reacting against corrupt and classicizing nobles.
But the truth is that it was made by well-educated middle-class
thinkers who took their classical schooling very seriously, and that
most of its theories and works were conscious attempts to revive
the better world of republican Rome and free Greece.
The chief difference between the thought of France in the time
of revolution and that of other countries is that Greece dominated
Germany, Italy, and England, while France turned towards Rome.
Yet not wholly. The art of revolutionary France was chiefly
Greek in origin. Her political thought, her oratory, her symbols
and institutions were mainly Roman. (No doubt some of them
were originally Greek, but the channel through which they came
and the spiritual impetus behind them w^ere Roman.) So, in spite
of the barbarities of the Revolutionthe guillotines, the mass
drownings, the destruction of Christian Gothic art~it did transmit
many positive values derived from Greco-Roman civilization.
Instead of attempting, like the Russian revolutionaries of 1917,
FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES 391
to make a new beginning on a single social and economic theory,
or, like the German revolutionaries of 1933, to mould a new
European culture on the ethics of the Iron Age, the French
revolutionaries built their new world on the civilization of Rome
and Greece. Under kindred influences, the American revolutionaries
did the same.2- The results are, among others, that the
senior legislative body in the United States, in France, and in most
Latin American republics is called the senatewhich was the name
of the elders council of the Roman republic; that U.S. senates
usually meet in the Capitola building named after one of the
seven hills of Rome and built on a famous Greco-Roman model
;
and that, even when the French republic became an empire, the
most lasting memorial of its first emperor was the code of laws,
logical, business-like, liberal, and universal, which he created on
the Roman model to replace the Gothic complexity and irrationality
of the laws superseded by the Revolution.
In French art the great representative of this movement is
Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825). David combined classical
form with revolutionary content, making each strengthen the
other. Having Won the Prix de Rome in 1775, he underwent the
same spiritual revelation in Rome that had already been felt by
Winckelmann and was to be experienced by Goethe. Winckelmanns
theories on the link between moral grandeur and great
simple art had already been expounded in Paris by Diderot, but
David took them up more fervently and with a more serious social
purpose. 3 Nearly all his pictures breathe a confident energetic
spirit of courage in the face of oppression, of heroic or tragic
devotion to the cause of humanity, which still produces a powerful
effect. His first famous work was Give Belisarius a Penny {Date
obolum Belisario^ 1780), which emphasized the ingratitude of
monarchs even to the greatest patriots. He then produced a long
series of stirring paintings on two types of theme. The manner
was alwrays heroic, symmetrical, and vibrant with emotion nobly
restrained. The themes were either Greco-Roman {The Death of
Socrates^ The Rape of the Sabines) or revolutionary and Bonapartist
{Marat assassinated^ Napoleon pointing the way to Italy), Both as
an artist and as a man, he was one of the chiefs of the Revolution.
He was elected to the Convention in 1792, voted for the execution
of Louis XVI, became a member of the Committee of Publiq
392 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION
Safety and president of the Convention, arranged many great
republican festivals, and was appointed painter to the emperor,
after Napoleon took that title. His sketch of the widow Capet,
Marie-Antoinette, on the way to execution is classically pure in
line and fiercely revolutionary in intent : it balances all his heroics
with one bitter touch of realistic hate.
In music a similar revolutionary change was initiated by
Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87). Beginning in an attempt
to re-create Greek tragedy opera had during the baroque period
become subject to large numbers of theatrical and even social conventions
which had nothing to do with Greco-Roman drama, and
which made the operatic stage little more than a show-ground
for virtuosi singers. Splendid was the singing, but the dramatic
values withered away. Then in 1762 Gluck produced Orpheus and
Eurydice^ and founded modern opera by a return to the principles
of Greek drama. ^ He chose a grand simple theme, strengthened
the drama by making the characters fewer and more vital, emphasized
the role of the chorus, enlarged the orchestra, and abolished
most of the baroque ornaments and repetitions in the solos. The
character of his work was fully understood by the apostle of Nature,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was always one of his partisans and
who actually advised on the production of Alcestis, (This is
another proof that the antithesis classical){rotnantic is almost
meaningless.) Gluck himself thus described his innovations:^
T have tried to reduce music to its real function, that of seconding
poetry by intensifying the expression of sentiments and the interest of
situations, without interrupting the action by needless ornament.*
But that is too modest. What Gluck almost succeeded in doing was
to make a new form of tragedy, based on Greek ideals of emotion
and structure, but making the music the main vehicle of lyric
and tragic feeling. What stopped him was the pettiness of the
audiences: they insisted on a happy ending, which weakened and
vulgarized the real meaning of the tragic legends he translated into
sound.
But it was not merely classical art which the French of this time
and spirit admired. Most of the revolutionaries had received a
thorough training in classical literature, which formed their minds
and suggested a set of symbols to replace those of the monarchic
and aristocratic regime. Their education has been described in an
FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES 393
interesting book, H. T, Parker's The Cult of Antiquity and the
French Revolutionaries (Chicago, 1937), which shows many of its
effects on their practice. Robespierre and Desmoulins both went
to the College Louis-le-Grand, concentrating on the classics;
Saint-Just and Danton went to similar colleges supported by the
religious order of the Oratoire; others, like Marat and Mme
Roland, studied the classics privately for their own pleasure and
profit. The classical curriculum of the colleges was fairly uniform.
It was Latin, not Greek ; and its chief authors were Cicero, Vergil,
Horace, Livy, Sallust, Ovid, and Tacitus. Analysing the quotations
from classical authors in the revolutionaries' newspapers and
debates, Professor Parker finds that, with one group of omissions
and one important addition, they reflect that curriculum. The
poetsno doubt as too frivolousare omitted. The addition is
Plutarch's Parallel Lives, Nearly all the other quotations come
from these admirable school-books, Cicero's speeches, Sallust's
biography of the anti-republican conspirator Catiline, the opening
books of Livy's account of the young Roman republic, and Tacitus'
savage histories of the emperors.
It was the history of the Greek and Roman republics that gave
the French Revolution its strongest moral impulse. The idealized
portraits drawn by Plutarch, the heroic adventures related by
Livy, made thoughtful men of the eighteenth century feel that they
had been born into an age of utter corruption, which ought to be
swept utterly away.
The moralist who did most to prepare for the revolution was
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). True, he did believe that the
perfect man was the natural savage of the woods; but neither he
nor the revolutionaries could seriously preach the dissolution of
the state into primitive anarchy. They hoped rather for its reform,
through simplification and purification; and the model which they
proposed was the free republic of Rome and the city-states of free
Greece. Among the Greek states there was one which shone out
in their eyes far more brightly than the others: the kingdom of
Sparta, which they conveniently forgot had been a kingdom.
Rousseau himself had no Greek, but he knew Latin. ^ In the
original and in translations, he read an amazingly large number
of classical authors.^ But it was Plutarch who most deeply
influenced his thought. He began to read the Parallel Lives at the
age of six, in Amyots fiine translation. He knew them off by
394 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION
heart when he was eight. He also studied Plutarchs Moral
Essays: there is in Neuchatel Library a commonplace-book with
more than fifty pages of his notes and excerpts from those works,
made while he was writing his Discourse on Inequality,^ In addition
to this, his favourite French author was Montaigneand
Montaigne, as we have seen, was devoted to his Plutarch, so
that it is often impossible to tell whether Rousseau found a particular
idea in Plutarchs w^orks or in a citation by Montaigne.
What Rousseau most admired in Plutarch was the description
of the early days of the Roman republic, and, even more, the
description of the laws and virtues of Sparta.
Sparta was one of the most curious anachronisms in history.
Like Prussia, it was not a country which had an army, but an
army which had a country. There were only a few thousand
Spartans, who kept themselves all in a perpetual state of soldierly
alertness, did no work whatever, and lived off the original inhabitants
of the country they had conquered. Since these, the
peasants and helots, far outnumbered them, and since they were
further outnumbered by the neighbouring states, they could not
survive and keep power without submitting to the most perfect
military training and discipline, surrendering their wills to the
state, and practising courage, self-sacrifice, soldierly brevity of
speech, and martial resolution, till all these became perfectly
instinctive in every Spartan.
Plato and other philosophers after him believed that this system
was so far superior to the anarchic democracy and individualism of
Athens that it must have been created en bloc by a great philosophical
legislator. Traditionally, an early Spartan hero called
Lycurgus (who must have been responsible for some important
decisions in the life of his people) was credited with drawing up the
entire codejust as Moses has been believed to be the author of
all the rules observed by orthodox Jews. Plutarchs life of Lycurgus
embodies that belief. It treats him as a great statesman who saw
that the legislators first duty is to ensure moral education. The
fact that the Spartans were economic parasites and bloody
oppressors is scarcely mentioned. Sparta is displayed as a state of
almost perfect virtue, created by a legislative genius.^^
Rousseau and the other revolutionaries found that this biography,
together with Plutarchs other accounts of Spartan virtue,
strengthened their own belief that the innate goodness of man
FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES 395
could be developed by good institutions. Political reform was to
be moral reform. In fact, Rousseau seems to have thought that his
own mission in life was to become a great moral legislator comparable
to the Roman Numa or the Spartan Lycurgus.^^
In Rousseaus Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1749), which
really launched him on his career, and in The Social Contract
(1762), praise, quite untempered by criticism, is lavished on the
Spartan constitution as represented by Plutarch. Its structure is
admired : indeed, Rousseau appears to have held that a city-state
like 'Sparta or his own Geneva was the only true democracy.^
3
Some of its principles are adopted by Rousseau : for instance, the
virtual abolition of private property; and the abolition of subordinate
associations within the state, so that each citizen might
think only his own thoughts: which was indeed the sublime and
unique system established by the great Lycurgus.^^ Rut more
important and more permanent in Rousseaus thought was his
admiration for what he believed to be the moral education of
Sparta and early Rome. He thought that these states, in shocking
contrast to modern European countries, inculcated patriotism,
physical vigour, simplicity verging on austerity, democratic
equality, and a love of simple agricultural life, instead of hypochondria,
luxury, class-distinctions, and the soul-corrupting arts
and sciences.^ 3 h ^^s to Plutarch, and through him to the Greek
philosophers from the Cynics back to Plato, that Rousseau owed
his revolutionary equation
:
a simple^ disciplined republic = perfect virtue
Plutarchs works, particularly his Parallel Lives, impressed
many other eighteenth-century readers with their moral idealism

which was ultimately the great Greek educational principle,

paideiaJ-^ Tragedies were written on the lives of his heroes. New
institutions were patterned after those he described. Young men
and women thought themselves back into Greece and Rome, and
were the better for it. Brissot burned to resemble Phocion.
Madame Roland wept at not having been born a Spartan or a
Roman. Charlotte Corday, before she assassinated Marat, spent
the day reading Plutarch. An important book could, and should,
be written on Plutarchs creative influence in the eighteenth
century seldom has a philosopher had such a powerful educational
and moral effect, at such a remove in space and time.
396 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION
When the revolutionaries took power they filled France with
Roman and Greek symbolism. Some of the best-known symbols
of this kind are
:
the cap of liberty, modelled on the cap worn in Rome by
liberated slaves j
wreaths of laurel, the emblem of immortal fame, used as signs
of honour by the republican leaders, and, after them, by
Napoleon
;
the fasces, symbol of the authority of the republican magistrates
;
the eagles, once standards of the Roman legions, and now
introduced as regimental insignia in the French army. At
Versailles there is a wildly melodramatic picture by David
of the young Bonaparte distributing them for the first time
to his regimental officers
;
the consciously Roman dignity of the portraits and medals
representing republican and imperial notables;
the classical simplicity of furniture, costumes, and housedecoration:
rococo fussiness was now abandoned for
w^hite-and-gold walls, Roman couches, urns, pillars, and
Greco-Roman busts; the costumes of the Directoire are
a conscious reversion to Greek styles;
official phraseology: Bonaparte became consul^ and then, by
the senatm consultum of i8 May 1804 under the authority
of the Tribunate^ he was mzdt emperor*, similarly the
names of the revolutionary months were mostly based
on Latin rootsFloreal, Fructidor, Germinal, Messidor,
Pluviose;
the new names of streets, towns, and even men, replacing
names of medieval or Christian origin. Babeuf publicly
renamed himself Gains Gracchus; the town of Montfort-
FAmaury became Montfort-le-Brutus ; in one sector ofParis
there were a Rue de Brutus, a Rue de Scaevola, a Rue de
Fabius, &c.;^
adoration of the personalities of Greek and Roman republican
leaders, who virtually replaced the saints of Christendom.
A favourite oath of excited orators in the early days of the
Revolution was I swear on the head of Brutus.^^ When
the hall of the Convention in the Tuileries was redecorated
in 1793, statues of Lycurgus, Solon, Camillus, and CincinFRANCE
AND THE UNITED STATES 397
natus stood around it, their heads shadowed by laurel
crowns, like enhaloed saints in a Jesuit church;
Revolutionary and imperial architecture, Roman in conception
and design: the Arc de Triomphe, the Pantheon, and
the Madeleine (which Napoleon intended to be a Temple
of Glory)
;
inscriptions in the Roman manner: for instance, the sabres of
the National Guard were inscribed with a line from the
anti-imperialist poet Lucan:
swords were made that none should be a slave
the dramatic gestures and utterances of revolutionary heroes,
nearly always classical in inspiration. Before their fall,
Saint-Just and Robespierre cried out that nothing was left
for them exceptlike SocratesTo drink the hemlock.
In his letter of surrender, Napoleon wrote T throw myself,
like Themistocles, upon the mercy of the British people
:
for Themistocles the Athenian statesman had, after leading
the Greek war against the Persians, thrown himself when
exiled upon the mercy of Persia;
the frequent identification of statesmen with heroes of the
Roman republic. Thus, among the Girondins, Vergniaud
was Cicero, Brissot was Brutus, and Roland was the
younger Cato.
Then, during the Revolution, a new school of French oratory
was created. It was modelled on Cicero : for the simple reason that
there had never been any political oratory in France, so that there
were no French patterns to follow. Besides, as the great orator of
an endangered republic, Cicero made the ideal model In Britain
there wzs a long tradition of noble political rhetoric, and her
speakers had found that Ciceros technique was the richest, most
adaptable, and most natural for the debates of a free parliament.
The best orations of Burke, and Pitt, and Fox, and Sheridan are
Ciceronian in almost everything but lan^age. The high standard
set by these men, and many of the Latin devices they naturalized,
have survived to our own time, to influence many modern speakers
who know nothing of Latin and have no idea that they are pupils
of Cicero. Similarly, French political oratory realized its true
powers during the Revolution, when its makers modelled their
speeches on the Cicero they had studied so carefully in school:
398 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION
that tradition has continued in speeches, editorials, and manifestoes,
until to-day.
For example, on 29 October 1792 Louvet delivered a violent
attack on a certain Catiline, who (he said) w^as conspiring against
the Convention as Catiline had conspired against the senate in
Rome ; who had a secret agreement with a powerful politician, as
Catiline had had with Caesar; and who intended to seize power
after incendiarism and murder on Catilines plan had paralysed
the patriotic party. Catiline was no other than Robespierre. The
powerful politician was Danton. And the speech was modelled on
Ciceros Catilinarian orations. The drastic effect of this attack
is shown by the fact that Robespierre asked for a weeks adjournment
to prepare his reply. When he delivered his answer, it was
closely patterned on Ciceros speech for Sullaeven to Robespierres
defence of himself against the charge of executing
citizens of the republic, and the comparison of his opponent to a
demagogic tribune. It saved him, for the time.
Again, in one of his most widely read pamphlets, Desmoulins
adapted the famous simile in Ciceros defence of Roscius, where
vigilant prosecutors are compared to the watch- dogs on the
Capitol. The passage struck the public ear; and ahoyeurs^
barkers, became the regular nickname for informers during the
Terror. There are many other examples.^^ In fact, one of the
chief difficulties in reading the speeches made during the Revolution
is to identify all the politicians who are so freely described as
Catiline, Clodius, and Cicero. The Caesar was still to come.
The Greeks were the inventors of democracy. And in Rome,
although there were more class distinctions than in Athens, the
name of king was detested, and every citizen was free. In remaking
France the revolutionaries therefore went to the examples of
Greece and Rome. The name republic is of course the Latin
phrase res puhlica^ the commonwealth. In the legislatures which
formed the First Republic, the Constituent Assembly of 1789-91,
the Legislative Assembly of 1791-2, and the National Convention
of 1792-5, debaters constantly alluded to Greek and Roman
history, because they felt the problems they were facing had
already been faced and solved in Greece and in Rome. And, as
Professor Parker points out, the more radical politicians praised
the ancients more warmly, while the right wing tended to disparage
them.25 Even the public festivals of the Republic, in which
FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES 399
costumes and properties (designed by David) were so often wholly
classical, were inspired by those of Sparta. At the end of his
career Saint-Just drew up plans to impose on France a Spartan
educational and civic discipline, including simple diet, the abolition
of private meals in favour of public messes, and the cultivation
of Laconic brevity of speechin fact, he attempted the hopeless,
suicidal enterprise of denying the French their cuisine, their wine,
and their conversation.^^
The American revolution also was partly guided by classical
ideals. Although it produced few works of literature, its syfnbols
and its institutions were markedly Greco-Roman in inspiration.
The Roman origin of Senate and Capitol has already been mentioned.^
7 The title by which Washington is best known, Father
of his Country, is a translation ofpater patriae^ the honorific name
given to several heroes of the Roman state, and with particular
distinction to Cicero.^^ The Federalist essays (1787-8) by Hamilton,
Madison, and Jay, which were largely responsible for creating
the present Union out of the early and inefficient Confederation,
contain a number of illustrative parallels from Greek and Roman
history, with discussion of such Greek attempts at federative
government as the Achaean League and the Amphictyonic
Council. The Great Seal of the United States bears three quotations
in Latinthe famous e phiribus unum, one (made) out of
many;^^ novus ordo secloruMy a new term of ages, the sentiment
expressed in Vergils Messianic poem and in Shelleys famous
revolutionary chorus, The worlds great age begins anew and
annuit cmptis, (God) has favoured our enterprise, an adaptation
of the opening of Vergils Georgics.^^ The city of Cincinnati perpetuates
the name of the Roman hero nicknamed curly-haired
(= cincinnatus) who, at the call of duty, left his plough to lead his
countrys army, and returned to his plough after his duty was done.
The retiring officers of the revolutionary army formed a mutualaid
society and named themselves after him ; and, as a compliment
to General St. Clair, president of its Pennsylvania branch, the
Ohio city took on a Roman name.
Many simpler Greek and Roman names are borne by townships
throughout the United States. There were a few before the
revolution. Virginia, named for the virgin Queen Elizabeth, is the
best known. An estate near the Potomac was named Rome in 1663
400 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION
by Governor Pope, no doubt because he liked the idea of being
called Tope, of Rome. But the flood of classical names was
opened, just as in France (p. 396), by the Greco-Roman idealism
of the revolution. Even unlearned men writing to the newspapers
used to sign themselves Cato, or Publicola, or (following the
formidable example of the famous English publicist) Junius.
First, in 1789, Vanderheydens Ferry, New York, was renamed
Troy. Probably this was a reminiscence of the old admiration for
the gallant Trojans (see p. 54). The first Troy set the pattern for
thirty others, in succeeding years. Next, in 1790, a number of
settlements in the military tract around Cayuga Lake, New York,
had to be named. The committee ran through a classical dictionary,
and called them after heroes^Aurelius, Camillus, Cato, Cicero
(who also appeared under his other name, Tully), Cincinnatus,
Fabius, Hannibal, Hector, Lysander the Spartan, Manlius, Marcellus,
Romulus, Scipio, Sempronius, Solon, and Ulysses; and
authorsHomer, Ovid, and Vergil, with three English baroque
writers, Dryden, Locke, and Milton. Cincinnati, Ohio, followed
in 1790. Seneca, New York, was more complicated: it was a
latinization of Sinneken, the Dutch version of the Mohican name
of an Iroquois tribe. Utica, New York, was given its name in 1798,
in memory of the African town where the great republican Cato
killed himself rather than submit to monarchy. In 1800 the inhabitants
of an Ohio town were planning to build a college : so they
named their town after the first home of learning in the western
world, and it became Athens. Next year Athens, Georgia, got its
name for the same reason. Many more Greek and Roman names
dot the vast map of the United States to remind us that, although
the land was at first savage, the civilization which grew up in it was
in part derived from Rome and Greece.
That belief was firmly held by the best-known educator of
the American revolutionary era, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). ^3
Throughout his life he was devoted to Greek and Latin literature,
which he considered the foundation of all higher culture. He
modelled his private life and his country home on the life of a
Roman gentleman with a spacious hill-top mansion. The University
of Virginia, which he planned, was a re-creation of the linked
porticoes, enclosed spaces, and pillared buildings which made up
a large Roman villa. To the constant inspiration he drew from
Cicero, Horace, and Pliny his visit to France as United States
FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES 401
Minister added new stimulus. In Paris he met David, as well as
the equally classical but more reposeful artists Houdon and Wedgwood.
At Nimes in the south, he actually saw and studied Roman
buildings : the temple dedicated to Augustus adoptive sons Gains
and Lucius (it is now known as the Maison Carree), the Roman
gates, and the fine arena. Although he said he preferred the Greek
language to Latin, and although the most advanced artists of the
late eighteenth century worked on Greek models, Jefferson remained
a Roman. The temple of the young Caesars was, under his
direction, closely imitated in the Capitol of the state of Virginia.
The University of Virginia library is the Roman Pantheon. His
own house, which he liked to call Pantops (= panorama) and for
which he finally chose the name Monticello (= little hill), was in
fact a Roman villa like those of Pliny and Cicero. Something of
the Roman republic had already been reborn in the symbolism and
the idealism of the early United States; and, through Jefferson, its
first official buildings were modelled on the mansions, theatres,
and temples which Rome had constructed by adding her own power
and solidity to the Greek grace.
The greatest French poet of the revolutionary era was Andr^
Chenier, born in Constantinople in 1762 of a French father and
a Greek mother; well educated at the College de Navarre; deeply
impressed by a visit to Italy when he was twenty-two ; a pupil of
David ; on the republican side during the Revolution, but repelled
by the excesses of the Terror, during which he wrote an ode to
Charlotte Corday and a brief for the defence of Louis XVI;
arrested in March 1794, and guillotined some three months later,
three days before the execution of Robespierre, which would have
saved him. His last work, the Iambics^ was written on tiny slips of
paper in microscopic handwriting and smuggled out of his prison
;
but scarcely any of his poetry was published during his lifetime.
His reputation began about a generation after his death, and has
^ risen steadily ever since.
He had a brother, Marie-Joseph Chenier, who was much more
prominent at the time, and whose career was both made and
blasted by the Revolution. In 1792, despite the counter-manoeuvres
of the court, he produced a tragedy on the death of Gains Gracchus ^the revolutionary leader of
the Roman republic, who, after his
brother had been murdered by the forces of reaction, continued to
5976 u 4
402 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION
defend the cause of the plebeians against the proud and privileged
aristos. It had a huge success: Marie-Joseph became one of the
voices of the Revolution. Yet next year the play was banned by
the Mountain because it contained the line
:
We seek laws, and not blood.3
s
Then in 1794 he wrote a play on the life of Timoleonanother of
Plutarchs heroes, who refused an opportunity to make himself
dictator, and retired into private life. This drama was suppressed
at the orders of Robespierre. Striking as these events were, and
talented though Marie-Joseph was, it is his brother Andre who
now has a permanent place in the literature of the world.
Andre Chenier may be compared to both Shelley and Keats ; but
he is inferior to them both in scope. He was essentially a miniaturist,
and produced nothing comparable to Prometheus Unbound
or Endymionalthough he aimed as high, For ten years he planned
a didactic poem, Hermes, which was to contain the teaching of the
Encyclopaedia in the style of Lucretius ; he also wanted to become
the modern Homer, with an epic in 12,000 lines on America; but
only a few fragments survive.37 His finest work is undoubtedly his
pastoral idylls in the manner of Theocritus. ^ 8 Close to them are
his elegies on minor heroic themes (Orpheus, Hylas) ; and then
his love-elegies, modelled on Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid,
which are comparable to Goethes Roman Elegies, surpassing them
in intensity of emotion, although hampered by the strictness of
French metre. Greek on his mothers side, he was one of the
first of the many modern poets who can be called reincarnated
Greeks. He knew Greek and Latin literature well, he had delicate
taste, and he could transmute effects from the classics into his own
poetry with such genuine emotion that the result was far above
mere copying. Therefore, for the uninstructed reader, his poems
are original evocations of antique scenes; while one who knows
Greek and Latin as Chenier himself did sees in them a blend of
thoughts, and images, and turns of phrase, taken from a dozen
different classical poets but blended into an original composition,
partly by the imaginative boldness with which Chenier combines
elements that no one before him thought of combining, and partly
by his distinguished verse-rhythm and sentence-structure. The
tirades of Racines Greek heroes and heroines, addressing one
another as Madame and Seigneur, are often great poetry, but are
FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES 403
seldom free from serious anachronisms : so serious that they make
the poetry false. But many of Cheniers short poems might be
translations from the Greek. They are true. They are re-creations
of the eternal aspects of the Hellenic spirit in a modern language,
with all the restraint which is the most Greek of poetic virtues.
For instance, the lovely little dialogue Mnazile et Chloe shows a
young couple slipping into a grove separately, each hoping to find
the other; they meet, and each says it is nothing but chance; there
the poem stops, like a smile on a timid lovers lips. And an evocation
of Orpheus ends, with Greek economy, in words which suit
Chenier himself
Around the demigod the silent princes
hung on his voice, motionless, listening,
and listened still when he had ceased to sing.
The second great writer of revolutionary France was a far more
complex, far less lovable figure: Fran9ois-Rene, vicomte de
Chateaubriand (1768-1848), whose adventurous life, titanic pride,
startling success, and tragic loneliness make him a fairly close
parallel to Lord Byron. He was born and well educated in
Brittany, spent a romantic seven months during 1791-2 in the
American and Canadian backwoods on a quest for the North-
West Passage, lived in poverty from 1794 to 1799 as an emigre in
London, but was able to return under Napoleon. Having been
converted to Christianity on his mothers death, he wrote The
Gefiius of Christianity^ a powerful defence of Christian thought,
which, published in 1802 just before Napoleon re-established
the church, was rewarded with an appointment to the embassy
at Rome. But he soon quarrelled with Napoleon, particularly
after comparing him to Nero. Like Byron, he toured Greece
and the Levant, but his pilgrimage, unlike Byrons, culminated
in Palestine. In 1809 he produced a prose epic, The Martyrs; he
had already written one called The Natchez on the French-Indian
wars of Louisiana, but was not to publish it complete until
twenty years later. He served the Bourbons after their restoration,
but quarrelled with them too, and retired into gloomy solitude,
working on his Memoirs from beyond the Tomb^ which were issued
in twelve volumes after his death.
The MartyrSf although interesting as a curiosity, is unreadable.
It is quite literally an epic in prose. Chateaubriand explains that
404 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION
Aristotle admits either verse or prose as the vehicle of epic, and
cites Fenelons Telemachus as a precedent."^^ The work is an
attempt to outdo Fenelon in depth and imagination and Homer
and Vergil in Christian nobility. It tells a complicated story of the
persecution of the Christians under Diocletian (284-305), ending
with the martyrdom of the hero and heroine and the conversion of
Constantine to Christianity. It reads like a rather affected translacion
from Latin into correct but laborious French. Although it has
no intrinsic interest, it is a fascinating example of the failure a good
writer can make when he chooses the wrong literary pattern. The
essential truth which Chateaubriand had grasped was that the day
of the verse epic was over. He knew that the grandeur and energy
of the epic had now flowed out of it into prose fiction : the epic of
the nineteenth century was to be Victor Hugos Les Miserahles and
Tolstoys War and Peace But he could not see that, in renouncing
the vehicle of verse, a writer must also renounce the smaller
stylistic devices which are valid only in poetry : the invocations to
the Muse, the conventional epithets, the circumlocutions, the
Homeric similes, which, although artificial enough in verse, are
sustained by the pulsing rhythm of the hexameter and the rich
profusion of the poetic vocabulary, but in prose look like artifice
without art.
Holy Spirit, who madest the vast abyss fertile by covering it with thy
wings, it is at this moment that I need thine aidP^^
What Chateaubriand intended to be in The Martyrs was a greater,
a French, a Catholic Milton; what he became wras a stilted precursor
of Ben-Hur and Quo Vadis?
On the other hand, The Genius of Christianity is a great book.
Like most great French books, it possesses few of the literary
virtues on which the French pride themselves: brevity, clarity,
reasonableness, balance. All the betterfor it is a partisan book.
It is the strongest possible statement of argument i in the Battle
of the Books. Thereby it marks the beginning of a Christian
reaction against the intellectual paganism of the eighteenth
century.^'^ Gibbon, we recall, described the fall of the Roman
empire as the triumph of barbarism and religion, implicitly equating
the t\vo. Chateaubriand now argues that Christianity, properly
understood, is far nobler than aU the ideals of the pagan world

yes, than even the noblest pagan achievements, in philosophy, in

FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES 405
the arts, and in poetry. In its breadth of view, the loftiness of its
ideals, and the subtlety and penetration of its analysis, this book
marks an epoch in criticism. Milton and Tasso receive their full
share of praise, and Dante (so long neglected) is recognized as a
master; Racine^s dramas are worthily criticized and their fundamentally
Christian outlook is explained; there is a great deal of
scholarly comment on the Bible, and on the less-known classical
authors, with some valuable exegesis of the art and thought of
Homer and Vergil. We have all wished that Byron, whose nobility
of soul, apparent even behind his bad behaviour and his melodramatic
verse, emerged triumphant in his death, had written
something not only so striking, but so serious and noble that it
would be worthy of his genius. In The Genius of Christianity
Chateaubriand wrote a work in which the grandeur of his ideals
and the sensitivity of his imagination are worthily expressed. It
honours him, it justifies the French aristocracy to which he belonged,
and it raises the Christian faith far above the pettinesses of
most of its attackers and some of its defenders.
The heir of the Revolution
Although he belonged to a later generation, although he lived
until nearly the end of the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo
(1802-85) was the heir of the Revolution. Among his earliest
works were stormy lyrics inspired by the Greek war of freedom
against the Turkish oppressors.^s The climax of his youthful
literary career came when he created a revolution in French poetry.
He did this partly by breaking down the strictly limited versepatterns
which had dominated, and crippled, French poets since
the opening of the baroque age. But more important and more farreaching
was his extension of the poetic vocabulary. Strange as it
seems, it is true that throughout the Revolution and the First
Empire poets were forced to avoid many ordinary words, because
they were 'low*. Audiences hissed if they heard a word like Toom^
or handkerchief\ Manuals of correct diction were published,
showing that spouse was preferable to husband, because the
latter signified merely a domestic or sexual relationship, while
spouse conveyed the idea of a contract hallowed by society.
Poets were forbidden to use the word horse*. They were enjoined
to replace the word negroes* by
mortals blackened by the suns of Guinea.
4o6 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION
They were urged not to use "priest and bell, but to prefer their
noble equivalents pontiff and bronze,^^ The most popular
translator of the age, Delille, complained that his task was made
more difficult by the limitations of the French polite vocabulaiy^
In Rome, he said, the people was king, and its language shared
its nobility; . . . among us, prejudices have debased both words
and men, and there are noble expressions and lower-class expressions.
47 This was not really true of Roman poetry, which was
aristocratic enough to eschew large numbers of colloquialisms ; but
at least in the Georgies Vergil could (as Delille could not) use real
words for real things, and call the farmers implement a spade.
Hugo has a spirited poem in which he accepts the charge that he
caused a new French Revolution in poetry by breaking down the
social distinctions of language. French, he says, was like the state
before 1789: words were nobles or commoners, they lived in a
fixed caste-system. But I, he cries, I put a red cap on the old
dictionary. I called a pig by its name. I stripped the astonished
dog of its collar of epithets, and made Maggie the cow fraternize
with the heifer Berenice. As if in a revolutionary orgy,
with breasts bare, the nine Muses sang the Carmagnole.^s
Hugos relation to classical poetry was strangely affected by his
revolutionary character and ideals. The poet he knew best and
for long loved best was Vergil. We hear of him translating Vergil
at sight, aged nine, at the entrance examination given by his exclusive
Madrid school; trying his wings, during his early teens, on
poetic versions of BucolieSy Geo^ics, and the horror episodes in the
Aeneid. There is a book on his love of Vergil which shows again
and again, almost as sensitively as Lowes does for Coleridge in
The Road to Xanaduy how a monstrous picture from Vergil like the
fight of Hercules and Cacus, or a harmonious echo like the lowing
of a homebound herd, lingers and reappears in Hugos writings as
the living product of his own imagination.^^ When he began to
feel his strength, in the revolutionary preface to Cromwelly he
started to call Vergil a copyist, the moon of Homeran idea
repeated in his William Shakespeare. Then, when he went into
exile under the disguised dictatorship of Napoleon III, he abruptly
dropped the rest of his admiration for Vergil, He saw in Vergil
only the courtier of the tyrant Augustus. He placed Juvenal and
Tacitus, the satirist and the historian who hated the imperial
FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES 407
regime, far above him. And yet he could not forget the beauty of
VergiFs poetry. In Interior Voices he honoured Vergil with a
loving tribute, written as by a pupil to his master, As far as he
ever solved the contradiction in his own mind, he did so by adoring
Vergil simply as a painter of nature ; and, ultimately, by deciding
that Vergil was a writer of talent, like Racine, rather than a genius,
like Homer and Shakespeare. Was he wrong?
Hugos knowledge of Latin literature was good. But he was
prevented from using it fully by his own rebellious nature, and by
a revolt which was forced on him in youth. In a brilliant tirade
placed early in his book of Contemplations
^
he denounces, scarifies,
blasts the pedantic schoolmasters with dirty nails, who ruin both
classics and mathematics by making them into forced labour. At
school, when he was sixteen, he was looking fonvard to a days
excursion with the janitors daughter; his attention wandered; his
master jumped on him, making him stay in all Sunday and write
out 500 lines of Horace; and, in his lonely attic, he poured out
curses on the jailers who distorted Horace, who made Vergil a load
for children to drag like oxen, and who
have never had a mistress, or a thought.
This is not the earliest, but it is nearly the strongest expression
of the revulsion which bad teachers of the classics have caused by
treating the subject as discipline, A few years earlier Byron had
felt the same hatred, for the same reason. We shall see it growing
throughout the nineteenth century, to the point when it almost
ruins the study and teaching of classical literature. Of course
learning is difficult, but it must not be made repellent: least of all
the learning of great languages and of fine poetry. The result on
both Byron and Hugo was the same. Involuntarily, they remembered
much of what they had learnt: it had become part of
them. But, unlike such poets as Dante, and Shakespeare, and
Goethe, they refused to go on reading classical literature after
leaving school. And, what is most important, they both refused to
learn the central classical lesson of aesthetic discipline^how to
organize large masses of complex material, how to speak more
clearly than a shout, Byron never produced a work as great as his
powers promised. Hugos Legend of the Ages is only an Ozymandias
group of colossal fragments, and not the epic of mankind.
4o8 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND
4. ENGLAND
We are all Greeks.
SHELLEY^
The lands of Greece and Rome and their civilization were only
one of the many excitements under which the English revolutionary
writers produced their marvellously varied work ; and on
each of them that excitement acted in a different way. In order to
determine what it did for English literature, we must see what it
meant for each of the great poets of that time. But let us take it at
its highest intensity. Wordsworth wrote two sonnets on a theme
he found in Plutarch true; still, the poems are bad, and facts
like that are not truly revealing. We must rather ask, how
did Greece and Rome change the minds of these poets? from
the classics, what did they get that was, for them, uniquely
valuable ?
We think of William Wordsworth as an observer of nature and
of natural man. The mountains which ennobled his boyhood and
strengthened his manhood (it is inadequate to call him a Lake
poet : he was a Mountain poet; there have been very few, and he
was the greatest), the mountains which in physical nature were the
counterpart of the lofty spiritual ideals by which he lived; the
lakes in which he swam and on which he skated and rowed (always
surrounded by the dominating mountains), the lakes which
symbolized the soft gracious influence of his sister and his wife
;
the trees and flowers, the fields, the men and women who worked
the land and wandered over it, that visible proof of the worlds
divinity,
the infinite magnificence of heaven
his own enraptured soul that saw the best and truest in all these;
and the great spirit which pervades them and is their life^these
made his poetry. Surely the Greeks and Romans can have had
little meaning for such a poet?
Then his style is remarkably free from imitation and reminiscence.
Although he admired Milton more than any other poet,
his conception of poetic diction and of the use of allusion in poetry
is diametrically opposed to Miltons. Another of the revolutionary
poets described the ideal of poetic creation in the phrase load
every 4ft with ore.^ Although this is too intense an image to fit
19 . THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND 409
Wordsworths calm poetry, it does emphasize the fact that for all
these poets writing was a natural process, and the poets mind like
the rich earth full of inestimable wealth effortlessly produced by
the creative powers of nature. For Milton, poetry was not native
ore, but a dilBicult piece of craftsmanship made from metal twice
and thrice refined, worked by earlier artists, and by himself remoulded
and set with even more finely cut jewels. But Wordsworth
seldom used the words of any other poets, even of those he
loved best.
Lastly, one of Wordsworths special contributions to literature
consisted in a departure from classical tradition. He created a new
pastoral. Of all the Greco-Roman cliches, the thinnest, the most
easily abused, and the least vital had been that of Arcadian poetry
and art. It became particularly nauseating when cultivated by the
French court, with their own peasantry living oxi tree-bark and
nettle-soup just outside the gates. Wordsworth perceived new
beauties in country life, and for Strephon and Phyllis substituted
a fresh range of symbols which meant more, and owed nothing to
Greek and Latin tradition.
In view of all this, what, if anything, did Wordsworth take from
the classics.^ What did they mean to him?
They meant spiritual nobility. He did not, except in his less
fortunate works, imitate their words and methods. But he had a
good university education, knew a considerable amount of Latin
and a little Greek, read an increasing amount of both Latin (in
original and translation) and Greek (in translation) as he grew
older, and learnt much of the deeper meaning of the classics from
Coleridges conversation. ^ His dependence on Roman history and
Greco-Roman philosophy, as well as his general affection for
classical literature, has been well explained by Miss Jane Worthington
in Wordsworth^s Reading of Roman Prose. The ideals he
derived from the classics affected his poetry and his thought in
three main ways.
First, it was Roman history, vitalized by the French Revolution,
that made Wordsworth a great political poet.^ After a period as
a Godwinian anarchist, he came to believe that one of the most
important objects of human effort is national independence. And
he always felt that political power was worse than useless, both
wicked and doomed, if it were not associated with morality.
Miss Worthington points out that the Roman historians, unlike
410 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND
many modem historians, always emphasize the indissoluble connexion
between private virtue and public security and prosperity.
(This is part of the long and noble tradition of paideia^ which
made it impossible for a Greek or Roman to write a worthy book
merely to record facts, without any intention of bettering his
readers^ souls.) But the Roman historians meant nothing to
Wordsworth until he saw their teaching applied in the beginnings
of the French Revolution, and, in conversation with a French
oiEcer, felt its emotional impact. In The Prelude, 9. 288-430, he
described Beaupuys personality, paid tribute to his idealism, and
explained its profound educational influence on him by comparing
it to that of Plato upon Dion of Syracuseone of the great
examples oipaideia in politics.^ The chief results of this in Wordsworths
poetry are his patriotic sonnets {Poems dedicated to
National Independence and Liberty), which stress the close link
between politics, intellectual and artistic culture

Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hourl^

and morality
:
by the soul
Only, the nations shall be great and free.^
The second great classical influence on Wordsworth was Greek
philosophy. He seems not to have read the Greek Stoics (apart
from Epictetus, who belongs to the Roman period), but he knew
a great deal of the Roman Stoics, particularly that difiicult author
Seneca. The effect of this was to strengthen his belief in the unity
of God, man, and the external world. Man (the Stoics held) is a
part of the physical world, and the world is a manifestation of God.
Again and again in Wordsworths poems this is most beautifully
expressed in terms of the grandeur of nature.
I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.^ ^
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND 41
1
And once, in a fragment which he never published, he says that
all beings live with god, themselves
Are god, existing in the mighty whole. . . .
His thought here is not that the world is divine because it is
beautiful (which is a Platonic idea), but that it is divine because it
is alive. Because it lives and is supreme, all-embracing, it is God.
In his attitude to moral obligations also, Wordsworth was a
Stoic. They should be accepted as natural, not struggled against
or questioned, their fulfilment not justified by external praise or
endangered by externaf blame, but recognized as part of the universal
process. Virtue, for the Stoic, means living according to
nature; and a good action is complete once it has been willed

whether it succeeds or not is unimportant, the essential thing being

the harmony of mans will with the spirit of the universe. Two of
Wordsworths most famous poems on moral subjects express this
belief : Character of the Happy Warrior and the Ode to Duty ; both
were written in 1805, and the latter is prefaced by a motto from
Seneca to stress its Stoical inspiration. Duty as an end in itself is
a Stoical concept. In The Excursion other aspects of Stoicism
reappear : especially in book 4, where Wordsworth describes the
wise man as perfectly free (one of the Stoic paradoxes) and,
quoting eight lines from Samuel Daniel, identifies two of them as
a translation from a little-known passage in Seneca. In The
Excursion he is turning more and more away from Stoicism towards
Christianity. Nevertheless, he is one of the few great modern
Stoic poets : and none has summed up the Stoic philosophy better
than Wordsworth in his identification of duty with the deepest
laws of physical nature
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong.
But his finest poem is not Stoical: it is Platonic. This is the
ode, Intimations of Immortality from Reminiscences of Early Child--
hoody written at a turning-point of his own life, and, despite its
fundamental emphasis on eternal life, implying a lament for his
own approaching spiritual death. The ode is a great question, and
a great answer. It asks why the poet himself no longer feels the
exulting beauty and joy experienced by nature, and animals, and
children; and it replies that children enter the world from heaven
412 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND
and still remember how they lived there: heaven dies about them
in their infancy. Children and their joy in nature are therefore
a proof that the soul is immortal. The adult sees only The light
of common day, and has no knowledge of eternity except the
obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things . . .
those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections
which are a lasting remembrance of heaven. This is the doctrine
which Plato expressed through Socrates, in the theory of Ideas
known perfectly in heaven before our birth, and recollected
under proper stimulus in the world. Plato stresses its intellectual
side : knowledge is recollection of heavenly knowledge. Wordsworth
stresses its emotional and imaginative side: joy in nature is
recollection of heavenly happiness. But the doctrine is the same,
and no doubt it was that great Platonist, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
who imparted it to him.^5
And fundamentally, Wordsworth was a classic in his attitude to
emotion. The Greeks believed that it was wise to control it, in
order to avoid the madness of passion ; and, in art, that it could be
more perfectly expressed in restrained terms. In an otherwise
unlikeable poem on a Greek legend, Laodamia, Wordsworth
expresses the first belief with noble emphasis
:
The Gods approve
The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul.
And he himself both felt and practised the second rule : for his
ideal of poetry was emotion recollected in tranquillity"
George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron, would have been contemptuous
if anyone had called him a classicist; and yet he died in
Greece, for Greece. He would have been even more scornful if he
had been labelled a romantic : his first considerable poem {English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers) contained a savage attack on romantic
writers like Scott and praise of the classicist Pope; and yet his life
was romantic, and his death a strange, quixotic, essentially un-
Greek gesture. Goethe symbolized him in Euphorion, the child
of medieval energy and classical beauty, whose ambitions and
senses were too intense to allow him to live on this earth. The
symbol is not unjust: Byron was a strong young man who loved
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND 413
strong sensations and exciting beauties. He appreciated Greco-
Roman culture best in its most immediate and most vital forms.
Would it be true, then, to say that he hated classical culture as
seen through books, and enjoyed only its concrete visible relics,
the Italian and Greek lands, their buildings and statues, their men
and their beautiful women ? Certainly he protested with alarming
violence against Lord Elgins removal of the famous marbles from
the Parthenon to the British Museum, one of his reasons being that
they looked better and more natural where they were.^^
But that explanation would be a false antithesis. He did know
a great deal of classical literature. He remembered it again and
again in his Mediterranean tour, quoted it aptly and sincerely, and
added notes to Childe Harold^s Pilgrimage connecting the scenes
he had witnessed with the great passages they had recalled to him.^^
He thought the writers of his own time were as vulgar and silly,
compared with Pope and the Greeks and Romans, as slums and
Gothic castles compared with the Parthenon.
Yet there is a famous passage in his autobiographical Pilgrimage
w^hich shows that there was a conflict within him about his attitude
to the classics: a mingled attraction and repulsion. Travelling
through Italy, he sees the snow-capped mountain Soracte, which
inspired Horace with the beginning of a famous and beautiful
ode.^^ Unexpectedly, he checks the rein of his galloping imagination.
He says: Others may quote Horace if they like: but I
could not:
I abhorred
Too much, to conquer for the Poets sake,
The drilled dull lesson, forced down word by word
In my repugnant youth, with pleasure to record
Aught that recalls the daily drug which turned
My sickening memory; and, though Time hath taught
My mind to meditate what it then learned,
Yet such the fixed inveteracy wrought
By the impatience of my early thought,
That, with the freshness wearing out before
My mind could relish what it might have sought,
If free to choose, I cannot now restore
Its health^but what it then detested, still abhor.^^
In this, as in other aspects of his character, Byron announced
the age to which we ourselves belong. He did not hate Greek and
414 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND
Latin literature, or Greek and Latin ideals. Only a few lines later,
he breaks out into a splendid dirge over Rome, crying
Alas, for Earth, for never shall we see
That brightness in her eye she bore when Rome was free!
Nevertheless, psychical blocks created by bad teaching kept Byron
from taking the full influence of classical culture into himself, and
profiting from it. Hundreds of thousands of Byrons, since his day,
have rejected Greek and Latin literature because its preliminary
discipline was made hateful to them; and therefore, they have
sometimes rejected even the necessary disciplines of art and
thought. We have seen Hugo rebelling in the same way, not
against Latin, but against hateful teachers of Latin.23 Swinburne
was similarly affected.^^ Byron loathed the drudgery of learning
Latin grammar and vocabulary in order to approach the poetry
;
and although, in his note, he pays a compliment to his master
at Harrow, he says the system of making little boys learn Horace
by heart was wrong. And it is evident that schoolmasters were
then starting to believe that it was more important for their pupils
to leam syntax and scansion than to grasp and respond to the
poetry they were studying. The age of gerund-grinding had
begun.^s Perhaps even that would not have mattered if, after the
preliminaries, Byrons teachers had explained something of the
real greatness of Greco-Latin literature. But evidently they did
not. They stopped at the drilled dull lesson.
What was the result? Byron himself admired the formality, the
restraint, and the intellectual power of classical poetry, and those
qualities as reproduced in English baroque literature. Yet he
himself wrote frenetic and often formless poetry, that suffers from
its own love for the limitless. It is clear that he was never shown
the greatest achievements of classical literature, that his teachers
led him to think most of it was like Horacecool, sane, limited in
scope, and rather middle-aged. If he had read as much of the best
as Shelley, he would have been a far greater poet than he was, with
more pride in his mission and more real understanding of the
tradition which he was helping to transform.
And he had a strangely mixed, almost embarrassed attitude to
classical literature. It has been pointed out that he was often
happier when parodying Greek mythology than when writing
seriously about it;^^ and yet whenever a figure of legend became
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND 415
palpably beautiful (like the Medici Venus) or nobly human (like
Prometheus) he threw his whole soul into admiration.^'^ He could
comprehend books as books, but never love them fully. The
countries where the books were written, and the ideals which still
survived thereespecially those that suited his own character:
political liberty, admiration of sensuous beauty, scorn of minor
conventions, yes, and aristocratic hauteurthese, with the men
and women who embodied them, he loved. From one point of
view Byrons career was a protest against the assumption that we
can learn about Greece and Rome by reading books. No one
could call the man anti-classical who swam the Hellespont to rival
Leander, who wrote an ode on the isles of Greece to evoke liberty
in the name of Sappho, who imaged himself as Prometheus
chained to the rock and vulture-haunted, and who, again and again,
in burning poems and at last in his own self-sacrifice, repeated that
the ideals of Greece were alive, were nobler than those of our own
materialistic existence, and were worth dying for.
_ John Keats was the Shakespeare of the revolutionary period:
inTiis smlK^ting but incomplete education, in his undistinguished
descent and early poverty, in his determination to write poetry, in
his tremendous productivity, in his essential originality, and in the
rich fertility with which his mind developed themes taken from
classical literature and legend. The exuberant sensuousness of
Endymion is closely akin to that of Venus and Adonis \ and the
grandeur of Hyperion foreshado^vs something which would have
equalled Antony and Cleopatra, The schooling of the two poets
was not very different, although'Keats was much more of a bookman.
Like Shakespeare, he learnt Latin but no Greek at school,
and, like Shakespeare, he got a great deal from translations of
Greek later. Keats, however, knew more Latin, and by the age of
fourteen had made his own translation of the whole Aeneid into
English prose : an interesting act, which shows both that he realized
the value of classical poetry for himself, that he disliked the existing
translations, and that he was not yet sure of his own style. But
it was Greek poetry that really moved him, although, standing
aloof in giant ignorance^ he could not read the language. His
friend Cowden Clarke, son of the headmaster of his school at
Enfield, gave him the run of his library with the translations it
contained: it was after a night spent in Clarkes study that Keats
4i6 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND
wrote his first great poem, On first looking into Chapman^s Homer,
(He had already read Pope's version, which made no impression
on him.) At first it scarcely mattered that he could not read the
originals: for he was building his own style out of the best of
English poetry, and the stories and imagery he could get, as
Shakespeare got them, through translations. He found renderings
of Hesiod, Apollonius Rhodius, and other little-known poets in a
collection called The Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to
Cowper: which also contained a fifteenth-century poem by Sir
Richard Ros named La Belle Dame sans mercie,'^^ Keats even used
classical dictionaries: Lempriere, Tooke, and Spence^who in
spite of their refined prose style give the myths quite vividly

were among his favourite reading in his last year at school. Like
Shakespeare, he learnt much classical mythology at second hand,
from authors who had studied the originals and used Greek and
Latin material in work he admired. The legend of Lamia, for
instance, he took from Burton; but Burton took it from Philostratus'
life of the miracle-working fakir Apollonius of Tyana.
Keats's favourite English author was Spenser, and Spenser was
deeply read in the classics.
The gods, the goddesses, the nymphs and Titans, and the men
and women of Greece were made more real to him by Greek
sculpture. At first he studied reproductions, in Spence's valuable
Polymetis, And then, as by Chapmans Homer, a new world was
thrown open to him by the Elgin Marbles. He was taken to see
them in 1817 by the painter Haydon, to whom he sent two sonnets
which acknowledge their own incoherence but express the same
overpowering ecstasy as his poem on the discovery of Homer.
He went again and again to see the Elgin Marbles, and would sit
for an hour or more at a time beside them rapt in revery. On one
such occasion Severn came upon the young poet, with eyes shining
so brightly and face so lit up by some visionary rapture, that he
stole quietly away.^^
This rapture was the work, not of imitation, but of creation.
The graceful figures in Endymion and the Titanic majesty of the
divinities in Hyperion were inspired by the Elgin Marbles ; yet it
is impossible to say that Keats described any one figure or group.
Rather it was the grandeur and the repose of the Parthenon
sculptures which tranquillized his burning imagination and gave
his poetry a larger scope. Henceforward magnificent statuesque
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND 41 ?
scenes occur at intervals in his longer poems, to serve as points of
rest in the bewildering flow of imagery and colour. Similarly, his
Ode on a Grecian Urn, although it exquisitely evokes the delicate
grace and the vivid reality of Greek vases, is not a description of
any particular vase. It blends motives from at least twoa calm
religious rite, and an ecstatic dance with men or gods' in pursuit
of maidens loath. These are the two central elements in his own
life, his quest for tranquillity and his consuming passion. Many
different sources have been suggested for the single urn which
Keats imagined; 32 but what he created was a unique fusion of his
own mortal genius with the immortality of Greece.
In spite of his incomparable imagination, the gaps in Keats's
classical knowledge injured his poetry. He knew little of philosophy:
and so, in his longer poems, the gorgeous descriptions
sometimes seem to be, not the imaginative efflorescence of clear
original thinking, but decorations concealing the commonplace.
Like Shakespeare in his youth, he lacked the sense of tragedy.
And he did not grasp the large structural principles governing
Greek poetry. Shelley, who understood more about the architecture
of classical literature, built his own poems far better because
of that understanding; and every reader of Keats regrets that, as
soon as he goes beyond a simple story like The Pot of Basil, or a
brief lyric, he becomes diffuse, vague, and sometimes incomprehensible.
The severest judgement that could fairly be levelled
against Endymion is that its structure lacks the clarity which
illuminates even the most complex and imaginative Greek poems.
What Greek poetry and art meant to Keats he himself has told
us : they meant beauty. They meant the highest manifestations of
physical beauty, in women, in sea and sky and mountain and forest,
in flower-laden earth and winding grottoes, in noble statues and
immortal paintings; and they meant the spiritual beauty of friendship,
love, and the kind emotions, of imagination, and above all, of
poetry. These two aspects of beauty were, for Keats, indissolubly
connected. Physical beauty was the expression of spiritual beauty.
Love, imaginative ardour, poetry, were the response to physical
beauty. And yet physical beauty is limited and temporary.
Spiritual beauty is eternal. Unless they are linked together like
body and spirit, one and perhaps both are meaningless. Amoment,
whatever passion fills it, is only a bursting bubble unless it is
eternalized by the spirit. Keats had learnt that from the Greeks.
sm Ee
4i8 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND
Physical beauty exists only as a symbol of spiritual beauty, and as
a way to it. Like Endymion, it is always searching and always in
danger of death until it is transfigured by the kiss of an immortal.
Like the lovers on the Grecian um, it is transient and immemorable
unless it is made permanent by art and imagination. All things in
this world die ; only their beauty can become immortal. Keats says
beauty is truth, and truth is an eternal reality.
If Keats was the Shakespeare of this nineteenth-century
Renaissance, its Milton was Shelley. Not Wordsworth, greatly
though he admired Milton's patriotism and moral nobility; but
Shelley, the poet of grand cosmological visions, of conflicts between
eternal spirits of evil and spirits of good; the scholar who like
Milton read and re-read the classics until phrases, images, ideas,
characters, scenes, entire conceptions from them became part of
his own thought ; the critic who, like Milton, had a thorough grasp
of the principles of classical form, which served not to repress but
to guide his luxuriant imagination. In many things the two poets
would have been profoundly unsympathetic to each other, but
in many others they were closely akin. The author of Samson
Agonistes and Paradise Lost would have admired Prometheus
Unbound'^ and Shelley joined the author of Lycidas when he wrote
a Greek pastoral lament for the dead Keats.
Shelley was the result of an excellent classical education, acting
on a unique personality in a stirring age. He was a tremendous
reader. His friend Hogg says that at Oxford he often read sixteen
hours a day. He read at meals^not while he ate, but while the
food grew cold. He read walking about the streets and fields. He
read in bed as long as the candle lasted, and sometimes all night.
Not only that: he read the best books again and again. Tt would
be a curious problem, Hogg remarks, to calculate how often he
read the whole of Homer. And he read his favourites aloud to his
friends, sometimes translating as he went, tie was only thirty
when he died, but he had read much more widely and intensively
in Greek literature than many professional scholars.
After starting Latin with a tutor at seven or eight, he got an
admirable schooling at Eton, far better than Harrow could give
the rebellious Byron. He may have been unhappy among the boys,
but the masters trained him well. We hear that he wrote good
Latin verses, recited one of Ciceros speeches against Catiline on
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND 419
speech-day, tried his prentice hand on poetic translations of
Vergil, 3 3 and certainly remembered enough of Ovids Mefamorphoses
to borrow the charming name lanthe for Queen Mab
and for his baby daughter. Oxford seems to have carried him
on from Latin to Greek, not very thoroughlyhe read Plato in
translation onlybut certainly in such a way as to encourage him
to go on to the originals. The rest of his short life he spent on
completing this education.
Whatever Shelley loved came out in his poetry: although not
always directly, yet always clearly. It is easy to determine the >
classical authors whom he loved best. 3 s
First, Homer, whom he read through year after year. In 1818
he translated seven of the Homeric hymns into English verse.
Next, the Greek tragedians. Aeschylus, whom he preferred far
above the others, now at last returned to his rightful place in
literature. As early as 1809 Shelley was quoting him;^^ he translated
Prometheus Bound to Byron in 1816 and to Medwin in
1820-1. Aeschylus is in fact an overpoweringly great poet, whose
wings beat too strongly and soar too high for any but a bold spirit
to follow. Shelley admired his eloquencethe complex rhythms
of his choruses, his long bravura descriptions, the skill and daring
with which he forms new words to express the almost inexpressible
;
the profound and complex spiritual meanings carried by his
tragedies ; and the grand imagination which produced those vast
plots and superhuman characters. Shelleys own Hellas was a sort
of imitation of The Persians^ of Aeschylus 7 while m Prometheus
Unbound he wrote for Aeschylus Prometheus Bound a sequel
which actually surpassed the Greek poet in nobility, if not in
depth of thought.
When he was drowned, or murdered, he was reading Sophocles.
He preferred the Oedipus dramas, which he specifically mentions
in his preface to The Cend^ and Antigone^ whose heroine resembles
Beatrice.
For Euripides, whom he must have felt to be cynical and
negative, he cared less; but he translated Euripides Cyclops^ the
only complete satyr-play in existence.
In prose his favourite author was Plato, who would have liked
him as a pupil. Shelley translated The Symposium in 1818,
and later Ion, Menexmm, parts of The Republic, and two of
Platos love-poems. There have been other Platonists in English
420 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND
literature; Milton himself was one;39 but Shelley was the most
understanding. Two long prose essays were directly inspired by
his Platonic studies : A Discourse of the Manners of the Ancients
relative to the Subject of Love by The Symposium^ and A Defence
of Poetry by Platons attack on poetry in The Republic, In the latter,
he says that Plato was essentially a poet because of the splendour
of his imagery and the brilliance of his language; he overlooked
only the fact that Plato was also a dramatist. Philosophical ideas
derived from Plato coloured all his thought. Like Wordsworth,
he was impressed by the fine idea that the immortality of the soul
can be proved by the childs recollections of his antenatal life in
heaven. (Shelley took the word ante-natal from its inventor Godwin.)
And the doctrine of The Symposium that sexual love can be
made a path towards the perception of eternal beauty and goodness
appeared both in his life and in his poetry. Epipsychidion is a
rhapsody on Platonic themes.
Theocritus and the other bucolic poets he knew and in part
translated. Before written history began, the Greeks in Asia
celebrated an annual rite dedicated to mourning the dead summer;
they sang songs for it, and personified it as a beloved youth cut off
in the flower of his strength and beauty. Sometimes the youth was
called Adonis: the legend told of Venus love for him and of his
untimely death.^ The dirge they sang for him was later taken up
by the pastoral poets, who wrote of shepherds and nymphs mourning
for a fair youth who died too soon. For the pastoralist Bion,
a friend wrote such a lament; and many other poets elaborated
the same pattern, none more eloquently than Milton in Lycidas,
And now, when Keats was cut oflF in his springtime, Shelley took
the beautiful old form to make a threnody for him, changing the
name of Adonis to the more melodious Adonais. The same twothousand-
year-old themes reappear in Shelleys dirge, and yet
they are changed so as to become real for Keats.^^ Instead of
calling him an actual shepherd with Arcadian sheep, Shelley
speaks of
the quick Dreams . . .
Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams
Of his young spirit he fed.^^
Adonis was wounded to death by a wild boar in the mountains,
and his mourners sadly reproached him for his daring. So Shelley
asks:
19 421
rpjjg time of REVOLUTION: ENGLAND
Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men
Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart
Dare the unpastured dragon in his den ?
The dragon that Keats faced, and the poison which (like Bion) he
drank, were the reviewers and their deliberately deadly malice,43
Then, for a time, the brilliant imagination of the comic poet
Aristophanes fascinated Shelley.^ His greatest failure, Oedipus
Tyrannus or Swellfoot the Tyrant^ was an attempt at an Aristophanic
farce-comedy based on the scandalous affair of Queen
Caroline. The chorus, suggested to him by the comical noises of
a herd of pigs that passed his window, is a swinish multitude,
parallel to Aristophanes choruses of frogs, wasps, and birds ; but
the satiric intention is too ungenerous and crude to make the play
comparable with Aristophanes, and the form of Attic comedy was
impossible to resuscitate.
Shelleys favourite Latin poet was the young Stoic Lucan.^s
After reading the first four books of the Civil War, he wrote to
Hogg that it was a poem of wonderful genius, and transcending
Virgil. Later, in A Defence of Poetry, he said Lucan was a
mock-bird rather than a real poet. For all that, he admired
Lucans perfervid rhetoric, his hatred of tyrants, some aspects of
his Stoicism (for instance, the idea that the soul of man originates
from the divine fire^?)^ and his deeply poetic power of imagining
macabre scenes and beings. One of the most famous of these
evocations is Lucans description of the snakes that attacked
Catos legions in the African desert, inflicting not one but many
different kinds of death.^^ Their victims shrivelled away or burst
into flames, swelled up out of human semblance, or melted into
liquid matter. . . . These snakes have impressed many poets:
Dante brought the scene into Inferno, 24, Milton into his own
hell.^^ Shelley often mentions the monsters with their monstrous
names in The Revolt of Islam and Promethem Unbound The
awful figure of Demogorgon in Promethem Unbound apparently
originated from Lucan also;^^ and Lucan himself appears in
Adonais, to mourn Keats as another inheritor of unfulfilled
renown.
His friend Medwin said that Shelleys atheism began at school,
when he read Plinys chapters on the gods, in the Natural History^
and the poem of Lucretius, who as an Epicurean believed the gods
had nothing to do with the world.^^ The epigraph of Queen Mob
422 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND
is from Lucretius : otherwise there is little trace of his influence in
Shelley.
Vergil, with his pessimistic belief in the inevitability of war and
his praise of empire, could mean little to Shelley except as a nature
poet. But once at least their two spirits met. In the most famous
of his smaller poems, written at the end of the atrocious civil wars,
Vergil prophesied that the birth of a miraculous baby would bring
in a new era of peace and of life according to nature. The
thousand-year pattern of history, starting again in the Golden
Age, would unroll itself once more: the Argonauts would sail
again and there would be a second Trojan war. But he did not
pursue the idea of perpetual repetition, and lingered rather on the
theme of perpetual peace, unlaborious earth, and oarless sea.s5
This ideal was repeated by Shelley in the last chorus of Hellas :
The worlds great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn.
But, in the spirit of Vergil, he corrected his masters inconsistency,
crying:
Oh, write no more the tale of Troy,
If earth Deaths scroll must be! . . .
Oh, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Vivid as Shelleys imagination was, he could never have created
the superb scenery and majestic figures of his mature poems unless
he had studied Greco-Roman sculpture and architecture, and
unless he had lived in Rome.s^ In his preface to Prometheus Unbound
he says it was largely written among the ruins of Rome. Two
generations earlier Gibbon had imagined The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire while sitting among those same mins. Yet that
was a book of clear-sighted resignation and autumnal regret.
Shelleys drama was composed under the inspiration of The vigorous
awakening spring in that divinest climate, and the new life
with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication. The
contrast epitomizes the difference between the two eras. Gibbon
sits among the mins and looks backward towards the past. Shelley
finds in the mins an inspiration for the future ; his poetry is a rebirth
of beauty from the magnificent fragments of that immortal
yesterday which is eternally reborn.
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ENGLAND 423
For Shelley, the most important gift of the Greek spirit was
freedom. The Greeks practised genuine freedom of religion.
Although Socrates was executed on a charge including heresy,
that was at a time of extreme political and spiritual strain; and
Athens was far less affected by religious persecutions than all
modern states have been: one of the chief reasons for Shelley's
admiration of that great religious poet, Aeschylus, was that he
wrote a tragedy whose hero defies the tyrant, God. Political freedom
was the watchword of Athenian democracy, and another of
the greatest achievements of Greek civilization. As the combined
Greek states had resisted enslavement by the ancient Persians, so
Shelley hoped they would cast off the despotism of the modern
Turksand that all similar despotisms throughout the modern
world would be shattered for ever. Sexual freedom also, beyond
the limits set by
that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
was assumed by some of the speakers in Plato's dialogues and
practised by Shelley, in spite of its melancholy results. Finally,
all these freedoms were expressions of that central Greek principle,
the freedom of thought: which is based on the belief that man's
nature is, in itself, capable of the best. Shelley was like the Greeks
in saying Yes to nature : even to human nature.
Yet the Greeks meant to him much more than models to copy
or rivals to emulate. Thus, he scarcely ever imitated Homer, and
yet read him year after year. From Homer, as from the other great
classical writers, he took an influence too large to trace in any one
of his writings. Just as he preferred to write in a tower overlooking
the Mediterranean Sea, or among the flowers and arches of the
Colosseum, or with the mountains of northern Italy before his
eyes, so his constant study of the Greeks gave him examples of
greatness and companions in nobility.
5. ITALY
Alas, in agony is conceived and bom
the song of Italy.
LBOPARDr
The ferment of revolutionary reading and thinking was stirring
the states of Italy. But there the corruption of the late baroque age
had sunk more deeply. Morality, intellect, even will-power were
424 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ITALY
drugged by the division of the nation and its subjection to corrupt
oligarchies and petty tyrants. Therefore it was more difficult for
young writers to make their way towards the light. Those who did
fight their way up and out usually suffered terribly while doing so.
Their lives were torn with agonizing conflicts. They died in
gloomy or despairing silence. Their work is unlike the serene
lyricism of Keats and Chenier; it has none of the optimism of
Shelley and Goethe; it has not the sombre Mazeppa energy of
Byron. It is profoundly pessimistic. It is a cry from the abyss.
But even that cry is music.
We hear it in three voices : tragic, elegiac, and lyric.
Count Vittorio Alfieri was born of an old, noble, and wealthy
family in 1749, neglected by his relatives, and atrociously ill
educated. Although he was obviously talented and hungry for
spiritual food, he was starved. He did not even know Tuscan, the
literary language of Italyonly French, and a local Piedmontese
dialect. Plato says that a brilliant character always suffers the
worst corruption if misdirected and Alfieri was so corrupted.
As soon as he became his own master he plunged into dissipation,
which still was not enough to discharge his volcanic energies.
He rode swift horses ; he fought duels ; he had burning love-affairs
;
he travelled with demoniac restlessness throughout Europe, from
country to country, from Scotland to Russia, from Norway to
Portugal. . . .
In his twenties he began to educate himself^not planning his
future, but merely feeding his starved mind with Montesquieu and
Helvetius and Rousseau and Voltaire. Through them he met
Plutarch. He read the Parallel Lives all through four or five times.
Here, for the first time, his imagination found subjects worthy of
itself to work upon. In his fascinating autobiography he says that,
as he read, he would leap to his feet with admiration for such men
as Caesar, Bratus, and Cato, and then weep at his own misery in
being a subject of a tyrannical government. ^ His mind was finally
set in its right track by his reading of Montaigne (where he chafed
at not understanding the Latin and Greek quotations) and by the
educational and poetic encouragement given him by a wise
Portuguese abbe, whom he called a Montaigne in the flesh*.
In 1775 he wrote his first tragedy, Cleopatra, It was performed,
and warmly applauded. Yet he knew it was inadequate. He had
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ITALY 425
not said what he had in him to say. We can see why. He had no
models to work on, but the tragedies of Metastasio and Racine
(through which he could only distantly feel the force of Greco-
Roman drama) and the artificial and basically false tragedies of
Voltaire. He could read no Greek; and he knew scarcely anything
of the central tradition of literature, to which tragedy belongs. Yet
he divined it. He started a course of severe self-education, taking
a vow never again to speak or write French, studying Latin and
Tuscan, and working at his tragedies with all his characteristic
driving speed and energy.
The rest of his life was stirringly dramatichis elopement with
Prince Charlies wife, his renunciation of his estates in the king of
Sardinias territories as the price of freedom from the kings police,
his publication of satires pouring scorn on kings, nobles, middle
class, and commoners, his escape from the French revolutionary
Terror,^ his savage lampoons called The GauUhater {Misogallo) on
the invading troops of Napoleon, his learning Greek when nearly
fifty, his foundation of a knightly Order of Homer. ... It was
indeed more variously dramatic than his tragedies.
He produced twenty-two in all.^ They were far the best
tragedies ever composed in Italian, and marked a new high level
in his countrys dramatic literature. They deal with important
and interesting historical subjects, ranging from Agamemnon to
Lorenzo de Medici, from Saul to Mary Queen of Scots; the
characters are clearly drawn and the emotions boldly differentiated
;
the medium is blank verse, energetic and sometimes harsh, but
firmly controlled. Byron, who in many ways resembles Alfieri,
often gives us the feeling that his eloquence has broken into a wild
gallop and run away with him. Sometimes he even lashes it on.
Alfieri rides a steed quite as violent; it is black and tireless; but he
has a tight grip on its reins.
His tragedies have been accused of being undramatic. Some of
them are: despite their nobility, these are his less satisfactory
works. Two different reasons account for this. One is Alfieris
own resolution to preserve the unity of action by cutting out all
episodes and sub-plots^not as a gesture of subservience to
Aristotle, but in order to concentrate on heroism. The other is the
habit common to nearly all the writers of the revolutionary era:
he makes long speeches on important idealspatriotism, tyranny,
filial loveand substitutes these for action. The essence of drama
426 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ITALY
is change. Yet in 1780 the utterance of a bold speech on tyranny
was so novel that, even if it did not advance the plot, it seemed to
be dramatic.
Still, Alfieri wrote some fine plays: for instance, Myrrha, a
powerful variation on the Oedipus theme, in which a girl falls
hopelessly in love with her own father;^ Metope, a tense intrigue
in which (quite credibly) a mother almost orders her own son
executed and a superb Saul, showing the struggle between
violent madness and wise sanity, both within the spirit of the king
himself, and in the conflict between the influence of his daughter,
his son, and his successor David, and the power of his evil
minister, Abner.
The chief importance of Alfieris tragedies is that they put a
revolutionary message into a classical form. Two-thirds of his
plays are on themes from Greco-Roman history and legend.^ All
are in a pattern which he assimilated as closely as he could to that
of classical tragedy. Nearly all contain bold denunciations of
tyranny, gallant eulogies of freedom. Sometimes the heroes are
too whitely good, and the despots too blackly evil; but not always;
and in truth the frontier between tyranny and heroism is the frontier
between black and white, between bad and good. The purity of
his tragic form enhances the power of Alfieris social protest, in
which he is a precursor of Shelley.
The form in which he wrote was derived indirectly from Greek
and Roman tragedy. But the tragedies which he knew best were
those of Racine and Voltaire, Of all the ancient poets, he was
closest to Seneca; yet he did not study him as carefully as the
Renaissance playwrights did. Formally, what he did was to
simplify and dignify baroque tragedy into something more truly
classical.
The content of Alfieri's message is bold and simple: down with
tyranny! Tyranny is power exercised for the sake of its possessor.
Usually one man makes himself a tyranny; but a family, a group,
or a classeven the working classcan be a tyrant. In this belief
he had predecessors in Montesquieu and Helvetius, and a close
ally in Andre Chenier. Before Alfieri published his treatise
On the Prince and Literature (1786), he read it to Ch6nier, who
expressed similar ideals next year in his own Essay on the Perfection
and Decadence of Literature and his idyll Liberty Both Chenier
and Alfieri equated liberty and literature. Without liberty, they
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ITALY 427
held, virtue was impossible; and without virtue, great writers
could not exist. Alfieris own violent imperious character made
him feel for the tyrant^which he himself might easily have been ^both interest and hatred.
Relentless will; terrifying cruelty,
exercised even against his own family ; serpentine treacherythese
are the tyrants qualities. Among his subjects they breed abject
fear, unprincipled treachery, a corrupt reverence for money, and
the abolition of all standards of morality ;^
3
in some, a gloomy
melancholy begotten of the certainty that a full free life is impossible,
and in heroes, a determined revolt, all the more resolute
if it is doomed. In that resolution Alfieri summed up the best of
his own revolutionary era, and at the same time re-created the
spirit of classical tragedy.
Alfieris dramas had many imitatorssome, like Vincenzo
Monti (the Italian Southey), more successful in their day than
Alfieri himself. The best poet among them was the Venetian Ugo
Foscolo, who was born in the Greek island of Zante in 1778, and
was to die an exile in London in 1827. Unimportant though his
plays were in contrast with his other work, they resounded with
the same revolutionary and nationalist ardour as those of his
master. But like so many others, Foscolo was cruelly disappointed
by the greatest of all revolutionists, Napoleon Bonaparte. Everyone
knows how Napoleon at first appeared as the liberator of
oppressed nations, the destroyer of tyrants ; and then as the leader
of French nationalist aggression; and lastly as the betrayer of
republicanism, the assassin of liberty, the emperor of the French
and almost of all Europe. Everyone knows how Beethoven
dedicated his Heroic Symphony to the liberator, and then, when
he heard of Napoleons new dynastic plans, tore off the dedicatory
page and inscribed the work to the memory of a great man. Everyone
knows how Wordsworth, after hailing the rising sun of
liberty

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven

saw it darkened by the tempests of ambition and war. From

Poland to Spain, the same disillusionment sickened the youth of
the whole continent.
Foscolo fought as a volunteer in Napoleons armies. In 1797
he saluted him in an Ode to Bonaparte the Liberator. A few weeks
428 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ITALY
later Napoleon sold the territory of Foscolos homeland, Venice,
to Austria, by the treaty of Campo Formio. The ensuing despair
of Foscolos generation was immortalized in a novel of unhappy
love, mental agony, and suicide. The Last Letters of lacopo Ortis
an extension of Goethes Sorrows of Werther beyond individualism
into patriotism.
Foscolo was a competent classical scholar. Like Chenier, he
heard modern Greek spoken around him in his childhood; like
Chenier, he went on to study ancient Greek with taste and erudition.
Graceful echoes of Greek and Roman poetry can be heard
even in his slighter personal lyrics. His greatest poem, however,
is not a chord of echoes, but a complete and vital interpenetration
of the ancient and modern worlds ; an assertion that history is one
of the values we live by ; a claim that the past is not dead while it
inspires the present; a warning that the present is dead if it forgets
its past. This is his famous elegy On Tombs.
In 1806 the new revolutionary government issued an order
designed to introduce equality and fraternity among the dead. It
enjoined that all bodies without exception should be buried in
a public cemetery, under tombstones of exactly the same size,
with inscriptions censored and co-ordinated by the local authorities.
Foscolo might have viewed this as a piece of petty tyranny,
and denounced it in a bitter satire. If he had, his poem would
scarcely have survived longer than the ordinance which provoked
it. Instead, he meditated on the whole context of the order, until
he reached the broadest and most deeply human meaning of the
custom of burial. Tombs are built (he reflected) and gravestones
are carved with names and titles, as a symbol of the continuing
life of the dead in the minds of those who survive. They should
not bear images of woe and dismal skeletons;^ 7 they should be
among evergreen trees, green as a deathless memory, or in gardens
outside the city as they are in Britain. Above all, the tombs where
great men lie are a focus of national life, and an encouragement to
greatness among the living. It would be shameful for Parini^^ to
lie beside some criminal ; and the Holy Cross church in Florence,
which holds the graves of Machiavelli, of Michelangelo, of
Galileo, yes, and now of Alfieri, is one of the greatest sanctuaries
of Italy. So it has always been. Across the Aegean Sea He tombs
which the Muses love to haunt, A blind man once wandered
among these tombs, and they told him their story, and with his
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ITALY 429
song he did homage to the shades that lived there. That song made
Hector of Troy famous
wherever men revere and mourn the blood
shed for the fatherland, while still the sun
illumines the misfortunes of mankind.
In form this fine poem is a descendant of the Greco-Roman
elegy. Its modern ancestors are the English eighteenth-century
elegiac meditations: Blairs The Grave, Youngs Night Thoughts,
Grays Elegy written in a Country Churchyard; and their successors
in France, the reflective poems of Legouve and Delille. It is
tempting to see On Tombs as a letter, rather than an elegy : it is
in blank verse, and is addressed to the poet Pindemonte, who replied
in an Epistle. But the Roman poets also addressed elegies to
sympathetic friends, and the deeply imaginative and emotional
tone of the poem makes it an elegyone of the noblest and broadest
in literature.
Its thought begins with the poets own day, and moves back
through the history of Italys greatness to the source of the central
stream in European culture: the Trojan war and the poems of
Homer. As a meditation on the fact that time becomes eternity, it
is therefore a descendant of Dantes Comedy. But it is a pagan
poem, not a Christian poem.^o Foscolo does not speak of the
Christian doctrine of death and eternal life. He knows that it is
possible to think of graves as reminders of mortality; but he
believes that to do this is almost as inadequate as to demand that
all graves should be equal and indistinguishable. That is to deny
much of the highest of which humanity is capable. The present
contains the past and lives by it. Tombs, like poems, are a record
of past greatness and a stimulus to future achievement. The
Muses both remember and inspire.
Although Foscolos elegy was a protest against a decree of the
revolutionary government, he himself was none the less a poet of
revolution: for he was calling on the Italians to break away from
their ignoble lassitude, and to make themselves a new nation,
worthy of the magnificent past which linked them with Roman
gravity and Greek heroism.
Count Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), the saddest lyric poet of
Italy, grew up in a loveless provincial home where his only friends
430 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ITALY
were books. Like Feaelon and Gibbon, he educated himself by
devouring his fathers library. Unlike them both, he ruined his
health by excessive study. This, with his loneliness and his
mothers neglect, permanently darkened his soul.
Before he was twenty, he made himself a distinguished Greek
scholar.^^ At fifteen, he composed a history of astronomy. At
sixteen, he wrote a translation of two works by the sixth-century
historian Hesychius, with a biographical essay; a Latin commentary,
with notes and emendations, on Porphyrys life of the
Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus; and a Latin commentary
on several important rhetoricians of the imperial period.^^ At
seventeen he produced an Essay on the Popular Errors of the
Ancients, By the age of twenty he had written more works of
scholarship than some modern professors do in their entire lives.
But he did not feel himself physically and mentally strong enough
to embark on a long career of research; and he found that hardly
anyone in Italy cared for scholarship. Restless like Alfieri, but far
less vigorous, and shackled by dependence on his parents, he
travelled (after being set free) from city to city, finding no one to
talk to except an occasional foreign savant like Niebuhr, or, rarely,
an Italian litterateur like Giordani.^3 His own poetry has many
poignant images of loneliness and homelessness: the solitary
sparrow; the wandering shepherd on the plains of Asia; the
broom growing alone on the slopes of a volcano. And his lyrics
are full of questions^urgent and sad questions which no one
hears, and which are never answered.
Like so many of the poets we have studied, Leopardi began
writing by translating classical authors, and then by trying to rival
them. At seventeen he translated the poems of Moschus and
the little mock epic, The Battle of Frogs and Mice?^ At eighteen
he ventured on an experimental translation of part of the Odyssey.
This was his first published work. It was received with cold
indifference or sarcastic laughter.^s
Early in 1817, aspiring higher, he issued translations of a Hymn
to Neptune and two anonymous odes from the Greek, with
illustrative notes. There was no such hymn; there were no such
odes. Leopardi invented them. In his notes he said the author
of the hymn was not Simonides or Myroin fact, it looks like the
work of a talented pupil of Callimachus. The short odes^which
are characteristically addressed To Love and To the Moon
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ITALY 431
Leopardi said he 'would gladly ascribe to Anacreon. The publication
of these innocent forgeries marked an important turningpoint
in his life. He already felt he could at least equal the scholars
of his own time. Now he set out to equal the poets of Greece, in
preparation for his own work in the same field, lyric poetry. Just
in the same way fifty years before, another unhappy boy called
Chatterton had produced original poems of remarkable merit, and
disguised them as relics of the past he admired.
As he came to manhood, Leopardi made the same breaks as his
contemporary Shelley and other young poets of his epoch. He
gave up Christianity, and became a free-thinker, with an emotional
preference for the Greek divinities.^^ He became, for a brief time,
a social reformer, opposed to the forces of conservatism and
repression. And he sympathized with the growing movement of
nationalism^not merely as resistance to foreign aggrandizement,
but as a positive revival of the intelligence, the eloquence, and the
historical sense of the Italians. In his first original poems, three
important and closely linked lyrics, he evoked different aspects of
the new renaissance he hoped for. These were To Italy^ On the
monument of Dante^ and To Angelo Mai after his Discovery of
Cicerds ^On the Commonwealth! The thought of these lyrics was
closely akin to that of Foscolos elegy on tombs. They lamented
the decay and ruin of Italy, her moral disintegration, the loss of
that courage and resolution which she ought to have inherited
from ancient Rome, and the misdirected heroism which led her
young volunteers to fight in Russia with Napoleon rather than in
their own land for liberty. They reminded Italians of the nobility
of Dante, The unconquered enemy of Fortune, the sweet melancholy
of Petrarch, the exploratory courage of Columbus, the
imagination of Ariosto, the infelicity of melodious Tasso, and, last,
the proud energy of Alfieri.^^ They said, and repeated, that men
cannot live by the present alone, for the present alone, without
becoming as dull and cowardly as a ruminating beast. Heroism
is built on history. Modern men should think shame to be less
heroic than Leonidas and his few Spartans, facing the overwhelming
power of PersiaA^
But disillusionment came upon Leopardi, as upon other
reformers. Added to his loneliness, his ill health, the coldness and
stinginess of his family, and his unhappiness in love, it brought
him to a depth of despair more profound than anything we have
432 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ITALY
seen among the poets of his time. He reached the clear-eyed
hopeless agony of De Quinceys Our Lady of Darkness
:
She droops not; and her eyes rising so high might be hidden by
distance. But, being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the
treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery,
that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night,
for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground/^o
In its name he pronounced that life was meaningless ; or, if it had
a meaning, that it was cruel. The ideal of progress was a silly
delusion. Love itself was an experience so overpowering that it
must end in its twin brother, death. Once, brooding on this, he
recalled the Greek poetess Sappho, who in one legend had killed
herself for love : he pictured her standing on the moonlit precipice,
reflecting on her implacable sufferings and the agonizing death of
her hopes, and then hurling herself into the nothingness which is
freedom. 32 No other revolutionary poet expressed such abysmal
despair, although many (Byron, Heine, Holderlin) felt it. In
Leopardi it turned into the objective judgement that life, in this
world, is hopeless. He has often been viewed as a precursor of the
philosopher of pessimism, Schopenhauer. Through Schopenhauer
the line leads from Leopardi to Nietzsche ; while as a poet he is the
ancestor of James Thomson {The City of Dreadful Night) and
Charles Baudelaire. 3 3
As Leopardi matured, his pessimism grew into something
approaching a complete philosophy, which he expounded in his
Short Works on Morals^^a series of brief dialogues in the manner
of Lucian. But Lucianos dialogues have a mocking smile, sometimes
slightly twisted, Leopardis have a grin like a skull. There are
conversations between an embalmer and his mummies; between
Death and Fashion ; between a lonely Icelander and Nature^not
mother Nature, but stepmother Nature, indifferent or cruel.
There is a long discussion on suicide, between the Neoplatonists
Plotinus and Porphyry, and another on the longing for death which
Leopardi so often felt: he himself appears in it, under the sombre
name of Tristan, The note of ghastly humour which returns again
and again like a facial tic is that which we find in the tales of Poe
and Hoffmann, in some of the prose poems of Baudelaire, and in
the life and personality of the demoniac Paganini. The philosophy
of the dialogues is Leopardis own materialist conception of life.
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ITALY 433
The world is only a ball of earth and steam, he tells us, and we men
are only like the animals and insects, the trees and fishes, which it
has produced. Why then, he continues, are we tortured with
emotions like hope and love? with aspirations like fame and
immortality ? Why are we alive at all ? All our activities, our life
itself, are as purposeless as the dance of gnats in the summer air,
and less beautiful, and more painful. This might have been true of
Leopardi himself, had he not written his exquisite lyrics.
Leopardis thought is so much his own that we can scarcely lay
a finger on any part of his work and say This is classical, that is
modern, this again comes from his reading in the Renaissance. It
has all passed through the furnace of his own mind and been
transformed there. 3 5 In form his dialogues are Greek. His poems,
on the other hand, are free variants of the long-stanza Italian lyrics
{canzont) which developed out of folk-song and were used by
dozens of poets after Petrarch set the model. Their language has
fairly frequent latinisms, which give it austere dignity rather than
the appearance of affectation. There are important references to
Greek and Roman myth and history, which Leopardi connects
closely with modern life as example and inspiration. There are
also several echoes of classical thought, sometimes direct quotations:
as when, in his fine poem On an Ancient Grave-relief, he
reflects
;
Never to see the light
would, I believe, be best

taking both thought and word from a tragedy of Sophocles.

Sappho^s Last Song is on the same situation as Ovids Letter of
Sappho to Phaon, although it is far less brilliant and more sincere
and the pathetic Dream, in which the dead girl whom he had loved
at a distance appears to him, restates the theme of one of Propertius
finest elegies, which reached him through Petrarchs Triumph of
DeathJ^
His closest links in classical literature are with Lucretius the
Epicurean, who believed that creation and the life of man were
a pure accident, having no significance beyond itself; that nature
was neither kindly nor hostile to us, but indifferent ; and that the
only sensible purpose of living was to attain, through well-spaced
and well-chosen pleasures and an intelligent understanding of the
universe, a calm and reassured happiness. Like Lucretius,
5076 p f
434 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: ITALY
Leopardi is a materialist; like him, he admires the charm of the
Greek deities, although he knows that they have really no effective
connexion with our world like him, he looks at human excitements
and efforts with astonished pity, as we do at an ant-hill
struck by a falling apple.^^ But^here is the fundamental difference
not only between Leopardi and Lucretius, but between many
modern poets and nearly all Greco-Roman poets^the conclusion
which Leopardi draws is that life, because of its futility, is a cruel
agony where death is welcome ; and the conclusion of Lucretius is
that life, if properly understood and managed, is still liveable. Even
Greek tragedy does not mean that life is hopeless ; but that, at its
most terrible, it still contains nobility and beauty. Perhaps because
of the sickness which afflicted both Leopardis body and his soul,
he was never able to fight through to this truth. At least, not
consciously. Yet, as an artist, he grasped it. His chief debt to
classical poetry and his truest claim to equal the great lyric poets
is that he sees his tragic subjects with sculptural clarity, and describes
them with that combination of deep passion and perfect
aesthetic control which we recognize as Greek.
6. CONCLUSION
It is right that our survey of the revolutionary generations should
end with Leopardi, in mortal sickness and despair. So many
writers of that time died sadly young, like Keats ; were killed, like
Chenier; went mad, like Holderlin; or (quite as significantly)
suffered the death of their imagination, survived by their bodies,
their reputations, and their interminable flow of words. The
revolutionary era was a brief meteoric blaze, illumining the whole
sky, burning away neglected relics, casting unreally dark shadows,
lighting up beauties long unperceived, and ending in what looked
like sombre gloom but was really the light of common day. We
have already compared it to the comet-like brilliance of the Renaissance.
Yet, like the Renaissance, it did not end abruptly. While
some of the new forces it released were checked, and others were
diverted, many flowed on into the century which succeeded it : and
one of these was the deeper understanding of Greco-Roman art,
literature, and thought.
It has been impossible to discuss all the currents which rushed
into the literature of this era. Some of them are now difficult to
19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: CONCLUSION 435
admire, such as Orientalism, and Ossian with his one-stringed
harp. Others have grown to be dangerously powerful. Nationalism,
the cult of the Folk, has produced new and valuable differentiations
in modern thought, and has helped to eradicate many intolerable
oppressions. But human civilization, which is a higher ideal than
national civilizations, is now in danger of being destroyed by them.
Those who believe it is more important to appreciate American
novels, English poetry, French criticism, German philosophy,^
Russian music, Bolivian science, Tibetan theology, than to admire
and improve the thought of humanity as a whole (or as a few large
interrelated and co-operative wholes) are quite capable of reducing
mankind to a mass of mutually unintelligible and hostile tribes.
It has also been impossible to discuss, even to name, all the
writers and artists who, partially under Greek and Roman
inspiration, contributed to the revolutionary era. Some of those
neglected are highly interesting: for instance, the Austrian dramatist
Grillparzer (1791-1872), who made his name with a trilogy on
the Argonauts, and wrote a fine series of lyrics expressing the
typical disillusionment of that generation, under the name chosen
by the exiled Ovid, Laments from the Black Sea.^ Some belong to
nations which stood rather on the edge of the main stream, and
which therefore reproduced in their own languages inspirations
which first awakened elsewhere. Such were the Polish poets
Casimir Brodzinski and Kajetan Kozmian, who put the spirit of
the Polish country-side into Theocritean idylls and Vergilian
georgics ; and Zygmunt Krasinski, who wrote a drama, Irydion^ on
the revolt of Greece against the Romansas Holderlin wrote of
his Hyperion rebelling against the Turks. Some also are less
richly creative writers than Goethe, Chateaubriand, Keats, and
others we have discussed. 3 Some^for reasons which varied with
each individualdeliberately turned away from Greek and Roman
influence, although they often felt its power. Horace came in for
much mistaken hatred in France, as the supposed instigator of
Boileau and the purveyor of literary rules.^ And the apocalyptic
Blake, while constantly using Greek sculpture as models and
inspirations for his drawings, cried The Classics! it is the Classics,
and not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars!

a sentence which has very little meaning except as a contradiction

of Gibbon.3
A creative era is one in which a large number of powerful
436 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION: CONCLUSION
spiritual forces flow together, strengthening, renewing, and enriching
one another. Such an era was the time of revolution. It
has been shown that it was not anti-classical, but more deeplypenetrated
with the classical spirit than the age preceding it.
Among all the energies that made it, the current of Greek and
Roman culture was only one ; but it was very powerful, very varied,
very fertile. It moved young writers and thinkers to strive for
political freedom; religious liberty; aesthetic perfection; beauty,
sensuous and spiritual; beauty in an external nature which was
not dead or animally alive, but inhabited by spirits of superhuman
strength and loveliness. For some, it provided an escape from the
hateful world of materialism and oppressionand this, we shall
see, it continued to provide throughout the nineteenth century.
Some were inspired by it to emulate the ideal of a balanced
psychical and physical life which sings in Greek poetry and shines
out from the Greek statues. And some, the greatest, took from their
studies of antiquity a deeper sense of one of the central truths in
human life^the fact that civilization is a continuous achievement.
20
PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
I
N one of his most famous poems, Wordsworth accuses his contemporaries
of killing their own souls. They think of nothing,
he says, but making money and spending it ; and in exchange for
money they have given away their hardened and worthless hearts.
They cannot feel the grandeur of nature : of the moonlit sea, the
winds, the calm. In a sudden fit of exaltation he shouts that he
would rather be a pagan, believing in the divinities of Greece

for the Greeks not only felt the beauty of the external world, but
peopled it with spirits.
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, . . .
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
This poem was written in 1806.^ It was one of many attacks on
contemporary materialism delivered by the revolutionary poets.
Other abuses of the human spirit stirred them to protest also:
religious oppression, arid social convention, survivals of feudalism.
But after they died, the generations of writers who succeeded them
saw the forces of rebellion divide and dwindle, and, with the
growth of nineteenth-century capital and industry, the power of
materialism increase. They saw also, or thought they saw, that
Christianity, once the champion of the poor and oppressed, was
becoming the stronghold of money, social privilege, and the timid
or sordid tricks by which they are acquired and kept. The
nineteenth century was a great time for money-making, but for
thinkers, poets, and artists, for men who loved nature and
humanity, it was hell.
Materially also the nineteenth century was ugly. The sky had
become dark with smoke; the air was thick with factory-fog and
rasped by the roar and chatter of machinery. Within a few years,
smiling valleys were turned into acres of slums, quiet moors were
ripped open, green fields were buried under barren slag. Drawings
of interiors, pictures of the homes of the rich (even of such
artists as Wagner and Zola), photographs of streets and crowds,
show us scenes of appalling hideousness. Millions of repulsive
438 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
buildings and towns, brick churches and dark Satanic mills,
constructed in that period, still afflict our eyes.
The result was that most of the great nineteenth-century
writers hated and despised the world in which they lived. Again
and again they said so, in poetry, in criticism, in prose fiction,
and in philosophy. Other ages have provoked revolt among
artists, but it is difficult to think of any other period in which
so many talented authors have so unanimously detested their
entire surroundings and the ideals of the people among whom
they were forced to exist. Perhaps the twelfth-century satirists
and student tramps hated their own times as much, but who
else?
Many poets of the nineteenth century felt it was impossible to
write anything beautiful about the life they saw around them. They
cried:
Mist clogs the sunshine.
Smoky dwarf houses
Hem me round everywhere
;
A vague dejection
Weighs down my soul.^
They turned away in disgust from the industrial cities which were
growing up around them, from the vulgar books, paintings, and
plays which delighted their contemporaries, and from the
materialist ideals which they thought dominated the age. They
looked to other lands and other ages, beautiful in themselves and
made lovelier by distance. And often they turned towards Rome
and Greece, Oftennot always. There were other regions full
of beauty and energy to which they could escape. Gauguin went
to Tahiti. Rimbaud went to Java, and then to east Africa. Pierre
Loti and others went to the Orient. De Quincey and Baudelaire
went to the artificial paradise of drugs. Many went back to the
romantic Middle Ages. But none of these provided such a large,
consistent, and satisfying refuge as the culture of Greece and
Rome.
Nineteenth-century writers admired this culture for two chief
reasons : because it was beautiful, and because it was not Christian.
They saw their own civilization as squalid and greedy; they
praised the Greeks and Romans as noble and spiritual. They felt
contemporary Christianity to be. mean, ugly, and repressive; they
admired the cults of antiquity as free, strong, and graceful. Look20.
PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 439
ing at the soot-laden sky, pierced by factory chimneys and neo-
Gothic steeples, they exclaimed
:
Great God! Id rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn. 3
There are, then, two types of classicizing art and thought in the
nineteenth century, which can be distinguished by two symbolic
names : Parnassus and Antichrist. Both attitudes sometimes appear
in the same writer, and even in the same book. But usually they
are distinguishable; and they differ so deeply in intention and
result that they should be separately discussed.
PARNASSUS
Unworldly aesthetes and intellectuals are often said to live in an
ivory tower.^ It is a fine phrase, but Parnassus is a better symbol
for the nineteenth-century idealism which loved Greco-Roman
culture. The name was given by a group of French poets to the
periodical in which, between 1866 and 1876, they published their
work: Le Parnasse contemporain, or The Modem Parnassus. Parnassus
is the mountain inhabited by the Muses^who are not
goddesses of poetry alone, but patrons of history, philosophy,
science, drama, in fact of everything in civilization that is above
material concerns. Parnassus is a mountain : far away from cities,
part of wild nature, above the world; loftier, more beautiful,
stronger, more real than a tower of ivory. And it is not a mountain
of Hebrew or Christian legend, the secret top of Oreb, or of
Sinai, 5 nor a medieval stronghold like Tintagel, nor a friendly
peak in modern lands. ^ It is a remote mountain in Greece. The
French gave its name to the hill where the universities, the art,
and the thought of Paris are assembled. It is Montparnasse, which
stands in perpetual opposition to the hill on the more modern (and
materialistic) right bank, crowned by the Christian church of
Sacre-Coeur and bearing the medieval name of Martyrs Mount.
Although the word Parnassian has been kept for the relatively
small group of French poets whojoined in publishing the magazine
mentioned above, the symbol is too broadly useful to be confined
to them ; and many of the ideals in which they believed were shared
by poets in other countries.^ We may therefore call the whole
movement to assert the beauty of Greek and Latin aesthetic ideals,
in opposition to those of the nineteenth century, Parnassian.
440 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
Much of its energy was, as we have said, devoted to opposing
naaterialisrfi. But it was a complex movement, and, like most important
spiritual events, cannot adequately be described as reaction.
Looked at from another point of view, it was an expression of dislike
for the romantic ideals which grew exuberant and extravagant after
the age of revolution. Many of the Parnassians felt that, if a millowning
millionaire was disgusting, a Byronic corsair was ridiculous
and that a modern corrugated-iron chapel was no more repulsive
than a medieval cathedral full of hideous gargoyles and exaggerated
saints. Therefore some of the Parnassian writers despised
romanticism for distorting life, as they despised industrialism for
degrading it. What they maintained was (they believed) neither
reaction nor escapism, but a group of positive aesthetic and spiritual
ideals, which, discovered in Greece, were the foundation of
all civilization worthy of the name, and were eternally true.
The first Parnassian ideal which claims attention is emotional
control. Although its expression is restrained, the emotion of
Greek poetry is none the less real and intense. But it is more
genuine, more central, than violent expressions of extravagant
feeling ; it is usually more beautiful ; and even at its wildest it does
not degrade human dignity. For example, three of Victor Hugos
novels deal with loveits idealism, the gulfs which separate lover
and beloved, and the renunciation which in great love rises above
desire. The characters he chooses to symbolize these aspects of
love are a hideous deaf hunchback in love with a homeless gipsy,
a nobleman kidnapped in childhood and mutilated into a perpetual
grinning mask, but beloved by a blind girl, and a workman who,
after carrying out single-handed a technical feat of superhuman
strength and skill to win a girl, finds that she loves someone else, and
commits suicide by sitting in a rock chair to be covered by the tide,
while she sails past him with her husband.^ Dramatic ideas, these,
and expressed with tremendous vigour; unforgettable; but unreal.
From such exaggerations of desire and suffering, Parnassian
restraint was a relief. Edgar Allan Poe, although himself a wildly
romantic writer, once felt that relief. In his lyric To Helen,
addressed to the girl whose name and face image the perfection of
Greek beauty, he said that her serene loveliness had brought him
home, a
weary way-worn wanderer, . . .
On desperate seas long wont to roam.
20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 441
He had been on the romantic adventure. He had felt the visionary
magic
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.^
But after those wild visions, he found gentle beauty and a sense of
repose in
the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
The contrast between the frenetic emotionalism of such poets
as Swinburne and the serenity which produces saner thought and
better poetry was put by Matthew Arnold (1822-88) in a fine poem
called Bacchanalia; or^ The New Age, He describes an evening,
after a hot summer day, with the perfume of the flowers coming
out and the stars rising slowly; and then, suddenly, an irruption of
wild maenads rioting through the quiet sheaves and tearing out
the flowers from the hedge. He asks the shepherd (who is himself
or any kindred poet) why he does not join the revel, pipe for the
dance
:
Glow not their shoulders smooth.?
Melt not their eyes ?
Is not, on cheeks like those,
Lovely the flush ?

But the shepherd answers

:
Ah, so the quiet was!
So was the hush!
The same ideal was summed up by the leader of the French
Parnassian group, Charles-Marie-Rene Leconte de Lisle (1818-94),
in the word impassibility. Similarly, in criticism, the latinist Desire
Nisard (1806-88) wrote a brilliant essay on the later Latin poets,
charging Hugo and his followers with being degenerate writers
and distorting the standards of literature, as Lucan and Statius
had done in the decadence of Rome.^^ And in Italy, Giosue
Carducci (1835-1907), although a revolutionary liberal and an
admirer of Goethe and Hugo, denounced the romantic attitude
to life. In Classicism and Romanticism^'^ he compares classicism to
the rich strong life-giving sun, and romanticism to the morbid
moon, which ripens neither flower nor fruit, but looks down with
most pleasure on graveyards and on skulls less white than its own
dead face. (It is difficult not to remember Leopardis many poems
443 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
written in the white glare of the moon, that planet of love and
death.) In painting, the same ideals of restraint, conveyed likewise
in Greco-Roman symbols, were expressed by Davids pupil
Ingres, and by the tranquil visions of Puvis de Chavannes. Ingress
Apotheosis of Homer proclaims the idealism of Greek thought
and Greek art; but it mirrors only half of the Hellenic spirit.
The other half appears in his superb nude. The Spring, which
shows a Greek nymph brought close to us by modern tenderness
and realism. Her dawning smile, and the little flowers at her feet,
make her (like Botticellis Venus) something more than a copy of
an antique model, and exemplify once more the inextinguishable
vitality of Greek myth.
Although Greco-Roman poetry laid down no absolute laws of
poetic structure, yet its control of form, and its avoidance of the
extravagant, vague, and unbalanced, are impressive ideals. Therefore
the Parnassians admired and practised severity ofform. They
felt that Victor Hugo and other writers of his type were deliberately
cultivating length, incoherence, and eccentricity. Hugo would
write a poem with lines three syllables long, or fill chapter after
chapter of a novel with lectures on natural history and meditations
about God ; he and his followers would never use one word if ten
would do as well. In order not to make these extreme errors, the
Parnassians cultivated precision, clarity, and patterns which were
regular and traditional rather than novel or extravagant.
In this field the most impressive of their works is The Trophies
a single book of sonnets, perfectly regular and rigidly controlled,
by Jose-Maria de Heredia (i842--i905).^2 Beginning with the
earliest legends of Greece, and passing through Rome to the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance, it freezes the whole of western European
history in a series of vividly coloured and dazzlingly bright
crystals, each of exactly the same form and each showing some
heroic enterprise or moment of beauty at its extremest intensity.
Thus, one sonnet sums up the love, the luxury, and the catastrophe
of Antony and Cleopatra by describing one embrace in which
Antony, gazing deep into Cleopatras blue eyes flecked with gold,
sees
a whole vast sea, with routed ships in flight.^3
This one book was like the great single works on which classical
poets spent a lifetime, working with what we now think of as a
20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 443
scientists self-forgetfulness to cut out the inessential and the
false. It made Heredia a member of the Academy, and, in an
even greater sense, an immortal.
His contemporary Carducci had, some years earlier, published
a collection of Barbarian Odes, in the manner of Horace, on Greek
and Italian themes. The rhythms are a curious adaptation of
Horaces metres, not as Horace himself sang them, but as they
would be spoken by someone reading with the stress-accent of late
Latin and modern Italian. The benefit of using difiicult metres of
that type, modelled on rigid forms in which great poetry has
already been written, is that it compels the poet to combine
intensity of feeling and economy of language with extreme clarity
of thought. In Carduccis first poemreminiscent of Horaces
I hate the vulgar mob, and fence it off

he compares ordinary poetry with a prostitute, and the complex

forms he himself strives to master with a nymph caught on the
mountains by a faun, and all the lovelier because she is so
difficult to subdue and resists so passionately.^'
This time, however, the admirers of Greek and Roman art did
not make the baroque mistake of educing any rules from their
models. The Parnassians saw that the essence of classical form is
not the use of traditional laws, but the acceptance of discipline, not
the slavish copying of a pattern, but the subordination of personal
fancies to a supra-personal tradition. Theophile Gautier (1811-72)
stated this in a fine poem whose form is none the less austere
because it is not classical in origin
No false restraints put on!
Yet, to walk steadily,
Muse, you must don
a narrow buskin high.
(The buskin was the thick-soled boot worn by Greek tragic actors
to increase their height: hence the symbol of tragedy, and of high
poetic standards.)
The same poem ends with a statement of the ruling ideal of the
Parnassiansone which was not confined to France by any means,
nor even to literature, but spread to every western country and to
all the arts. This is that beauty is an independent value.
444 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
It was not a new idea. But it was proclaimed with great fervour
by the Parnassians, because its falsity was either assumed by their
opponents without argument, or preached in those tones of unctuous
self-assurance which are so familiar in the nineteenth century.
It was a defiance of the materialists, who thought that food,
lodging, and medicine were all that man needed, or who, themselves
rich, enjoyed nothing but the parade of richeslike Mr. Podsnap
in Oiir Mutual Friend
\
a defiance of the realists, particularly of
writers who appeared to enjoy describing bourgeois materialism
and poverty-stricken squalor; and, above all, a defiance of the
moral and religious propagandists like Mr. Pecksniff in Martin
Chuzzlewit, who held that no art was good unless it taught an
improving lesson, and vice versa. Against such people, Gautier
wrote
:
All passes. Art alone
has immortality.
The bust of stone
outlives the stone city.^^
Leconte de Lisle, who began as an idealist with hopes of social
reform, but was soured by the 1848 defeat of liberalism, put the
doctrine in a sentence which distinguishes it from the ideal of
Keats. Keats had identified truth and beauty. Leconte de Lisle
said: The Beautiful is not the servant of the True.^
However, the most famous expression of the doctrine is the
phrase Art for art's sake. Victor Hugo said he invented it, but
Hugo was never quite as original as he thought.^^ It was, it seems,
an infiltration into England and France of the idea worked out by
Kant and his philosophical successors, that there is an aesthetic
sense by which we appreciate the beautifula sense quite independent
of our moral judgement, independent of our intellect. If
that is true, it follows that the artist works through this special
sense, and that it is quite irrelevant to introduce moral or intellectual
standards into the appreciation of a work of art. Kant said
works of art had purposefulness without purpose,^^ by which he
meant that they seemed to have been created to serve some special
end; yet they had no clearly defined function like a chair or a
machine : rather, they were like a flower. In the same way, Picasso,
when asked what one of his pictures meant, is said to have replied
What does a tree mean ? In England the doctrine was proclaimed
by A. C. Swinburne (1837-1909), an ardent admirer of Gautier;
20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 445
and then set in elaborately jewelled phrases by Walter Pater
(1839-94), whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance became
the young Parnassians breviary.^^
Although many of its devotees were admirers of the classics, it
should be noted that this is not a classical doctrine. The Greeks
and Romans did not believe that art was divorced from morality.
On the contrary, their literature was profoundly moral in intention except for a few minor types
such as mime and epigram; and
their great sculptures were expressions of spiritual as well as
physical ideals.^^ It was rather (like the mysticism of the Pre-
Raphaelites) a revolt against the Victorian attitude that literature
must be edifyingan attitude often combined with supreme
indifference to good taste and beauty.^s
It is a dangerous belief. All art\ wrote Pater, constantly aspires
towards the condition of musid for in music, matter has merged
entirely into form ; a piece of music has no meaning other than its
own beauty. But literature is not music. It deals with people, and
people are moral agents : therefore it is impossible to write about
human thoughts and human actions without, consciously or
unconsciously, raising moral problems and answering them.
And it is a very short step from declaring that art is non-moral
to making it immoral. Those who say literature has nothing to do
with ethical standards often mean that they wish it to reject current
ethical standards, and by implication to teach different ones. In
Huysmanss famous novel about the aesthete who lives alone to
devote himself to a life of pure beauty, composing symphonies of
perfume and reading a few obscure and perfect authors, the hero
initiates the corruption of a boy of sixteen, so that, when he is
sufficiently corrupted, he will murder his disgustingly bourgeois
father.^7 This act is presented, not as a deliberately vicious deed,
but as morally colourless, another episode in des Esseintess search
for interesting sensations, or at most an ironical comment on
the stupid world which believes marriage and the family worth
preserving. But in fact Huysmans knew that it was evil; and in
later books his heroes, the projection of himself, sank lower still ^until they felt the conviction of
sin, and, like Huysmans, began
to remake their lives through religion. Similarly, two British
writers whose devotion to Greek ideals was very marked both
maintained the Parnassian doctrine that art has nothing to do with
morality; but both in fact used their art to teach a new moral code,
446 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
chiefly in sexual matters. One was Swinburne. The other was the
pupil of Pater and the admirer of Huysmans, Oscar Wilde (1856-
1900).^^ Swinburnes considerable scholarship and amazing
technical skill only emphasized the fact that his Greeks led a life
far more purposefully devoted to sexual ecstasy than the real men
and women of classical Greece; and while Wilde ostensibly
admired Greece as the home of beauty at its purest and passion at
its most intense, we know from repeated hints in his work as well
as from the ruin of his career thatlike his friend Gidehe also
loved Greece for the homosexuality which was practised there,
although never (at least in Athens) accepted as morally indifferent.
All these principles seem to be restrictions and negations. Did
Parnassus mean anything positive ?
If there is something actively valuable in Greek and Roman
culture, surely the Parnassian writers should have brought it out.
Most of them were deeply read classical scholars. While still a boy,
Alfred Tennyson (i8o9--92) was taught by his father to recite all
Horaces odes by heart: although he hated this overdose, he
learned Horaces difficult art of placing words, and came to
respect the quiet inimitable artist. He himself was surely the
English Vergil; and the address To Vergil which he wrote as a
mature poet is among the finest tributes ever paid by any artist to
his predecessor. For Arnold and Swinburne, reading Greek and
writing poetry were interdependent activities.^^ Walter Savage
Landor (1775-1864) wrote Latin poetry as freely as English.
Having begun his career by publishing a collection of English and
Latin poetry, together with an essay (in Latin) supporting the
practice of writing Latin versea tradition in which he was the
successor of many bilingual poets as distinguished as Milton and
Dante^he continued to write in both languages, and said I am
sometimes at a loss for an English word, for a Latin never.
Robert Browning (1812-89) read Greek and Latin as energetically
as he read Italian and French and other vernaculars, and has left
translations from three Greek dramas. Giosue Carducci was a
professor of literature, and ranged with fine freedom from medieval
to classical and back to modem prose and poetry. Leconte de
Lisle was mediocre in Greek when he graduated, but worked at it,
discussed it, gave up much of his life to it, and published translations
of the Iliads the Odyssey^ and other classical poems which
20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 447
inflamed his younger readers with his own adoration of the
Hellenic world.
Why did these poets write so much about the world of Rome
and Greece? Were they merely escapists? defeatists?
Partly, yes. But not wholly; and scarcely more than poets always
have been. The past is never dead. It exists continuously in the
minds of thinkers and men of imagination. We tend to-day to
think too much of the immediate and ever-changing present,
which, because its dangers are so urgent, presses upon us, but
which, because it is so hard to see clearly, is scarcely a fit subject
for poetry. Most poets throughout the world, from Homer to this
moment, have sung of ages earlier than their own, and other
worlds. Shakespeare blended the past and the present. Ariosto
and Vergil, Milton and Racine, expressed their ideals more
clearly and nobly at a heroic distance.
There were several different reasons for the re-creation of the
classical past by the Parnassians of the nineteenth century.
Compared with the chimney-pots, the hideous furniture, the
dreary cities, the ruined landscapes, and the drab clothes of the
nineteenth century, Greece and Rome were physically beautiful.
Their beauty stimulated the imagination of poets, evoking the
graceful and eloquent language which was choked by the squalid
present. Their beauty lay not only in soft Venus de Milo curves,
but in intense colours and strong vivid forms. The heir of Keats
liked the softer charm, and sang:
A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go
;
And some thro wavering lights and shadows broke,
Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.^s
Browning preferred a complex vigour not unlike his own:
And no ignoble presence! On the bulge
Of the clear baldness,all his head one brow,
True, the veins swelled, blue network, and there surged
A red from cheek to temple,^then retired
As if the dark-leaved chaplet damped a flame,

Was never nursed by temperance or health.

But huge the eyeballs rolled back native fire
Imperiously triumphant: nostrils wide
Waited their incense.34
But neither these poets nor the others limited their imaginations
448 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
to the GrecORoman past : which shows that it was not a pedantic
classicizing fad, as it often became in the baroque age. Tennyson,
the modern Vergil, spent most of his effort on re-creating the
medieval legends of Arthur. Brownings largest single work is a
reconstruction of a seventeenth-century murder case. Others
wrote serial reconstructions of great moments throughout history.
Heredias Trophies begin in the twilight of Greek prehistory, with
Hercules fighting the monstrous lion, move through Greece to
Rome, then past the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, out to the
Spanish empire in America, thence to Egypt, Islam, Japan, and
other distant, beautiful realms of the fancy. His master Leconte
de Lisle was the leader of the French Parnassians, and is sometimes
thought of now as having been a complete hellenist, a reincarnated
Greek. But his Antique Poems begin with evocations of Hindu
legend before they pass on to Greece; and he followed them by
Barbarian PoemSy in which he painted picture after vivid picture
of biblical antiquity, Phoenician, Scandinavian, and Celtic history,
medieval life, and modern times. 3 s Landor himself, the Greek
Englishman, ranged over a great part of history in his most
important work, the Imaginary Conversations, as well as in his
dramas and dramatic scenes.
This movement into the past was, then, not confined to those
writers who had a nostalgia for Greece and Rome. It was part of
a new sense of history and legend, spreading and deepening in the
nineteenth century. The historical perspective that had been
partly created by Gibbon, by Winckelmann, by Wood and Wolf,
by Niebuhr, was now shared by many of the public. Hundreds of
new history books were written. Vast historical paintings were
produced. Directors of plays on historical subjects took elaborate
care to make costumes, and properties, and gestures, authentic
and correct. (The great operas of this period^Wagners, Verdis,
Strausss, Puccinis, and those of the Russians^were all, with
minor exceptions, historical and legendary.) For the first time,
authors of romantic stories about the past began to aim at ever
closer accuracy of reconstruction. As an astronomer photographs
the rays of light impinging on the earth from a star which may have
died a million years ago, so nineteenth-century writers and artists,
using imagination, scholarship, and aesthetic tact, placed the
modern reader under the sunlight and among the people of many
a distant land and century.
20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 449
The Parnassian poets also felt that their own age was morally
base. They turned to the world of Greece and Rome because it
was nobler. Whereas everyone around them was occupied with
making money and spending it, with winning a social position and
maintaining it, they themselves found that in the Hellenic legends
they could write of young love, or the desire for fame, or the rapid
passing of youth, without introducing any of the sordid motives
flaunted by their own contemporaries.
It has been well said that the Parnassian movement and the art
for arts sake theories in France cannot be understood unless as
a refuge from the disillusionment caused by the failure of the
Second Republic. It was largely for this reason that Leconte de
Lisle turned away from the ruined present, to inhabit a world of
tranquil Greek beauty and vivid antique barbarism. Landor had
not been so disappointed, but he had the same sovereign contempt
for contemporary standards of power, wealth, and happiness.
Seldom he mentions them, and with bitter scorn
:
Curse on that chief across the narrow sea,
Who drives whole herds and flocks innumerable.
And whose huge presses groan with oil and wine
Year after year, yet fain would carry off
The crying kid, and strangle it for crying. 3
7
Nineteenth-century writers also felt that the universal emotions
could be expressed more clearly and intensely by classical than by
contemporary figures. From this point of view, Tennysons
Ulysses is a typical Parnassian poem : a bold statement of the ideals
of energy, indomitable will, and exploratory adventure, without
any thought of such powerful Victorian motives as profit or selfsacrifice.
3^
In particular, utterances of sexual passion could be frank, and
yet graceful and eloquent, in a Greco-Roman setting. Thus
Tennysons Lucretius is a very daring picture of extreme sexual
tension, with fantasies taken both from Lucretius own poem and
from Tennysons psychical insight. After the flaring atom-streams
that rush before the eyes of the maddened poet, and the rainstorms
of blood which fall on the earth to produce girls dancing round him
in narrowing circles, several strong images of love and death are
fused in this immortal picture
:
Then, then, from utter gloom stood out the breasts,
The breasts of Helen, and hoveringly a sword
5076 eg
450 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
Now over and now under, now direct,
Pointed itself to pierce, but sank down shamed
At all that beauty; and as I stared, a fire,
The fire that left a roofless Ilion,
Shot out of them, and scorchd me that I woke.
In Brownings Fifine at the Fair, written after his wife died, Helen
also appears as an ideal but almost irresistible temptation, while his
Fan and Luna is a franker dream than anything Tennyson dared
to print. Leconte de Lisles Antique Poems are noticeably, and
Banvilles classicizing lyrics overwhelmingly, concerned with
erotic themes. And although many stories and poems were
written in the nineteenth century about women deceived and
deserted, in few did the woman speali as eloquently, and in very
few as boldly, as Tennysons Oenone. In spite of the cumulative
power of Tolstoys Anna Karenina, for example, and the pathos of
Annas suicide, her final monologue

We are drawn apart by life, and I make his unhappiness, and he
mine, and theres no altering him or me. Every attempt has been made,
the screw has come unscrewed. Oh, a beggar-woman with a baby. She
thinks Im sorry for her. . .
is weak and unconvincing compared with the torrent of noble
imagery in Oenone :
O death, death, death, thou ever-floating cloud,
There are enough unhappy on this earth.
Pass by the happy souls, that love to live . . .
Thou weighest heavy on the heart within,
Weigh heavy on my eyelids : let me die.
One of the main reasons for using Greco-Roman characters and
settings is now, as it has always been, their impersonality. Problems
that torment the poet himself can be expressed more clearly, and
perhaps their tension will be relieved, if they are transferred to
figures both distant and noble. The best example is Arnolds
Empedocles on Etna. In this Faustian drama a philosopher-poet,
troubled by his own thoughts, tormented by the pressure of world
problems, saddened by the slow death of his imagination, waits for
the ever rarer moment when he feels at one with the universe, and
then unites himself with it and destroys the petty troubles of the
self, by leaping into the crater of a volcano. Meanwhile a calm
young musician, thought-free, sings the praise of poetry and
20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 451
melody, within hearing but out of sight, far below the barren
mountain-shoulders and the fiery lava, among cool streams and
green trees. This was Arnolds own problem. These were Arnolds
two selves, the thinker and the singer. That was Arnolds own
wish for a fuller life, or death. Had Arnold written it openly about
himself, it would have been embarrassing, perhaps ridiculous, and
certainly more limited in its effect. By situating the conflict in a
distant ideal time, he made it comprehensible and sympathetic to
thousands of readers who have felt something of it themselves, and
can identify themselves more easily with a vague, legendary,
universal figure like Empedocles than with an individual like
Matthew Arnold himself.
Yet the great Greek and Roman figures are not really devoid of
personality. They are more than plastic dolls. They are people,
not dimmer but more intensely alive than most of ourselves. The
beautiful Helen, the martyred Socratesaround these immortal
beings cluster a crowd of stories, ideas, pictures, suggestions,
desires and admirations, symbolic meanings, private dreams. Their
very names stir the imagination. Therefore a writer who uses
them often finds that he is being used by themthat they awake
in him visions he had not tried to see, that his readers trace
significances he scarcely hoped to create.
But this evocative quality of mythical figures has its dangers.
One is that an audience ignorant of their names and natures will
miss their meaning. Readers who, by diverse nationality or by
inadequate schooling, stand outside the tradition of western
culture may recognize the names of Solomon and Hercules and
Nero^but the innumerable associations which cling to those
names and make those personalities will be lost to them. The other
danger is that authors in search of new subjects may choose obscure
and tedious myths which stir neither their own imaginations nor
those of their readers. To avoid that, the Greeks (and Seneca)
usually kept to a few dozen legends which were widely known and
had many overtones of meaning.
This was one of the dooms which afflicted the classical dramas
of the Parnassians. Swinburne was not interested in Atalanta, and
still less in Erechtheus (whoever he was). Arnold admired Empedocles,
as Tennyson admired Lucretius; but he cared nothing for
Merope.^ He had to write a long preface explaining the story, and
its previous treatments, and his reasons for choosing it; but its
452 20, PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
very style, so dull and dutiful compared with his lectures On
translating Horner^ shows that the whole thing was a boring task
for him. As he himself wrote, no man can do his best with a subject
which does not penetrate him. Yet in these very plays the
choruses, where Arnold and Swinburne could let their imaginations
fly free, are interesting poetry : they alone have survived.
Two souls, and a deeply personal problem, appeared in Brownings
largest and strangest poem on a classical theme. BalaustiorC
s
Adventure is an enormous monologue by a young Greek poetess.^i
She tells how she arrived in Sicily soon after the defeat and enslavement
of the Athenian army ; and how she saved herself and
vindicated Athens by remembering a play by Euripides. The
Sicilians were hungry for poetry, but, the war intervening, had
been cut off. Balaustion (her name means Wild-pomegranateflower)
recites the entire drama in the theatre of Syracuse, cutting
a few dull patches and interspersing such brilliantly vivid descriptions
that, as we read or listen, the actors appear before our very
eyes. So, Hercules strides in
Happy, as always; something grave, perhaps
The great vein-cordage on the fret-worked front,
Black-swollen, beaded yet with battle-dew
The yellow hair o the hero!his big frame
A-quiver with each muscle sinking back
Into the sleepy smooth it leaped from late.
Under the great guard of one arm, there leant
A shrouded something, live and woman-like,
Propped by the heartbeats neath the lion-coat.
The play itself is the not-quite-tragedy of Alcestisy which reverses
the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Queen Alcestis volunteered to
die instead of her husband, Admetus. He lamented her, but lost
her. Hercules, however, conquered Death and brought Alcestis
back to her husband, now doubly embarrassed. Brownings
young poetess gives this story, told cynically by Euripides, a kindly
interpretation. Then, after reaching its end, she retells it once
more, giving it an even kinder meaning. Evidently Browning is
trying to face and solve the problem of the husband who feels
unworthy of his wife and has lost her. Long afterwards, in a less
successful poem, he thought of himselfstill tied down to earth
and fleshas a swimmer buoyed up by the water and yet sinking
20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 453
deep in it, while a butterfly (symbol of the soul and inhabitant of the
air) floated above him, watching his heavy body imitating flight.^^
In Balaustion's second version of the Alcestis myth the dead wife
returns to her husband because, having become his very soul, she
cannot die while he lives. This was close indeed to Brownings
own love-story. He himself (like Hercules) had once pulled
Elizabeth Barrett out of a grave, and after she died her spirit lived
on within him. A quatrain of her poetry appears as the epigraph
for the whole Adventure^ and is quoted towards the end ; and surely,
as well as being Alcestis, she is Balaustion herself, the lyric girl
who loved Euripides.
It was not, then, wholly a desire for escape that led so many
nineteenth-century writers to use classical themes. Some of them
did detest their own contemporaries. Some did, like Huysmanss
hero and like Baudelaire, attempt to shut themselves away in a
private artificial paradise. But Greco-Roman subjects and figures
were creatively used by many others who wished to create beautiful
images and music as an offset to modem materialism and ugliness,
and who felt bound to speak more clearly, moxt permanently^ about
their own problems and the problems of our civilization.
ANTICHRIST
Christianity was hated and despised by many of the most ardent
lovers of the classics during the nineteenth century. In this the
revolutionary poetsShelley, Holderlin, and othersshowed the
way; but their successors were more energetic and rancorous.
They loved paganism for everything that was not Christian in it.
They hated Christianity because it was not Greco-Roman, or was
a perversion of Greco-Roman ideals. This conflict included some
of the same issues and revived many of the same arguments as
appeared in that other war between past and present, the Battle
of the Books.^3 this time it was less of a declared war between
open enemies, and yet the opponents were farther apart. Seldom
speaking out directly, the pagans delivered their attacks in apparently
innocuous stories, escapist poems, and professedly
objective histories.
The chief arguments which lay behind the work of the anti-
Christians were three in number. Although they were often
confused, they can be best considered separately.
454 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
I . Christianity is not part of the European tradition; it is oriental^
and therefore barbarous and repulsive.
This attitude is usually connected with half-acknowledged anti-
Judaism. It appears in the famous Prayer on the Acropolis by the
eminent orientalist Ernest Renan (1823-1902).^ The prayer is an
address to Athene, patroness of Athens, as goddess of truth,
wisdom, and beauty, the supreme and central divinity of the world.
In it Renan speaks of Christianity as a foreign cult, which came
from the Syrians of Palestine^ and of the apostle Paul as an ugly
little Jew, speaking the Greek of the Syrians. Renans chief work,
The Origins of Christianity^ had much to do with the rise of religious
scepticism in the nineteenth century: although it treats Jesus
himself with reverence as a remarkable man, and his followers
with the admiration due to men who achieved the impossible, it
emphasizes the idea that they were Jews, and that they were part
of an Asiatic tradition.
A similar attitude appears in Anatole France (1844-1924), an
early admirer of the great Parnassian Leconte de Lisle.^s a
famous short story, The Governor of Judea, he presents Pontius
Pilate as an elderly official in retirement, taking the waters in great
luxury at Baiae. Discussing his career with a friend, Pilate
expresses the most biting scorn and hatred for the Jews as a cruel
and uncivilized tribe of fanatics. His friend recalls being in love
with a beautiful red-haired Jewess, who lived in a vile underworld
of soldiers, mountebanks, and publicans ; she was a barbaric but
wonderfully voluptuous dancer; but she disappeared and took up
with the followers of a young Galilaean miracle-worker.
He called himself Jesus the Nazarene, and he was cmcified for some
crime. Pontius, do you remember the man ?
Pontius Pilate frowned. . . . After some moments of silence:
Jesus? he murmured, Jesus the Nazarene? I do not recall him.
The story is nonsense, of course. The execution of Jesus was
a striking event in Judea, accompanied by serious disorders, and
certainly made a strong impression on Pilate. No Roman official
could forget having been forced to make a gesture as striking (and
as un-Roman) as washing his hands in public self-exculpation.
But Frances distortion of the facts is characteristic of this interpretation
of Christianity: that its founder and his first followers
were poor Jews from villages and slums, too obscure for a cultured
20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 455
Roman to remember. The same feeling inspired Frances Thaisy
a contrast between the lovely, civilized, Epicurean courtesan of
Alexandria, and the barbarous, fanatical, Christian monk of the
desert who converted her, leading her to place her talents and her
beauty at the service of God, but who, by the exaggerated violence
of his own cult, was driven after contact with her from the extreme
of purity to the extreme of sin. It is traceable also in Oscar Wildes
Salome
y
where the disputing Jews are grotesque (Strauss emphasized
their grotesqueness when he added music to the play), St. John
the Baptist an appalling figure like a Hindu ascetic, and the
atmosphere of the entire play perverse, oriental, and evil.
2. Christianity means repressiony paganism means liberty.
We have already seen this belief in Shelley. It was given vigorous
expression by Giosue Carducci, who began his career with a
passion for liberalism, and a violent hatred for those who opposed
the liberation and unification of Italy. Among the forces of oppression
he thought the worst was the Roman Catholic church, and
its head, Pius IX, whom he attacked again and again.^^ He had
an Italian predecessor, Alfieri but went far beyond him. His
most famous manifesto is his hymn To Satan (written in 1863,
published in 1865). "This is quite unlike Baudelaires Litanies of
SataUy the invocation to the patron of the wretched; indeed,
Baudelaire much disliked the neo-pagans. It is a hymn to the
spirit of progress^whom Carducci calls Satan because he
believes that progress and the free life of the human spirit have
always been opposed by the Roman Catholic church. He praises
Satan as the god who ruled the happy pagan worlds of Ahriman in
Persia, Astarte in Asia Minor, Venus and Adonis in Lebanon and
Cyprus; as the patron of the witch and the alchemist^those forerunners
of sciencein the Middle Ages ; as the consoler sending
wretched Heloise visions of the beauty described by Vergil and
Horace, whom, even behind nunnery walls, she could not forget
;
as the inspirer of the great reformers, Arnold of Brescia, Wycliffe,
Huss, Savonarola, Luther; and now as the victorious leader of
science, riding through the world on the chariot of fire which has
conquered Jehovah. This chariot is the locomotive.'^^ a larger
sense it is the image of modern scientific progress, which raises
man above the limits of time and place, and which, Carducci believed,
would free him from the policemen who controlled thought.
4S6 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
Another remarkable anti-Christian poem by Carducci is By the
Springs of ClitumnuSj the Umbrian stream known to the Roman
poets. The clear river still flows down from the Apennines. The
peasants still dip the struggling sheep in it, and water the great
white oxen. This is the river that saw the fall of Umbrias power,
and of Etruria, and then the rise of Rome. It saw the invasion of
Hannibal, when Rome suffered and triumphed. But Rome now
triumphs no longer, since a red-haired Galilaean ascended the
Capitol and told her to take up the Cross. The nymphs fled,
shrieking. Black-clad monks came ; they made a desert, and called
it the kingdom of God. From this desert Carducci calls on the
spirit of Rome, reincarnated in that of modern industrial progress,
to rise and free mankind.
In France, Leconte de Lisle produced a Popular History of
Christianity^ which was a savage philippic against the church and
its corruptionsblood-thirsty inquisitors, greedy popes, terrifying
superstitions. A thousand years of Greco-Roman paganism, he
implied, had produced no atrocities to compare with the burning
of heretic Christians, no such abuses of the human spirit. Twice
he wrote the tragic story of Hypatia, the beautiful Alexandrian girl
whose soul, nourished on the Neoplatonic philosophy, was as
beautiful as her body. She was stripped naked by a Christian mob,
flayed alive with sharp shells, and then burnt. You, priestess and
incarnation of beauty (cried Leconte de Lisle),
were struck and cursed by the vile Galilaean.^
Leconte de Lisles friend Louis Menard (1822-1901) not only
preferred Greek to Christian morality but justified Greek religion ^which to others seems a
confused though sometimes beautiful
congeries of disparate superstitions, poetic myths, and halfunderstood
barbarian survivalsas being a truer philosophical
picture of the universe. In Hellenic Polytheism and other books
he asserted that polytheism represented an orderly cosmos, where
the forces of nature, fully developed, unite to produce harmony.
That is a peaceful republic. Christian monotheism, where all is
subject to one supreme God, is, he said, a monarchy with all the
vices of absolute power. The Greek cosmos embodied the rule of
law, according to Menard, and the rule of Jehovah was the rule of
force. And, he went on, look at the book of Genesis, in which work
is imposed on mankind as a punishment. Compare that with the
20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 457
healthier and more natural attitude of the Greeks, who believed
that their gods invented agriculture, the cultivation of the vine,
and other useful arts in order to benefit mankind. Menard was
more than an interesting old eccentric : he has been described as
a scholar among poetsand perhaps a poet among scholars.
In particular, some nineteenth-century writers detested Christianity
because of its restrictions on sexual liberty, and admired
Greco-Roman paganism because (they believed) love in Greece
was free and unashamed. On one side is the pale Galilaean,
preaching fasts and virginity. On the other is a wild wood with
two lovers:
And soft as lips that laugh and hide
The laughing leaves of the trees divide
And screen from seeing and leave in sight
The god pursuing, the maiden hid.
The ivy falls with the Bacchanals hair
Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes
;
The wild vine slipping down leaves bare
The bright breast shortening into sighs . ,
Beautiful poetry, beautiful dreaming: especially in a Victorian
world of heavy clothes and cumbrous conventions. But the theory
from which it flowed did in fact credit the Greeks with far more
sexual licence than they admitted or admiredexcept in a few
cosmopolitan cities like Alexandria. Sometimes it distorted the
facts of history by confusing Hellenism with Orientalism.
Here the great sinnerhow he would have welcomed the title!

is Pierre Louys (1870-1925), a vicious but talented writer.^^ He

did not learn Greek at school, and, having read a poor translation
of Homer, disliked even the Iliad and Odyssey until he found
Leconte de Lisles version. ^It was a revelation : he went on to
read all Leconte de Lisles translations, and then, at eighteen,
began to learn Greek seriously. Strange how many modern poets
have learnt Latin without enthusiasm at school, and then, under
a more vital impetus, have taught themselves the Greek language
or literature in adolescence : Keats, Shelley, Goethe, many more.
Louys always revered Leconte de Lisle for teaching him to think
of classical Greece as the ideal home of the human body and spirit;
and Louis Menard, whom he called a great pagan, a saintly man
and imitated in his story A New Pleasure. At twenty-three Louys
produced the first French translation of the exquisite epigrams of
458 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
the Syrian-Greek poet Meleager, at twenty-four a rendering of
Lucians Courtesans^ Conversations, and at twenty-five the book
which made his name.
This was The Songs ofBilitis, a collection of prose poems supposed
to be translated from a Greek manuscript found in a tomb. It gives,
in a form which is a cross between a diary and a volume of Hellenistic
epigrams, the autobiography of a peasant girl of ancient Greece
who, after the death of her first love, became a member of Sapphos
circle of Lesbian lovers and poetesses, and then, just as naturally
and happily, a temple-prostitute in Cyprus. Gide (to whom the
first edition was dedicated) says Bilitis was modelled on Meriem
ben Atala, an Arabian girl Louys met in Biskra; the landscapes
are remembered from Louyss tours in north Africa and Egypt;
the open-eyed frankness of the poems on homosexuality and
prostitution is not Greek but oriental.^^ It is strange, so long after
Dares the Phrygian, to see another romancer using the same
device of the MS. found in a tomb to carry a modern invention.^s
But this time it found a detective to expose it and a real hellenist
to show its falsity. The great Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorif
,
professor of Greek at Berlin, knew perfectly well that The Songs
ofBilitis were made out of whole cloth by a young modern author
;
but, because Louys had pretended they were translations from an
authentic Greek manuscript, fell upon him like a hawk on a rabbit.
His review, in ten closely printed pages, brushes aside Louyss
amateur scholarship, and even the anachronisms, to concentrate on
the crucial faults of the book : that oriental passions and extravagances
are attributed to the self-disciplined Greeks, andthat a homosexual
lust is represented as the moving force of Sapphos art. A
woman who led a life like Bilitis, he concludes, could not have
written great poems ; and it is a complete falsification of the Greek
ideals to think they aimed at producing such art or such people,
Louys once wrote a poem saying that, when all the other Greek
divinities died, only the goddess of love survived. The year after
Bilitis he dedicated a romantic novel to her more extreme avatars.
Aphrodite was published at his own expense in early April 1896,
and became an immediate best-seller, reaching its twenty-sixth
edition in June. (Still very popular, it has attracted some outstandingly
repulsive illustrators.) It is a story of Alexandria in the
first century before Christ, the heroine a courtesan, the hero a
sculptor even more sought after and not less bored with love. Only
20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 459
her indifference attracts him; after she promises herself and he
dreams of possessing her (in a scene largely composed of quotations
from the Song of Solomon), he loses interest again, to regain it
only when she has been cruelly executed for blasphemously posing
as Aphrodite in the goddesss stolen regalia. Using her corpse as
a model, he carves his masterpiece.
The immediate literary ancestors of this odd book were Frances
Thais, Merimees Carmen (Hf you do not love me, I love you),
and Flauberts Salammbo, In structure it was based on Greek
tragedy, having five 'acts with a peripeteia, or sudden reversal, at
the end of the fourth; it was filled with details imitated or quoted
from certain regions of Greek literature. But it was not a picture
of Greek life. Its heroine was a Syrian prostitute (there are
pointed allusions to Jewry as a half-barbarous Asiatic outpost), its
scene the polyglot megapolis of Alexandria (which was then no
more Greek than modern New Orleans is French or Rio de
Janeiro Portuguese), its goddess a divinity far more terrible and
Asiatic than the smiling spirit born of Aegean sea-foam, and its
morality, though striking, unlike all we know of Greece through
its greatest poetry and philosophy. Every age finds what it wants
in the classics. Evidently what Louys and his readers wanted was
not the clear water of Ilissus, beside which Socrates talked to young
Phaedrus of passion and the mastery of reason, but a draught from
the turbid Nile.
3. Christianity is timid andfeeble, paganism is strong and intense.
The theory was put with great violence by another of the
Germans who were destroyed by their love for Greece. Friedrich
Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) went to the best German classical
school, Pforta, with Wilamowitz-Moellendorff ; became professor
at Basle before he was twenty-five; and in 1872 produced a theory
of the origin of Greek tragedy whichbitterly attacked by
Wilamowitz^was historically false but contained some psychological
truth. He held that the essence of Greek art was misrepresented
as calm, impassive, statuesque. It grew, he believed,
out of a tension between the wild forces represented by Dionysus,
god of the dithyrambic frenzy, cruel and uncivilizable, which roves
the forests and mountains, and the spirit of Apollo, god of light,
beauty, healing, and art. It was the result of the artistic sense
working, not on a neutral material, but on savage subconscious
46o 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
urges. So Greek art is not cool and white and lifeless, a Greek
play not a lofty, formalized, intellectual exercise: they are the
products of violent conflict, and represent not serene repose but
a hard-earned victory.
Nietzsche admired Greek art for its intensity; its difficulty; its
aristocratic quality. He despised Christianity because he thought
it weak, easy, and vulgar. Aeschylus, the eagle of poetry, was one
of his heroes. Another Greek, who wrote at an earlier stage in
history, during the class-wars of the sixth century, interested
Nietzsche deeply and helped to form his dislike for Christian moral
ideals. This was Theognis, who called his fellow oligarchs good
and the commoners bador, as we still say, with a reminiscence
of feudal distinctions, gentle men and villains, Like Theognis,
Nietzsche held that only the moral values of the powerful few were
worthy of respect. He loathed Christianity as the morality of
slaves and of herd-animals. He thought that Blessed are the
peacemakers meant DonH fight for your rights \ that Blessed are the
meek meant Lie down when you are challenged {and feel happy
because your conqueror will be damned in the next world). The gospel
of loving ones neighbour seemed to Nietzscheas Socrates
definitions of justice seemed to the demagogue and the propagandist^
o^to be a trick to get the few strong, clever, energetic, brave
men, who care nothing for others and who can rule the world, to
submit to namby-pamby rules designed to cripple their talents and
reduce their natural superiority. And he described Christianity as a
Jewish stratagem of revenge on the Romans and on the whole world
:
*To smash the strong, to make great hopes sickly, to cast suspicion on
the happy enjoyment of beauty, to bend all independence, virility, conquest,
mastery, all instincts that are peculiar to the highest and most
successful type of man, into uncertainty, troubles of conscience, disruption
of the self, in fact to convert all love for earthly things and for
the domination of the earth into hatred for the earth and earthly things that was what the Church
made its task.^^
The Jewsa people born for slavery, as Tacitus and the entire
ancient world would say, the chosen people among the peoples, as
they themselves say and believe^the Jews have carried out a masterly
reversal of values . . . their prophets have confused rich, godless,
bad, violent, sensuous il together, and for the first time have
stamped the word world as a shameful expression. In this transformation
of values . . . lies the significance of the Jewish people : with
it begins the slave-revolt in morality.
20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 461
And yet it is possible to find, among the extremely unsystematic
utterances of Nietzsche on the conflict of Christianity and paganism,
evidence that he saw deeper than that. He knew that Socrates was
one of the first to criticize a morality of instinct and tradition which
had long been, but in a changing world could not continue to be,
sufficient unto itself; and that in that sense Socrates the stonemason
was one of the forerunners of the Galilaean carpenter. ^3
Nietzsche once spoke of Flaubert as a 'decent citizen who
tormented himself by bitterly enjoying the stupidity of the middle
class. But Nietzsche cultivated the aristocratic foible of admiring
his ancestors and hating his peers. Like him, Gustave Flaubert
(1821-80) detested nineteenth-century morality, despised contemporary
Christianity as unfit for intelligent people, and said
that the world had passed through three stages, the last being the
lowest: paganism, Christianity, and skunkery, his own age being
ruled by the skunks. His chief complaint against the era of
skunkery was its pettiness. No one could live a genuine, full life.
Everyone was the slave of second-rate delusions, whether created
by himself (as the provincial doctors wife invented dreams of
romance) or delivered by the newspapers and other garbagefactories.
Flaubert did not write poetry; but he felt the ugliness
of his century as acutely as aTennyson or a Gautier. Sometimes he
would dissect it in a coldly realistic novel ; and sometimes he would
reconstruct the world of the past, where, instead of bogus romances,
there were fiery passions and ardent asceticisms, instead of the
middle class with top-hat and bank-book there were warriors and
barbarians and saints, instead of Louis Napoleon there were St.
Anthony and Hamilcar. Salammbo, one of the greatest historical
novels in the world, is not about Greece, nor about Rome, but
about the rival culture of Carthage. That modern Brueghel, The
Temptation of St, Anthony
y
is about an early Christian hermit in
Egypt. The sources from which Flaubert drew his material for
both books are Greek and Latin, but the subjects lie on or over the
frontiers of the classical world. Like Louys, he was guided towards
his counter-assertion of values superior to those of the modern
world by reading classical literature. Pater quotes a letter in which
Flaubert says he is re-reading the Aeneidy with its phrases haunting
him like unforgettable melodies,^ But like Louys he could
not, or would not, describe the highest states of Greco-Roman
462 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
civilization as a contrast to the life he lived and hated. The
books he wrote on the past were ferociously cruel, and, compared
with both Greek and modern ideals, perverse in an oriental way.
Flauberts hatred of his own vulgar age pushed him (like Nietzsche)
into admiration for the extreme opposite : he did not falsify it, but
constructed it from materials which he found in Carthage and the
Thebaid, on the further extreme of the calmer, richer, betterbalanced
world of Greece and Rome.
But Christianity, in spite of this opposition, was still a vital
force. Many nineteenth-century writers admired the simple faith,
the moral purity, the energy and courage of the early Christians.
They thought the poems and novels which represented the pagan
world as a heaven on earth were false in fact and morally dangerous.
Confident that the gospel was saving the world, they set out to
show that, when it was first preached, it had met with even more
bitter opposition from an age even more corrupt and brutal.
Chateaubriand put this point of view in The Martyrs^ whose form
and ill-chosen style kept it from reaching a very wide public.
But the rise of prose fiction encouraged the production of a number
of popular novels based on classical documents and describing the
conflict between Christian and pagan ideals in the Roman empire.
They were not all well written^they were on a far lower aesthetic
level than Swinburnes poems and the rest of the pagan opposition
:
but they had an immense circulation and influence. In particular,
they established the belief that Rome fell because it was an
immoral pagan empire. This is now widely believed, and the fact
that both the western and the eastern empires fell long after they
had officially become Christian is ignored.
The best known of these novels are
:
The LastDays ofPompeii (i 834), by E. G. E. L. Bulwer-Lytton,
later Lord Lytton (1803-73), a melodramatic description of
the struggle of Christianity and paganism emphasized by the
symbolic destruction of a wicked pagan city.
Hypatia (1853), by Charles Kingsley (1819-75), a more complex
story of the conflict between the northern barbarians,
the effete pagans of Greece and Rome, their higher ideals
as represented by the beautiful girl-philosopher of Alexandria,
earnest and noble Christians like St. Augustine, and
the cruel intolerance of the Christian mob that lynched
20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 463
Hypatia. 70 Kingsley sub-titled the book New Foes with an
Old Face, feeling that the murder of Hypatia sprang from
the root of religious intolerance, which he thought was
sending out new shoots in his day.
Ben-Hur (1880), by Lewis Wallace (1827-1905), who served
as a major-general in the Northern army during the Civil
War, and saved Washington from the Confederate advance.
His book, in exciting and often memorable scenes, dramatizes
the interaction of Romans, Jews, and Christians
during the lifetime of Jesus. The hero is a Jewish nobleman
condemned to the galleys on the charge of attempting to
murder a Roman official. His life as a galley-slave, his
shipwreck and escape, the healing of his mother and sister
from leprosy, and above all the famous chariot-race against
his Roman friend and enemy, are among the most vivid
descriptions of the ancient world ever published.
Quo Vadis? (1896), by the eminent Polish novelist Henryk
Sienkiewicz (1846-1916), is a laboriously detailed account
of the penetration of Rome by Christianity during the reign
of Nero and the ministry of Peter and Paul, ending with
bloodcurdling descriptions of the Neronian persecutions

which gain fervour from Sienkiewicz^s hatred for the

German and Russian persecutors of Poland. The story is
really a patriotic manifesto, in which, despite frightful
sufferings, the small community of early Christians vindicating
itself against the oppressions of a vast and powerful
empire expresses the admiration and hope which Sienkiewicz
felt for his own Poland. The correspondence is
rather over-emphasized by the fact that the heroine is a
Christian princess from the area of northern Europe which
later became Poland. Authentic historical documents are
followedalthough not always quite accurately ; there are
acute character-sketches of St. Peter, Nero, and Petronius
but the plot, which culminates with a gigantic Pole killing
a huge German aurochs in the arena with his bare hands in
order to free the princess tied naked to its horns, is really
too sensational.
Much of the interest in these books came from their vivid
historical detail, which was a product of the broader and deeper
464 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
knowledge of ancient history made available by nineteenth-century
research. Fenelons Telemachus owed part of its popularity to
the same interest, at an earlier stage, which later made The Travels
of Young Anacharsis in Greece a continuous best-seller for generations.
74 Even in the prosaic heart of Macaulay, his Scottish blood
and the romantic ballad-fervour blended with Niebuhrs theory
that the chief early Roman historical records were folk-poems about
great events: the result was his stirring Lays of Ancient Romef^
and school libraries are still full of text-books disguised as fiction,
like Beckers Gallus, whose fault is that they have too much matter
and too little art.
The Christian novels, however, owed more of their influence to
the fact that they countered the rationalist criticism of biblical
tradition which began with David Strausss Life ofJesus and grew
to a tall and shaky structure of hypothesis throughout the nineteenth
century. It is impossible to believe in Christianity without
accepting its traditions with faith as well as with reason. Therefore
the purely rational type of criticism, which sometimes treated the
gospel and the growth of the faith purely as a product, like sugar
or vitriol, was in effect anti-Christian. Against that, these novels
showed the establishment of Christianity as the deliberate intervention
of God to save a spiritually dying world. After the revolutionary
pangs which brought the nineteenth century to birth, this
interpretation was, to many, very welcome.
Finally, as we have shown in outline, pagan ethics and pagan
ideals were being defended by some of the most eminent poets,
philosophers, and novelists of the day, and the morality of nineteenth-
century Christianity was being attacked directly and by
implication. As a counter-attack, these novelists now produced
pro-Christian stories which revived Argument i of the Battle of
the Books^in a new form, with a stronger foundation of fact.76
Their counter-propaganda had an effect still very active to-day. It
was another of the many conflicts, which are also confluences,
between the spirit of Christendom and the spirit (through which it
reached us) of Greece and Rome.
There is one other novel which deserves deeper attention, since
it is in a different category from the rest. This is Walter Paters
Marius the Epicurean (1885). It is a study of the process of
Christian conversion, not through passion or miracle, but through
reflection. Its hero is a thoughtful young Roman noble, living in
20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 46^
the age of the Antonines^which Gibbon and others believed to be
the highest point ever reached by human existence on this planet.
At first the warm paganism of the household gods and the spirits
of the farm is enough for him. The deaths of his mother and of
a close friend, a sceptic, plunge him into doubt. He becomes an
Epicurean. Then, after meeting and admiring Marcus Aurelius,
he rises to Stoicism. From Stoicism he penetrates deeper into the
realm of the spirit. He is about to become a Christian when he is
arrested (at a Christian meeting), ^and dies for the faith to which he
does not yet belong. Like Vergil, like many noble pagans, he has
become a soul worthy of Christ.
This deeply poetic book has far less action and personal interest
than the others we have described, but much more understanding
of the best in both paganism and Christianity. It shows the long
difficult process of conversion as it occurred in many thoughtful
souls of the late Roman empire, and as it was repeated in many no
less troubled spirits of the nineteenth century. And, instead of
showing the great historical change from Greece and Rome to
Christendom as a war, in which one side was victorious and the
other crushed out of existence, it makes us see the long interpenetration
by which the highest elements of Greek and Roman
spiritual life were taken up and transformed in Christianity.
21
A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
Time to taste life/ another would have said,
Up with the curtain!
This man said rather, Actual life comes next ?
Patience a moment!
Grant I have mastered learnings crabbed text,
Still there s the comment.
BROWNING*
During the century which succeeded the revolutionary era and
closed with the First World War, classical knowledge increased
both in distribution and in depth. More was known about
Greece and Rome than ever before; and more people learnt something
about Greece and Rome than ever before. But the two
graphs of increase did not coincide. During the first fifty or sixty
years they ran roughly parallel. After that, one began to turn down,
while the other kept on going up^more slowly, perhaps, but still
continuously until 1914.
Throughout the century scholars were discovering more and
more about Greco-Roman antiquity, and the growing sum of
knowledge was being tabulated and made more and more available.
By 1914 the library of the average professional classicist was ten
times larger, and the books at his disposal in his college library
fifty times more numerous, than those which his predecessor in
1814 could command.
Meanwhile the distribution of classical knowledge at first increased;
and then fell off. In the first sixty or seventy years of the
nineteenth century the existing schools and universities grew
bigger; many new ones were founded, private, and religious, and
state-supported; more boys and even girls were encouraged to
attend; a new seriousness of educational purpose made itself felt.
Classical education gained a great impetus from the striking advances
in Greek and Latin scholarship which were being achieved,
and also from the inspiration of widely admired authors whose
classical knowledge was part of their reputation: Goethe, Chateaubriand,
Tennyson. However, towards the eighteen-eighties the
classics began to lose their hitherto imdisputed primacy in education.
Other subjectsparticularly the physical sciences^were
called upon to supply the demand for experimentalists and techni21.
A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 467
cians. New disciplines introduced in universities began to compete
for attention
:
political philosophy, economics, psychology.
Modern languages were taught more widely, as avenues to both
culture and commerce. It became obviously impracticable to
teach Greek and Latin to the huge numbers of children now
entering public schools every year. The general increase in
material prosperity which marked the nineteenth century out from
nearly all other eras in human history encouraged a widespread
demand for schooling which was practicaF, which would train
boys and girls first and foremost to make things and earn money.
For all these reasons the teaching of classics in schools and universities
fell off in the two generations preceding the first war. The
process had another, perhaps less apparent cause, which will be
discussed later in this chapter.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century one man could sit in
a library and master the whole of classical knowledge. He would
have had to be exceptionally gifted, with health, talent, money,
good training, and what the Greeks called brazen bowels ; but he
could have done it. Mr. Gibbon, who spent much time and effort
outside the subject, still mastered a great deal of it; while Bentley
and Porson, Mabillon and Niebuhr, came very close to complete
coverage. But at the end of the period no one man could possibly
have known all that was to be known about Greece and Rome.
The best he could hope for was to understand the fundamentals,
to follow the main channels along which research was moving, and
to be at home in a number of fields chosen by himself as illuminating
the rest of classical antiquity. (One of the differences between
a good and a bad scholar is that one specializes in topics which
complement each other, and together light up most of the general
area of his interest, while the other works on peripheral and unrelated
provinces, like the frontier administrator who tries without
success to understand the central problems of an empire.) It was
not merely that the sum of things known about Greek and Romaii'
civilization had become too large, that there were too many books
for one man to read. Classical knowledge had been developed,
rapidly and intensively, along dozens of divergent lines, too varied
and specialized for anybody to master them all, and for any but the
most gifted and industrious of scholars to survey in a single lifetime.
The increase and intensification of classical knowledge in the
nineteenth century were due partly to the closer contact of scholars
468 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
with social and political life, partly to the use of modern industrial
techniques, but chiefly to the application of the methods ofphysical
science to what had until then been regarded as a field midway
between art and philosophy. For instance:
1. New branches of knowledge were developed through the application
of the direct exploratory methods of experimental science.
Archaeology had existed for centuries, chiefly for artistic ends.
It now acquired new meaning with the work of Heinrich Schliemann
(1822-90), a retired business-man who discovered and
excavated the sites of Troy in 1873 and Mycenae in 1876. He had
predecessors; and he committed many errors; yet by applying the
decisive and practical principles of the explorer to an open field of
scholarship, he literally made history.
Scarcely any modern man had seen papyri until after the middle
of the nineteenth century. Papyri are pieces of the Egyptian paper
made from slices of giant bamboo-like reeds : they were the usual
Greek and Roman writing-material until after a.d. ioo. The oldest
documents previously known to have survived from antiquity
were written on vellum, incised in clay, or carved and painted on
stone. But in the eighteenth century a number of rolls of papyrus,
badly charred and almost unreadable, were recovered from the
ruins ofHerculaneum, the sister city of Pompeii. Next, a few rolls,
more or less intact, were discovered in Egypt, and passed from
hand to hand until they reached European collections. And then
expeditions went out to Egypt, explored the sites of former Greek
settlements and other likely areas, and began to bring back loads of
papyri which had been preserved in the dry sands. Some were
literary, but most were financial, legal, and personal documents
straight from the hand of the writer. To read and interpret them
became a new branch of classical scholarship.
Anthropology, linguistics, comparative religion, and other
departments of knowledge, although not wholly new, were now
founded as practical sciences, enlarged, and developed in the
special field of classics.
2. Established branches of classical knowledge were revised and
elaborated by the application of scientific method.
The history of the Greco-Roman world was critically analysed

in the same way as the traditions of Christianity, the records of

21 . A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 469
Egypt, Babylonia, and primitive Europe, and the whole ofmedieval
and modern history were now scrutinized, not from the pulpit or
the writing-desk, but under the microscope.
Classical literature also was subjected to clinically detailed
examination. The manuscripts of the Greek and Latin authors,
the literary patterns in which they wrote, the affiliations between
individuals and schools, and the vocabulary, sources, and content
of single authors were all studied in hitherto unparalleled
detail.
Greek and Roman literature and history were reinterpreted in
the light of the methods and results of other branches of study.
Our knowledge of Homer was enlarged not only by the study of
the epics of other peoples^the Finns, the Anglo-Saxons, the
Indiansbut by the discovery of some of the cities mentioned in
the Iliad and Odyssey
y
and of weapons, ornaments, and utensils
comparable with those used by Homers people. The origins of
Greek drama were illuminated by anthropological parallels and
reconstructions. (The only trouble with this was that it sometimes
relegated the conscious arts of Greece and Rome to a less important
place than they deserved : for instance, the art of rhetoric, highly
developed in antiquity, was neglected.)
3. The scatteredfacts in many fields of classical knowledge were now
completed, centralized, and made readily available.
Just as Johnsons Dictionary, made in the baroque period, was
succeeded in the nineteenth century by the Oxford English Dictionary,
so the smaller classical handbooks of earlier times were
now replaced by great reference manuals written by many hands
and aiming at absolute completeness: dictionariesLiddell and
Scotts Greek lexicon, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae; encyclopaedias
Daremberg and Saglios Dictionnaire des antiquites
classiques, the enormous Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll Real-Encyclopddie
der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. All the known Greek inscriptions
in the world were collected in the Corpus Inscriptionum
Graecarum, familiarly known as the CIG, and all the Latin ones
in the CIL. Large, detailed, comprehensive histories of Greek and
Roman religion, political development, literature, fine art, &c., were
compiled, often by many authors and in many volumes.
470 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
4. Mass-production methods were used to make classical books available
to a wide public.
Long series of classical texts in a standard format were published,
with the ultimate aim of covering all classical literature: the set
issued by Teubner of Leipzig was the largest, and next, far behind,
the Oxford Classical Texts, and the Didot series in France.
The university presses began publishing a vast variety of scholarly
works on everything knowable, the mass of which is one
of the finest intellectual monuments of the nineteenth century.
Educational publishers produced series of annotated editions for
schools and colleges. Nothing like these had been issued since the
Renaissance exceptsignificant parallelthe collection of standard
texts with Latin prose versions and notes, now known as the
Delphin series, because they were designed ad usum serenissimi
Delphini, for the use of His Serene Highness the Dolphin, or
Dauphin of France. The best in this line are the Teubner school
series in Germany and the red Macmillans in Britain.
Lists of standard translations of Greek and Latin classics began
to be published. A great deal of harm was done here by hack
word-by-word translations made to help dullards and ill-taught
schoolboys. The Bohn series (parodied by Kipling and Graves in
Horace's Fifth Book of Odes) helped to kill the interest of many
intelligent boys in classical literature by making it appear both
ugly and stupid. It has now been replaced by the dull but correct
Loeb series, which contains some 200 authors. France has the
Bude collection (named after Guillaume Bude, the scholarly friend
of Rabelais), often useful but sometimes unreliable.
5. The technique of specialization developed by nineteenth-century
science and industry was applied to research in classical scholarships
as to every other branch of learning.
An' almost inconceivable number of articles, papers, essays,
pamphlets, dissertations, treatises, and theses on small areas of
knowledge, particular aspects of individual authors, single blocks
of facts selected from a larger range, new theories, unknown personalities,
unguessed connexions and unobserved parallels and
untraced derivations, was now produced^partly under the orders
of professors who were building up their own subjects, partly to
gain the doctorate for their authors, partly to win promotion out
21 . A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 471
of an obscure post,^ but also often from the disinterested belief
that any objective contribution to knowledge, however small, was
valuable.
Periodicals were founded, to collect the results of research which
might otherwise remain unpublished, or like so many dissertations
be lost in the limbo of limited editions; and, presumably, to
organize the study of certain fields of classical knowledge which
deserved exploration. The collected product of the most important
of these journals now fills many bookshelves and contains a vast
amount of valuable information. Such are Hermes^ Philologus^
the Rheinisches Museum, The Classical Quarterly, The American
Journal of Philology, UAntiquite classique, Mnemosyne, and the
Neue Jahrbucherfur das klassische Altertum,
6. And to join all these activities together, societies were founded
throughout Europe and America; to meet and talk, to correspond
and criticize, to discuss problems of common interest, and in
general to encourage scholarship in the classics. All this activity
was growing into an international exploration of truth, a federation
of the worlds but it was halted and crippled by the First
World War, and, after an attempt at recovery, still further damaged
by the Second.
Whether those days of free exchange of knowledge between men
of learning in all countries will return within the next few centuries
seems doubtful. Stanley Casson (killed in 1944) used to say
that the present generation reminded him of one of the latest
Roman poets, Sidonius Apollinarisa Gallic noble who became
bishop of Clermont. Sidonius spent some years (a.d. 461-67)
living in retirement in France, visiting his friends and writing
letters to a large circle of correspondents. The letters, which are
bright and interesting, somehow survived the many centuries of
savagery, massacre, gang-rule, and primitivism which followed his
death. The odd thing is that Sidonius did not foresee those
centuries, or anything like them : at least, not while he was writing
his letters. Every now and then he mentioned that a woman had
been carried off by outlaws and sold,^ or described a half-civilized
northern barbarian potentate who was more powerful than any
Roman. But he did not understand that the barbarians and the
outlaws were going to become more and more numerous and
powerful ; that the rich civilized cities were going to be attacked
472 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
and destroyed in repeated wars and invasions; that the traderoutes
would be broken, and remain broken for centuries ; that the
map was not rearranging its colours, but breaking up into isolated
fragments ; that law, and science, and philosophy, and cultivated
codes of behaviour, and of course the treasures of literature and
art which he himself loved, were about to dissolve, most of them
apparently for ever, some to survive in gross transformations halfunderstood,
some to be preserved in monasteries like the relics of
miracle-working saints, and the rest to lie in tombs and pits like
dormant seeds, to become alive only when they were restored to
the light, hundreds of years later.
Are these shadows on so many of our horizons the outriders of
another long night, like that which was closing in upon Sidonius ?
We cannot yet tell. But modern scholars must regret that they
have to work during a time when, instead of that generous supranational
comradeship which helped to build the learning and
culture of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is becoming
more and more difficult to exchange opinions across the world, to
bring from distant countries books where new and vital points of
view are freely expressed, to carry on many-sided correspondences
with far-off scholars and encounter no difficulties other than those
involved in the common search for truth, and to feel oneself part
of a world-wide structure of art and learning, greater than all the
things that divide mankind : nationalities and creeds, fear and hate.
There were three special fields in which the new forces in
classical scholarship affected literature (and, through literature,
society) during the nineteenth century and the opening of the
twentieth century. These were history^ translation, and education.
The third is by all odds the most important.
The history of the Greco-Roman world was rewritten by the
scholars of the nineteenth century. The job is still unfinished, but
it had been carried well forward by 1914.
The modern method of dealing with Greek and Roman history,
and indeed all history, was introduced by a German-descended
Dane who became professor at Berlin: Barthold Georg Niebuhr
(i776_i83i) 4 Although the outlines and many of the details of
ancient history were already known, or believed to be known,
Niebuhr revalued them by insisting on the distinction between
21 . A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 473
first-hand and second-hand information, and by evolving methods
of filling in the gaps. Many of his principles were fundamentally
the same as those governing the work of the baroque scholars, but
he applied them more rigorously, energetically, and imaginatively.
Through his teaching, scholars grew accustomed to the idea that
it is unsafe to trust any historian who writes long after the events
he describes ; and that, when such a historian is the only authority
available, we should not swallow all he says, but rather try to
penetrate through his writings to the sources which he used. For
instance, our main authority for the history of early Rome is Livy.
But Livy was as remote from Tarquin and Horatius as we are from
the wars of the Roses. Therefore we must try to discover what
sort of authentic contemporary evidence he had for the stories he
related, in fact, how much he really knew about early Rome.
Niebuhr conjectured that the main evidence he used was ballads
handed down from old times by word of mouth. If this were true,
obviously Livys account of the period would be far less reliable
than it appears, it would be melodramatic and biased and oversimplified.
A brilliant imaginative attempt to reconstruct these ballads was
made by Macaulay in the Lays of Ancient Rome : his preface gives
a useful summary of Niebuhrs theory, although most of us skip its
measured prose in our eagerness to reach the irresistible gallop of
He reeled, and on Herminius
He leaned one breathing-space;
Then, like a wild cat mad with wounds,
Sprang right at Asturs face.
The only difficulty is that there is hardly any evidence that such
ballads ever existed. Niebuhr belonged to the Time of Revolution;
and as such he admired the unspoilt peasantry, which he felt
ought to have a folk-poetry far more beautiful than anything produced
in later times by professional poets, s
(Macaulay rightly stresses the fact that the principle was not
new, but had been revived and energized by Niebuhr.^ It was
given additional weight by Leopold Ranke (1795-1886), who stated
the ideal of the nineteenth-century historian in the phrase To show
what really happened.^ Ranke was not a classical but a modern
historian, and he himself said that in writing his famous Criticism
of Modern Historians he was not thinking of Niebuhr. Yet he had
474 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
Niebuhrs bust in the place of honour in his study; and (as
Mommsen said) all historians are Niebuhrs pupils.)^
But if we cannot find any contemporary evidence, if all our books
are late and imaginative, how can we discover what really happened ?
By inference, Niebuhr replies. Social forces do not emerge unexpectedly
and disappear quickly. They leave long-lasting results.
From the results we can infer the character and interaction of the
forces, even though no eyewitness has left us a description of them.
And we can strengthen our inferences from parallels elsewhere.
Thus, Niebuhr was able to explain several complex problems in
the economic history of early Rome from his own knowledge of the
Danish and north German peasantry and his own experience as an
expert in public finance. For another of his principles was the
concept of social evolution, applied to classical antiquity. Nations,
according to this theory, grow and change just as human beings do
in the course of a lifetime. It is possible, therefore, for a historian
who understands the regular stages of that development to work
back (with the help of parallels observed in the life-history of other
nations) from the known facts in the later development of a people,
to reconstruct an earlier stage for which there is no direct evidence.
A. J. Toynbees A Study of History contains a brilliant application
of this principle on a much larger scale; and in the nineteenth
century Niebuhrs work helped, in England, to produce Grotes
History of Greece, Arnolds History of Rome, and Macaulays
History of England.
The greatest classical historian of the nineteenth century was
Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903). He published three volumes of
his Roman History in 1854-6, covering the rise and fall of the
republic. Then he stopped. He never went on to write the history
of the empirealthough, thirty years later, he produced a brilliant
description of the provinces under imperial rule. This arrest is
peculiar, all the more peculiar because Mommsen lived so long
and wrote so much. He produced uniquely valuable treatises on
the R,oman coinage and Roman criminal law. His Roman Constitutional
Law has been called the greatest historical treatise on
political institutions ever written. ^ And it was he who edited the
huge Corpus ofLatin Inscriptionsa task which demanded as much
energy and organizing ability as building a transcontinental railway,
to say nothing of the unrivalled knowledge Mommsen
brought to bear on it.
21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 475
Many attempts have been made to explain why his history of
Rome was left incomplete. Fueter, the historian of historians,
suggested that Mommsen refrained from writing about the empire
because {a) he had no interest in the personal history of the
emperors, and {b) he did not want merely to rewrite Tacitus and
Suetonius.^ This is clearly an inadequate explanation, for there
is much more in the Roman empire than Tacitus, Suetonius, and
the personal history of the emperors: and Mommsen knew that.
Mr. Toynbee begins his Study of History with a discussion of
the invasion of modern historical thought by techniques and ways
of thinking derived from the industrial system. He takes Mommsen
as an illustration of this. He says that after Mommsen had written
his history of the republic, he became almost ashamed of it and
turned his magnificent energy and ability into other channels.
Those other channels, Mr. Toynbee suggests, were the collection
of the raw materials of history and the work of superintending
their manufacture, as a plant foreman superintends the construction
of a series of motor-cars; and in this, Mr. Toynbee concludes,
Mommsen was yielding to the spiritual pressures of industrialization.^^
This may be true. Part of it probably is. But it does not
explain the abrupt break in Mommsens work on Roman history,
the difference in tone between its beginning and its continuance.
President Butler of Columbia University mentions the Mommsen
problem in his reminiscences. He writes that he himself
heard Mommsen say, at one of Zellers Sunday evening gatherings,
that the reason why he had never continued his Romische Geschichte
through the imperial period was that he had never been able to make up
his mind as to what it was that brought about the collapse of the Roman
Empire and the downfall of Roman civilization.^^
This looks like a deeper explanation, and perhaps brings us closer
to the truth. Was Roman history a question which Mommsen
could not answer? Yet he had answered the question of the
Roman republic with sovereign confidence and brilliance. Why
could he not answer the question of the empire? Did he feel that
the empire could not be explained by the republic ? or, perhaps,
did he come to think that his own explanation of the republic was
wrong?
Mommsens Roman History is the only scholarly work in which
he allowed his personal emotions to appear, and his personal
476 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
judgements to stand on the same level as objective statements of
fact. It is powerfully, sometimes violently, written, with far more
emphasis on politics than on all other aspects of Roman civilization.
Modern parallels are constantly drawn, in the manner to
which Spengler has accustomed us since. The younger Cato
appears as Don Quixote. The Roman aristocrats look like German
Junkers. Pompey is a stupid sergeant-major; and Cicero is a
flabby journalist, a shifty lawyer without principles or strength of
character. Julius Caesar^whom other historians have seen as a
political crook who ruined his country out of personal ambition

Caesar is superman, the ideal Roman. Energy, passion, a sense of

immediacy boil through the book.
Now, Mommsen was not only a scholar but a politician. He was
deeply involved in the revolution of 1848, and had to leave his post
to avoid reprisals. It is clear, then, that his Roman History was
sparked by his own experience of the 1848 debacle. He could not
admire the weak liberals. He loathed the feudal landowners of
Germany. The working classes he felt to be passive, not active.
What could he admire, then.f^ The man of action, the masterspirit
who would dominate the weaklings and break the stiflFnecked
and mould the passive and make a single powerful Reich.
He wished for such a man in Germany : a Bismarck. He wrote that
such a man had been the salvation of Rome : Caesar.
Why then did he not go on, and write the history of the empire ?
Was it not because he felt that, after all, the empire had been a
failure? If Caesar and Caesarism were right for Rome, then
Mommsen would have had to show that the Roman empire was
happier, more virtuous, and more powerful than the Roman
republic. And this he could not do. He did in fact describe the
provinces, because they were actually happier under the imperial
regime. In his Roman Constitutional Law he advanced the theory
that the rule of Augustus was a dyarchya division of power with
the senate rather than a monarchyand that the emperors powers
flowed out of the Roman republican constitution. This looks like
an attempt to justify the rule of the emperors in a way which
cannot be harmonized with the complaints of those Romans who
actually lived under it. Any history of the Roman empire must
face the problem of absolutism, and of the various forms of resistance
to it: the senatorial and Stoic opposition, the military revolts,
and the very important opposition of the Christians. Mommsen
21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 477
could not face this problem because he shrank from applying to
the German empire, then just coming to its birth, the conclusions
to which his answer must lead.
Instead, he spent much of his enormous energy on describing
one of the greatest achievements of the Roman genius, which was
begun by the republic and carried to completion by the emperors

Roman law. Posterity will always be grateful to him for the power
and penetration which he used to expound this vast and important
subject. But, if law is one of the pillars of Roman spiritual greatness,
humane culture is another. It is regrettable, therefore, that
Mommsen was misled by the political aspirations of his own time
and place into making a radically false estimate of the man who,
more than all others, transmitted Greco-Roman philosophical and
literary thought to the modern world. The early empire is not only
Augustus; it is Vergil. And in the last generation of the republic,
and for the future of the world, the work of Caesar was no more
vital than the work of Cicero.
Another spiritual descendant of Niebuhr, but as patriotic a
Frenchman as Mommsen was a German, was Numa-Denys Fustel
de Coulanges (1830-89). Just as Ranke made his reputation by
going behind the historians to the archives and reading the actual
reports of the Venetian ambassadors, so Fustel de Coulanges
demanded evidence, in the shape of a Greek or Roman document,
for any assertion made about ancient history. His favourite
question was Avez-vous un texte ? and he boasted of being the
only man who had read every Latin text from the sixth century B.c.
to the tenth century of the Christian era.^s Where Mommsen
emphasized the role of political institutions and individual statesmen
in making history, Fustel regarded them both as less important
than the social facts of which they were expressions and results.
In the book which made his name, The Ancient City^ he worked
out the theory that religion was the determinant factor in moulding
the institutions which are the framework of politics, and hence of
history. He showed how, as little local deities became inadequate
and disappeared, the small states that worshipped them lost their
identities, merging into larger nation-states; and how, as the
nation-states (Rome in particular) adopted more cosmopolitan,
more universal deities, a world-religion, like the sun rising as the
stars go out, at last occupied the whole firmament. Toynbee
would say that the universal religion was the work of the internal
478 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
proletariat, a phenomenon parallel to the universal state which was
the later Roman empire; but Fustel held that Christianity, by
overthrowing the old cults, destroyed Greco-Roman society and
established Christendom on its ruins.
He then went on to spend his life on a political history of France
during the period when it was ceasing to be fully Roman : History
of the Political Institutions of Ancient France. The main purpose
of this work was to confute a number of modern historians by
proving that Roman Gaul was not conquered, not crushed and
transformed, by Germanic tribes in the Frankish, Visigothic, and
Burgundian invasions of the fifth century a.d. ; that the language,
law, religion, and social structure of Gaul were consequently not
germanized; that the theory of German virtues regenerating the
decadent French was^however pleasing to the emotions of
Germansfalse to the facts ; and that it was quite untrue to say
that the French nobility was descended from conquering Germans
and the vassals and peasants from conquered Gaulsa theory
which would represent the French Revolution as one of the latest
battles in a struggle which had begun more than a thousand years
before. This question had been argued in the eighteenth century,
by Dubos against Boulainvilliers, but had gained new importance
with the rise of nineteenth-century nationalist feeling.^^ Fustels
interpretation of the invasions took long to penetrate and was
bitterly attacked, but is now widely accepted, and not in France
alone.
The last of these great men, and the first of the modern superhistorians
who survey the whole universe of the past (to which the
present generation is attached, like a new and not particularly
significant asteroid), was Eduard Meyer (1855-1930), a scholar
qualified by a knowledge not only of Greek and Latin but of their
more abstruse dialects, and of Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, and
Egyptian. He wrote the first useful history of Egypt ; an invaluable
account of the economic development of the ancient world ; and an
unfinished History of the Ancient World^which he could never
complete because it was constantly being revised as fresh discoveries
were made. Meyers special contribution to history was a combination
of the ideas of Gibbon and Niebuhrthat, although
nations develop severally, they are all parts of a common process,
the history of human civilization. Thus, it is impossible to understand
Greece without knowing the history of the other Mediter21
. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 479
ranean peoples. Isolated views are distorted. This is now widely
recognizedin politics, in science, in comparative literature, in
aesthetic history, in the history of religion. Meyer much admired
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), the author of The Decline of the
West ; and it is the modern universal historians like Spengler and
Toynbee who are his real successors.
Many translations of classical books were made during the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries ; and a number of new theories
of translation were put into practice. There were some brilliant
results. But the total effect was unsatisfying.
Translation is a difficult art. The translator must be a good
scholar in a foreign languageor else have access to the results of
good scholarship, together with an unerring flair for divining what
is right and useful among them. And he must in his own language
be an extremely good writer. It is hard enough to set ones own
thoughts on paper in prose, still harder in poetry ; but setting down
the thoughts of another man who thought in another tongue means
that, although one is spared the pangs of creation, one suffers the
keenest tortures in finding the right words and choosing the right
order for them. Now, during this period the difficult art of translation
did not progress so far or so surely as other branches of
classical learning and of general literature. Before we discuss the
reasons for this, let us survey the field. It will be best to examine
the English translators, who are better known to most readers of
this book, and who are typical of the general trends in European
translation.
The most interesting documents on the subject in English are
Matthew Arnolds lectures On translating Homer and his essay
On translating Homer, Last words (1861-2). Both were aimed at an
erudite and affected verse translation of the Iliad published in 1856
by the eccentric professor F. W, Newman, and in particular at the
assumptions in Newmans preface.^ It was a common practice
for Victorian critics to attach a general discussion to a particular
criticism ; but although Arnold at first broadened his treatment of
the subject by bringing in Chapman, Pope, Cowper, and other
translators of Homer, he eventudly fell into rather trivial disputation
with Newman, which blurred the general outline of the
problem and lowered the tone he had intended to maintain. Nor
did he assist his criticism by including some lumbering and
48o 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
irregular hexameters of his own design and manufacture. But the
chief merit of his criticism is that it emphasizes, clearly and unforgettably,
the fact that Homer is a poet, a great and noble poet.
The revival of interest in folk-poetry, which was part of the
movement of thought in the revolutionary era, had greatly changed
the general estimate of Homer. Pope saw him as a court poet in a
rather primitive court. Many (though not all) of Popes successors
saw him as Homer the Rhymer, and translated him into the jaunty
metre and quaint old-fashioned language of the ballads. Newmans
preface and the manner of his translation made him an excellent
representative of this school, for, by recoiling from the polished
ice of the baroque translators, he had fallen among the hedges and
ditches of the ballad-mongers. He writes
:
*The style of Homer himself is direct, popular, forcible, quaint,
flowing, garrulous, abounding with formulas, redundant in particles
and afflrmatory interjections. ... In all these respects it is similar to the
old English ballad. . . . The moral qualities of Homers style being like
to those of the English ballad, we need a metre of the same genius. It
must be fundamentally musical and popular. Only those metres which,
by the very possession of these qualities, are liable to degenerate into
doggerel, are suitable to reproduce the ancient Epic. ... I ought to be
quaint; I ought not to be grotesque.
This preface is followed by a glossary of his own quaint words
:
hehight (= stipulate), bragly (= braw, proudly fine), gramsome
(== direful), sithence (= ever since), and so forth. And then off he
pelts into twenty-four books of ballad metre, modelled on
She kissed his cheek, she kamed his hair,
As oft she did before, O,
She drank the red blood frae him ran.
On the dowie houms o Yarrow.
But only a very strong-willed Victorian could have refused to see,
before he ever reached the Battle at the Ships, that Homers rich
vocabulary, spacious descriptions, and flowing rhetoric could not
be crushed into that little ditty-measure. The result was the painful
incongruity which Arnold denounced
:
Beneath the car the axle,
And the broad rims orbicular, with gore of men were pelted.^
Arnolds criticism of this translation had two results. The first
was that he destroyed the false parallel between Homer and the
21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 481
ballads. This he did by destroying Newmans translation, but in
passing he also attacked Maginns Homeric Ballads and Macaulays
Lays of Ancient Rome?^ The second was that, by putting Homer
on a level with Dante and Milton, by discussing their grandeurs as
being unlike but comparable, by defining the difference between
Shakespeares rapid power and the serenity of Homer, by introducing
illuminating comparisons with the moderns, Wordsworth,
Longfellow, and Tennyson, and by maintaining almost throughout
a tone of unmistakable, unaffected love for great poetry with all its
various possibilities, he raised Homeric criticism out of the morass
of pedantry, conjecture, dissection, and tastelessness into which it
had been sinking. His lectures were an implicit protest against the
scholarly attitudes to Homer which had become prevalent throughout
Europe and Americathat the Iliad and Odyssey were remarkable
collections of facts about the Bronze and early Iron Ages
;
that they were monuments of Homeric grammar (which of course
is so interesting because of its differences from Attic grammar)
that they were fascinating relics of the Aeolic dialect ; or anything
except the essential fact that they were, and remain, great poems,
among the greatest in the whole world.
For all that, there were mistakes and overstatements in Arnolds
criticism, while Newman had a certain amount of right on his
side.^^ And the crucial problem was not fully argued out by either
of them. Yet it is fundamental. It recurs whenever the time comes
for a new translation of a great classic to be made. Arnold begins
by saying that every translator of Homer should remember, and in
his version show, that Homer is (i) rapid, (2) plain and direct in
language, (3) plain and direct in thought, and (4) noble. He goes
on to show how various English translations of Homer have failed
through missing one or other of these qualities. Most readers
would agree with him on the first, and third, and fourth. But the
crux of his argument with Newman was the second. For Homer
is often the very reverse of plain and direct in language, and seems
undeniably obscure and odd. This raises a radical question of
taste, closely connected with difficult problems of scholarship,
which both Arnold and Newman ought to have analysed in detail.
Here is an outline of the difficulty.
Homer uses words which no other Greek poet ever employs ; he
is very free with strange verbal forms and combinations of particles
and metrical tricks and relics of obsolete letters and combinations
5076 II
482 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
of disparate dialects and unintelligible ejaculations. Some of his
phrases look really unnatural and distorted. The Greeks themselves
found it difEcult to explain such parts of his language.
Scholars argued^not about its fine shades, but about its real
meanings. Erudite allusive poets (like Apollonius) embedded fragments
of it in their own poetry: still not quite understanding it,
but hoping that it would produce the right effect, like Chatterton
and Browning with slug-horn and Spenser with derring-do. It is
a splendidly flexible and sonorous language, but it is odd and
difficult.
Nevertheless, Homers thought is direct and plain.
This phenomenon is not so hard to understand if we look at the
subject-matter of the Iliad. The characters, and their motives,
and the lines of the story, are direct and plain. But the settings,
the accessories, are odd and difficult : weapons, strategy, customs

it is not that they are remote from us, like the customs of Beowulf^
but that they are difficult in another way, apparently through confusion
and incompatibility. (Even the life which we see through
the windows of Homers similes is different from the life led by his
characters.) Now, suppose a great poet had blended many traditions
which he had received as vehicles of great poetry or of great
poetic materialphrases, transitional formulas, ennobling adjectives;
and passages of narrative and description, attached to
famous names and polished by the work of generations of craftsmen.
Suppose that sometimes these traditions were conflicting,
because they came from different places and times, or through
different channels. Suppose, again, that the poet himself did not
always intellectually understand all the phrases and descriptions,
but felt them to be valuable because they were the setting of noble
events, the very habit of great men as they lived. And finally,
suppose that such a poet had lived towards the end of a long
succession of invasions, migrations, and destructions, in which
customs and language had suffered many changes, some surviving,
some only dimly remembered, and others swept away, while the
ideals of heroism and beauty and noble poetry had remained^not
surviving with the skin of the teeth, but illumined and intensified.
Such a poet might be Homer, and his poetry might look like the
Iliad and the Odyss^.
The problem then is how to convey, in English verse, the
extremely complex impression which we receive when reading
21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 4B3
Homer. The narrative is swift, the rhetoric sweeps us on grandly
and surely, the scope and depth of the whole poem are so vast that
they bear witness to the magnificence of the spirit which conceived
and worked it out. But, for all its splendour, the language is
sometimes odd and obscure, and details of the descriptions are
hard to comprehend. That is the difficulty of translating the
epics.
Arnold, who confined himself to three lectures and one article,
and Newman, in his long rebuttal, did not examine this question
fully. They approached it from different sides. Newman had the
best of it in Greek, because he did emphasize and prove the
strangeness of Homers language, which makes it quite impossible
for us to call it eminently plain and direct. But he omitted one
essential factapparently because he was incapable of seeing it.
That was the fact which Arnold saw; and Arnold had the best of
it in English. The fact is that, even when Homers language seems
odd, it is always beautiful : vividly decorative, or curiously memorable,
or rich and melodious in sound, or all together. What was
wrong with Newmans version, and with his principles, was that
he omitted beauty. Arnold had taste ; Newman had none. Dapper^
greaved AchaeanSy alone, would damn him.
But there was another aspect of the problem, which Newman
raised in his preface and Arnold dismissed in his first lecture,
but which is not irrelevant. Should a translator try to reproduce the
effect Homers poetry produced on its Greek audiences ? If Homer
seemed difficult to them, should the English translation be made
to seem difficult to English readers ? Arnold said the question was
meaningless, for this simple reason, that we cannot possibly tell
how the /ZzW affected its natural hearers^ This is, however, not
quite true. We have enough evidence, even apart from the philological
facts given by Newman in his Reply, to know that the Iliad
struck the classical Greeks as odd and antique, and that some of its
nobility consisted for them in that impression of oddity and antiquity.
(Of course, the men for whom Homer himself sang, steeped
in epic poetry as they must have been, no doubt understood and
felt it as deeply as he himself did.) On the other hand, we must
never forget that the classical Greeks leamt Homer in childhood,
and were constantly quoting and hearing Homer throughout their
lives. Therefore, although his language sounded unlike anything
else, they found it familiar z even if they missed the exact
484 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
meaning or found the words peculiarly shaped, they felt what the
poetry meant.
There is a modern parallel for this. For many generations the
English and Scots have been reading the King James version of the
Bible at school and Sunday-school ; they have been hearing it at
least once a week read aloud and expounded in church ; it has been
quoted again and again ; many of its phrases have passed into the
English language. Most of it is quite familiar; and yet it is not all
understood. Who knows what anathema means, or its expansion
Anathema Maran-atha'l'^'^ What is the mark of the beasts and who
are the poor in spirit Even the hyperbole which I used a few
paragraphs ago, escape with the skin of the teeth^ is very strange as
soon as one looks closely at it.^^^ Exit all these and many other such
phrases were familiar to educated English-speaking people throughout
the nineteenth century, and were used with a perception of
most of their meaning and all of their force which was a good
substitute for intellectual comprehension. That was the sort of
perception which, thanks to education and familiarity, the classical
Greeks had when dealing with Homers language. That is one of
the reasons why his poetry has been called the Bible of Greece.
The question how Homer struck the classical Greek audiences
who loved him so much is then neither insoluble nor irrelevant.
The suggested parallel of the English Bible (although omitting
Homers magnificent verse and much of his sonority) offers a
solution to the problem of finding a style. The Iliad and Odyssey
might be translated into the strong, vivid, dignified, often melodious,
often strange and archaic and yet familiar and welcome
prose of the Authorized Version. Arnold himself, towards the end
of his third lecture, attempted a translation of part of Iliad 6,
justified his choice of words by citing the Bible, and recommended
Homeric translators to take Crudens Concordance to the Holy
Scriptures for a guide in difficulties of language.
This also was the solution adopted by the most influential
English translator of Homer in the late nineteenth century.
Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was not a classical scholar, and often
lamented his relative ignorance of Greek; but he had a vast knowledge
of the heroic ages of the world and their poetry, and he
had admirable taste. His Homer and the Epic, in refuting the
niggling criticism which had led scholars to dissect the two poems
into collections of ill-assorted lays put together by what Wilamo21
. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 485
witz called a botcher, was common sense raised to the point of
brilliance. In collaboration with more exact classicists he produced
versions of the Odyssey (with S. H. Butcher) in 1879 and the
Iliad (with Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers) in 1883. They became
very popular. Their style was stately without being inflated, and,
through use of the vocabulary and syntax of the King James
translators, contrived to be almost as varied and strange, almost as
intelligible and noble, as Homer. But they are in prose: a fatal
defect. To read a prose translation of Homer, however skilful, is
like hearing a single pianist, however gifted, playing a version of
Beethovens Ninth Symphony.
Matthew Arnold himself apparently felt the failure of the hexameter
translations with which he experimented in his lectures. He
made no more attempts to translate Homer. But in two heroic
poems which he published in 1853 ^^55 already tried
to embody in English verse some of what he thought the most
important Homeric excellences. The poems are epic fragments,
what the Greeks called epyllia. They have lived longer than his
imitation of Sophocles, Merope^ because they are much more than
imitations. In some ways they are not heroic at all, and neither has
a Greek theme: Balder Dead comes from Norse, and Sohrah and
Rustum from Persian legend. These two fine pieces contain something
of the nobility of Homer, some though not all of his aristocratic
formalism, much of his strong simplicity; the half-primitive
quality of his scenes and characters^tribal armies, warrior chiefs
in single combat, hero-like gods and godlike heroes, the primacy of
the deed over word and thought, the supernatural and the human
closely intertwined; a few close adaptations of great passages from
Homer and Vergil several important structural elements, such
as the stately speeches, great crowd-scenes, conventional epithets,
and, most of all, similes drawn from nature and elaborated for the
sake of their own beauty. Milton had already used this splendid
device (although not often enough), and so had other modern
heroic poets. Arnold, who loved nature deeply, brought in many
spacious nature-images comparable to those of Homer. Comparable
sometimes in nobility, for the simile of the lonely eagle^^
is as great as all but the greatest of Homer; comparable in vividness
^the cardinal difficulty of the modern epic writer, which
Arnold solved by choosing similitudes clearly imaginable by us,
vivid and evocative, and yet appropriate to the oriental and northern
486 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
subjects of his poems but not comparable in strength, for most of
them, very revealingly, reflect fear, or grief, or helplessness.^^
But in the main the spirit and the style of Arnolds two poems
are not Homeric. They are Homer twice removed. The style is
eminently plain and direct, much more so than Homers. Sometimes
verse after verse, clause after clause, begins with And: which
is a biblical rather than a Homeric habit. The syntax is straightforward,
with none of Homers quirks, although often it has his
long-sustained roll. The vocabulary is far simpler than Homers
in variety and splendour. And the verse-rhythm, compared with
Homers, is calm and monotonous. If you spend a summer day in
a highland glen, the air around you will be warm and perfumed,
and the breeze will blow on you, lightly at noon, strongly at dawn
and evening, nearly always from one direction. If you climb the
mountain and spend the day on the top, the winds of heaven will
attack you, jostle you, caress you, confuse you, threaten and excite
and exalt you, but never leave you feeling that you are more
powerful than they. If they cared, they could crush you. Arnold
is the breeze in the valley. Homer is the air among the peaks.
But what readers of Arnold miss most is the spirit of energy and
daring which fills the Iliad and Odyssey. His images, although
beautiful, are melancholy. The theme of his poems is the tragic
and useless death of a young hero, the doom by which each man
kills the thing he loves. Mourning, the decline of greatness, the
waste of promisethese are the central thoughts. This penetrating
pessimism, with the slower pace and tenderer imagery, makes it
clear that Arnold was inspired not by Homer but by a man much
more like himself, the melancholy, sensitive, overburdened Vergil.
In Sohrah and Rustum some would hold that he actually surpassed
Vergilparticularly in the superb close, which is more than, but
seems to have grown out of, an epic simile. As Rustum is left alone
with his dead son in the gathering night, the scene darkens and
grows smaller, and we find ourselves following, not any human
struggle, but the majestic river Oxus which flows past the battlefield,
and away from it towards the north, itself to meet conflict and
to waste strength and beauty among the deserts, until at last, like
a hero reaching triumph through agony, it finds its
luminous home of waters . . . bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathd stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.
21 . A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 487
After Arnold there were few successful attempts to turn Homer
into English verse. Tennyson emphasized Arnolds failure, in a
note in the 1863 Cornhill^ saying that it had gone far to prove the
impossibility of using hexameters in English : he himself held that
blank verse was the only appropriate English metre, and he showed
it by adding a fine rendering of Iliad^ 8. 542-65, which Arnold had
discussed and partly translated into prose in his first lecture. Of
course, Tennysons Arthurian poems contained many faint
Homeric echoes. But, like Arnold, he modelled his own heroic
style more on Vergil than on Homerand indeed he conceived his
duty towards the Prince Consort, when he presented
King Arthur, like a modern gentleman,
as similar to that of Vergil towards Octavian Augustus.^^
Through his Lectures Arnold had abolished the conception that
Homer was a ballad-monger. In Langs translations Homer
appeared stately, slow-paced, solemn. Towards the end of the
nineteenth century Samuel Butler (1835-1902) brought his sharp
convention-hating intelligence to the problem. He began by
pointing out that the epics were sometimes deliberately funny. In
a short lecture. The Humour of Homer (1892), he suggested that
the heroic prowess of the Greeks in the Iliad was so overdone that
the poem was probably written by someone with Trojan sympathies,
who exaggerated in order to poke fun at the conquerors
;
and he emphasized what has been agreed by scholars, that the
gods are presented as human, all too human, to the point of being
ridiculousfor instance, in the scene where Hera fascinates her
husband Zeus, father of gods and men, and diverts his attention
from the Trojan war to a much more urgent matter. The effect
of this approach was to humanize the epics, to break their frame
of convention and allow them to be criticized as ancestors of the
modern novel. Butler continued this process in The Authoress of
the Odyssey (1897), where he contended, largely by arguments of
the no man could have written this type, that the Odyssey was
written by Nausicaa, the young princess of Oi. 6, that she lived in
Trapani in western Sicily, about 1050 b.c., and that she chose to
make the poem a feminine counterblast to the masculine Iliad.
Butler even knew how she wrote it^with a sharply pointed style
of hardened bronze ... on plates of lead.^^ Although Butlers
488 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
criticism lacked historical perspective, it carried farther the movement
to discredit the theory preached by Wolf and taken up by
dozens of German scholars (p. 384), that the epics were assemblages
of lays. Butler not only made the Odyssey the work of one
person, but, from the difficulties and incongruities smelt out by the
Wolf-pack, reconstructed a fallible human authoress.
Butler published prose translations of the Iliad in 1898 and the
Odyssey in 1900. As he said in chapter i of The Authoress of the
Odyssey, he felt that the Butcher and Lang translation showed
a benevolent leaning towards Wardour Street, where the bogus
antiques are sold; and that he himself preferred Tottenham Court
Road, where the goods are plain, cheap, and up to date. The result
was that his translations lacked the metre, most of the stylistic
conventions, the rich vocabulary, the flexible syntax, and the
sonority of the original. They still contained what he considered
the essentials^plot, characterization, and speeches. It was probably
a useful action on Butlers part to create an easily readable
prose translation, for the period when he wrote was inclined to
enjoy prose fiction and to respect, but ignore, poetry; and the
Odyssey was meant to be enjoyed. Still, it is a pity that no poet
arose to give us the whole, rather than half a loaf.
T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935) followed Butler part of the way in
another prose translation of the Odyssey, published under his new
name of Shaw in 1932. He too felt that the poem was one single
story told by one single writer intimately familiar with the Iliad
and better acquainted with books and home-life than with action
and danger; for him, though, the author was not a young princess
but an elderly bookworm, as muddled an antiquary as Walter
Scott.
3
3 The style of his translation was an unsatisfactory attempt
to render in prose some of the effect of those conventional turns of
speech which are essential parts of the Homeric verselike the
bars that punctuate and support a stained-glass window. Butler
accused earlier translators of leaning towards the sham antique.
Lawrence said the author of the Odyssey himself was a sham
antique. This assumed knowledge far greater than any human
being possesses, yea, even six scholars of these degenerate days
could not raise such an hypothesis. The result was what we should
expect from Seven Pillars of Wisdom : energetic and swift sentences
and paragraphs, with a vocabulary affected and often (Lady mine,
hitherto we have both travailed exhaustively) ^4 ludicrously false.
21 . A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 489
In fact there are only two major ways of accounting for the
incongruities and incomprehensibilities of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, One is to say that the poems grew up of disparate and
more or less independent materials, which were attracted together
because they belonged to the same large tradition, but which were
never built into a single structure by any intelligent creator. This
is the Wolf theory. The other is stated on p. 482 above; and to
it adhere Butler and Lawrence, although they much underrate the
power of tradition over an early author, and make the epic poets
improbably self-conscious. The best illustration can be drawn
from another art. The Gothic cathedrals are masses of disparate
and often incongruous material. Sometimes their original plan
was never completed, sometimes it was altered so as to give the
same building two different kinds of tower, and nearly always the
older simplicity was overlaid, but not concealed, by later elaborations.
And yet almost every one of these great buildings had a
master-plan, and sometimes a single man or group as masterbuilder.
The plan is grand, and evident, and dominating, while the
incongruities usually come from a wish to combine subtler expressions
of that plan with the reverence for tradition which is an
essential element in early, perhaps in all, great art.
The difficulty remains unsolved: the difficulty of finding a suitable
style in which to translate into poetry not only Homer but the
other masterpieces which are concealed from modem readers by
old-fashioned or inadequate versions. Professor Gilbert Murray
has translated many of the Greek tragedies and some of Aristophanes
into a late nineteenth-century style which owes much to
Swinburne and something to William Morris. His translations,
for all their charm, lack the strength of the Greek ; and nowadays
their style, instead of allowing us to see the original clearly, appears
as an addition and distortion. T. S. Eliot has attacked them in an
essay of disagreeable, but explicable, violence, 3 s and it seems clear
that future translations of classical books must, in order to reach
the public that needs them, master and expand the new poetic
style which Eliot has done most to develop.
But the difficulty goes deeper than the choice of a style.
Throughout the nineteenth century we can trace a conflict, in the
matter of translation, between scholarship and literature, between
knowledge and taste. The most interesting and vital ideas on
translation have come from the amateurs^Arnold, Lang, Butler,
490 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
Lawrence. The professors, like Newman and Wilamowitz, have a
killing touch. 3
6
Murrays were far the best of a long line of translations
by classical scholars, most of which were dull and some
excruciatingly bad. Many of these give readers the impression that
their authors hate their own literature and know nothing about it,
for they write in a language neither modern, nor beautiful, nor
even real. This conflict is an expression of a deep-seated illness in
the culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The illness
is even more clearly manifest in the problem of education and in
the decline of classical studies,
As a boy I had the common experience of fifty years agoteachers
whose sole object was to spoonfeed classes, not with the classics but with
syntax and prosody . . . with the result that we loathed Xenophon and
his ten thousand, Homer was an abomination, while Livy and Cicero
were names and tasks. . . . My experience was that of thousands, yet,
as I remember, we were athirst for good literature. . . . What a tragedy
to climb Parnassus in a fog!
That is Sir William Osiers description of his classical education
at a Canadian school in 1866.37 He was a clever energetic boy, full
of life and curiosity, ready to be absorbed in anything interesting.
However, his headmaster managed to disgust him with classical
literature, by setting him work which consisted largely in the committing
to memory of countless lines of Homer and Virgil, read
with the aid of Schrevelius lexicon and Rosss grammar, in which
the definitions were in Greek and Latin respectively. Meanwhile
another master, who had a real love for science, took the boys for
fascinating field-trips, talked to them about fossils and the formation
of the earths crust, and showed them marvels through the
microscope. The result was that young Osier plunged into science,
and became a brilliant doctor. At an early age he was appointed
the first professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, which
he left only to become Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford.
Throughout his life he admired classical literature and classical
scholars^in particular, two great men of the Renaissance who
were both physicians and humanists, Browne and Linacre.38 He
built up a fine classical library. He was never tired of warning his
students that the natural sciences, including medicine, were only
half the material of education, and that great literature (the classics
of Greece and Rome being the greatest) was the more important
21 . A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 491
part. But, while he did not wish his career other than it had
been, he never ceased to regret that, through bad and perverse
teaching, he had been denied the full understanding of the
classics.
Osier was one of many distinguished men of the nineteenth
century who found that bad teaching stifled even the readiest
youthful impulse to love good literature. Here is a description of
the classical work at Columbia College in New York, in 1879,
written by Nicholas Murray Butler, who later became president of
Columbia and for decades occupied the first place among American
educators
The teaching of the classics in those days was almost wholly of that
dry-as-dust type which has pretty near Hlled classical study in the
United States. Professor Drisler, who was then the Jay Professor (of
Greek), was a man of remarkable elevation of character and of mind as
well as a sound and thorough scholar. He was, however, so given to
insistence upon the minutest details of grammar that our eyes were kept
closely fixed on the ground and we hardly ever caught any glimpse of
the beauty and larger significance of the great works upon which we
were engaged. For example, I recall that during the first term of the
sophomore [== second] year we were to read with Dr. Drisler the Medea
of Euripides and that when the term came to an end we had completed
but 246 lines. In other words, we never came to know what the Medea
was all about or to see either the significance of the story or the quality
of its literary art. . . . In Latin Professor Charles Short was a pedant if
ever there was one. . . . Whether he was dealing with Horace, with
Juvenal, or with Tacitus, he was always attending to the less important
matters which the study of these authors suggested.*
In another great American college a few years later the same
dismal condition is recorded by a young man who later became one
of the best-loved teachers of literature in all America. Describing
Yale in 1883-4, William Lyon Phelps says:
Most of our classrooms were dull and the teaching purely mechanical
;
a curse hung over the Faculty, a blight on the art of teaching. Many
professors were merely hearers of prepared recitations; they never
showed any living interest, either in the studies or in the students. I
remember we had Homer three hours a week during the entire year.
The instructor never changed the monotonous routine, never made a
remark, but simply called on individuals to recite or to scan, said That
will do**, put down a mark; so that in the last recitation in June, after
a whole college year of this intolerable classroom drudgery, I was,
492 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
surprised to hear him say, and again without any emphasis, The poems
of Homer are the greatest that have ever proceeded from the mind of
man, class is dismissed, and we went out into the sunshine/'^
From a British public school at the same period we can hear the
same dry bones rattling; and once again it is not a hostile critic
who rattles them, but an original writer who later worked in
Greece and loved Greek literature for its own sake : E. F. Benson
on Marlborough;
h . . How dismal was the system, which, expunging all human
interest and beauty from a subject that is instinct with humanity and
loveliness, taught a language [Greek], and that the most flexible of all
human tongues, as if it had been a series of algebraical formulae. How
willingly would those dry irregularities have been learned if the imagination
had first been kindled. . . . But at the time when I was learning
Greek, the methods of tutors resembled that of those who, by making
their pupils chop up dry faggots of wood, hoped to teach them what was
the nature of the trees that once the wind made murmurous on the hillsides
of Attica.^^
Many more examples of this phenomenon could be quoted from
the biographiesnot of dullards, nor of practicaF business men,
nor of erratic discipline-hating artists, nor of men devoted from
boyhood to scientific research, but of genuine lovers of classical
culture. Clearly something went profoundly wrong with the study
of the classics in the nineteenth century.
At the opening of this chapter we said that the available knowledge
of Greece and Rome increased steadily throughout the
century that ended in 1914. Yet during that same period the distribution
of classical knowledge, after an initial rise, fell away.
Fewer boys and girls learnt Greek and Latin at school. Fewer
students chose classical courses at the university. Direct attacks
were made on the teaching of Latin and Greek in public schools,
and they were usually successful. The regulations prescribing
Latin as a necessary qualification for admittance to a university
were relaxed or abandoned. The general familiarity with Greek
and Latin poetry, philosophy, and history dwindled, so that, while
in the first part of the nineteenth century it would have been quite
natural for a debater in Parliament to cite Vergil and for ajournalist
writing a leading article to introduce illustrations from Greek
history, by the end of the century that would have been regarded
as pedantry or affectation, and would have had little or no other
21 . A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 493
effect on the public. The tide which had been rising until about
1870 or 1880 now faltered, stopped, and began to ebb more and
more rapidly. Some thought that this was a sign of Progress.
Others concluded that a new age of mass vulgarity and ^Gothic
ignorance, like that described by Pope at the end of the Dunciad,
was setting in. In any case, it was a large and complex event,
which is still difficult to see in proper perspective.
Like all complex events, the decline of public interest in classical
studies had a number of different causes. Some of these had
nothing to do with classical culture, others were only indirectly
connected with it, others again were actually part of the changing
process of classical learning.
To some extent, it was due quite naturally to the rapid advance
of science, industrialism, and international trade. That created
new subjects, which appeared to have a better right to be taught in
schools and universities: chemistry, physics, economics, modern
languages, psychology, political philosophy. By asserting their
rights, these subjects forced the classics to occupy less of the school
day, and took away many of the good classical students.
Another reason was the introduction of universal education.
Latin and Greek are fairly difficult languages, and it is quite as
impractical to teach them to the whole school population as to
train every pupil to paint or play the violin. In a few countries, at
certain periods, Latin has been taught in all the schools ; but either
those schools did not serve the whole population, or else (as in
Scotland) the public had an exceptional respect for education, not
because of its reward in money, but because of its spiritual prestige,
because educated men were the real aristocracy. But democracy
as it advances usually turns against such Hites, The subjects taught
and respected in schools are the subjects which everyone can
assimilate. A contributory factor is that schooling under a democracy
seems to get to work later and later, and to spend the early
years teachingonlythe fundamentals. Difficult things like languages
are left till later. But of course the best way to learn Greek and Latin
is to begin at nine or so, when the mind is so flexible that anything
prints it without an effort, and the essential memory-work
can be got quickly over, in time to let the boy understand and
appreciate Greek and Latin literature when he reaches the
appreciative age.
But certainly one of the chief reasons was that the classics were
494 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
badly taught. Of course, there have always been la2y and uninterested
teachers, like Gibbons tutor Waldegrave of Magdalen:
My tutor . . . proposed that we should read every morning, from ten
to eleven, the comedies of Terence. The sum of my improvement in the
University of Oxford is confined to three or four Latin plays; and even
the study of an elegant classic, which might have been illustrated by a
comparison of the ancient and modern theatres, was reduced to a dry
and literal interpretation of the authors text.^^^
Dry and literal, because Waldegrave did not care enough either for
the subject or for the pupil to bother about treating the comedies
as works of art. Eventually Gibbon gave up even these tutorial
hours, since they appeared equally devoid of profit and pleasure.
His tutor paid no attention whatever.
Yet that was not the kind of bad teaching that disgusted Osier
and Butler, Phelps and Benson, and so many others in the nineteenth
century. Their masters were seldom indolent. The trouble
with them was quite different. We have already seen it at work,
and observed the violent reaction it produced, in Byron (p. 413 f.).
and Hugo (p. 407). Potentially they were good pupils. Byron says
himself that he was idle, but not slow.^^ He remembered a great
deal of classical literature, badly taught though it was. Hugo, too,
had an active mind, greedy for good books ; but his appetite was
choked. The same thing happened to thousands of others. Their
complaint was always the same. It was that classical literature was
spoilt by being taught with an over-emphasis on precisionand
particularly on grammatical usage and syntactical explanation,
what Butler called insistence on the minutest details and Osier
dry husks. It can be summed up in the admirable story about the
headmaster who introduced his pupils to one of the greatest of
Greek tragedies by saying:
Boys, this term you are to have the privilege of reading the Oedipus
Coloneus of Sophocles, a veritable treasure-house of grammatical
peculiarities.^^
To discuss why teachers of the classics should have been increasingly
guilty of these errors during the nineteenth century
would require a volume. Partly it was caused by the strengthening
of the examination system; partly by the multiplication of rich
scholarships and prizes to be won by good examinees for displays
of memory and accuracy; partly by a change in the ideals of
21 . A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 495
classical study, which we shall discuss later; and very largely by
the ethos of the nineteenth century itself, which admired Discipline,
and System, and Flogging, and Hard Work, and Facts.
Dickens satirized that sort of teaching in Hard Timeshe called
one of the chapters Murdering the innocentsand although his
Mr. Gradgrind and the coldly factual schoolmaster Mr. McChoakumchild
were more interested in science than in the classics, they
were examples of a widespread Victorian attitude to all education
:
that it ought to be exact, difficult, and pleasureless. Discipline was
its method, and its ultimate aim. Now, it is impossible to teach
Latin and Greek without precision: grammar and syntax are
essential parts of the study of the languages ; but it is necessary to
give the young something more besides. Everyone who knows
children knows that they will work with amazing precision and
attention to detail on something that interests them^making a
code, or drawing a map, or learning the names of aircraft and stars.
But the detail must be a means, and not an end in itself ; and any
teacher who attempts to drive in the detail for its own sake, or for
the sake of discipline, will find his work difficult and its results
hateful.
University teaching of the classics was sometimes injured by
another fact. As research progressed farther and farther, many
university teachers became specialists in abstruse branches of
Greco-Roman history, literature, philology, and kindred subjects.
Sometimes they carried specialization so far that they lost touch
with their pupils. At Oxford and Cambridge this was discouraged
by the tutorial system, which is based on the constant contact of
minds between dons and undergraduates. The result was that the
standard of teaching in these universities was exceptionally high
throughout the century: from them came few complaints like
those quoted above; in fact, the dons usually felt it their duty to
sacrifice research to teaching, if both could not be carried on. But
in the great universities of the Continent and the United States it
was not uncommon to find a professor whose lectures were unintelligible
or repulsive to all but his best students, because his
intellectual life was spent in an atmosphere too rarefied for most of
them to breathe.
But the worst kind of bad teaching had a different cause. This
was the belief that the study of Greek and Latin was a science,
and nothing but a science. To us now this appears an obvious
496 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
exaggeration. Clearly the scientific virtues of accuracy, organization,
objectivity, and clarity must be used in classical research as in
any other kind of study. Clearly the methods of applied science
can usefully be employed in many areas of Greco-Roman literature
and history. But the subject-matter of classical study is not wholly,
or even chiefly, objective facts comparable to the material of
geology. Much of it, and much of the best of it, is art ; and art must
be studied with taste and imagination as well as with cameras and
callipers. Much of it is history, and historical research involves
moral judgement, while historical writing entails aesthetic choice.
However, the nineteenth-century classical scholars, led by the
Germans (who are more noted for their industry than for their
taste), resolved that their duty was to be scientific. This resolution
did much to ruin the teaching of the subject.
It is well exemplified in the paradoxical life of A. E. Housman.
He was a fine poet, and a sensitive, though limited, critic of letters.
But his chief work in the classics consisted of trying to establish the
original text of Propertius, Juvenal, Lucan, and Maniliusthat is,
of removing the mistakes and unintelligibilities introduced into
their poems by ignorant copyists and medieval scholars. Difficult
and necessary as this is, it is ultimately a glorified form of proofreading.
And he did not care particularly for these four poets, or
said he did not. (Actually, the sensitive love-poet, the cruel
satirist, the ranting Stoic, and the scholarly recluse did appeal to
certain sides of his character.) He said he chose them because they
presented difficult problems. In his inaugural lecture at London
University he declared that classical scholarship had no justification
whatever, except that in its wayin one of many possible
waysit satisfied mans desire for knowledge. Not for useful
knowledge : the information it provided was no more applicable to
daily life than the discoveries of astronomy. Not for spiritual
enlightenment: we need not hope through it to transform and
beautify our inner nature (he said)because, although classical
literature does sharpen the faculty of appreciating what is excellent,
most people do not possess such a faculty, and are spiritually deaf
and blind. We study the classics, therefore, only because the desire
for knowledge is innate in us. Housman did not explain in detail
why anyone should choose to study Greek and Latin literaturerather
than the Calypso songs of Trinidad and the hymns of the
Tibetan monasteries (which would also provide intricate subjects
21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 497
of study) ; but, in a rapid sentence or two (noticeably less clear than
the usual acid-tipped needle-stab with which he made the points
he was sure of), he said it was a matter of personal preference.
Would he have refused to admit that the writings of the Greeks
and Romans are, objectively and universally, more beautiful? that
they are more relevant to us, who are at some removes their
spiritual descendants
One incident which illustrates this attitude is both pathetic and
comic. Housman used to lecture on Horaces lyrics, concentrating
on the text, syntax, and prosody, adding just so much commentary
as was necessary for the interpretation of the passage under discussion,
never looking at his pupils, and never mentioning the
essentials of the poetry. But

one morning in May, 1914, when the trees in Cambridge were covered
with blossom, he reached . . . the seventh ode in the fourth book of
Horace. . . . This ode he dissected with the usual display of brilliance,
wit, and sarcasm. Then for the first time in two years he looked up at
us, and in quite a different voice said: T should like to spend the last
few minutes considering this ode simply as poetry. Our previous
experience of Professor Housman would have made us sure that he
would regard such a proceeding as beneath contempt. He read the ode
aloud with deep emotion, first in Latin and then in an English translation
of his own (now the fifth in More Poems). That, he said hurriedly,
almost like a man betraying a secret, I regard as the most beautiful
poem in ancient literature, and walked quickly out of the room.^^
One of the men who watched this said, T was afraid the old
fellow was going to cry. He was. In part, because of the extreme
sensitivity which made it uncomfortable for him even to recall
certain lines of poetry while he was shaving, because his skin
bristled and turned the razors edge; but in part also because of his
embarrassment at feeling that he had permitted personal emotion
to escape, and invade what he held should be nothing but an
objective field of thought, sterile as ice, bright as an operatingtable.
This belief that the study and teaching of the classical literatures
ought to be purely and scientifically objective has spoilt many a
teacher and many, many good pupils. It was largely responsible
for the recession in public interest in the classics during the latter
half of the nineteenth century. Put broadly, it has meant that
classical scholars feel more obliged to extend knowledge than to
5076 Kk
498 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
disseminate it. The gap between the scholar and the public, which
in the Renaissance and in the revolutionary era was bridged by a
constant interflow of teaching and questioning and propaganda and
imitation and translation and emulation, has now widened to a gulf.
Earlier in this chapter we discussed some of the translations of
classical poetry made during the last hundred years, and pointed
out that on the whole they were unsatisfactory. That fact is
another aspect of the lack of communication between scholars and
the public. Few scholars think it worth while to translate the
books they read : and, if they do so, they are apt to choose a woefully
old-fashioned style which, instead of interesting and stimulating a
non-classical reader, repels him. Non-specialists who wish to try
their hand at translating and adapting often find that the work of
the specialists has built an impenetrable zariba of thorns around
the beauty they are seeking.
The actual writing of scholarly books on classical subjects is
seldom good, and is sometimes deliberately repulsive. For this
the Germans are chiefly to blame. They have always found it
hard to write good prose; in the name of science, they have
cultivated difficulty and gracelessness. Mommsen is actually
reputed to have said Tn spite of his beautiful style, Renan was
a true scholar'.^s A very good example is provided by the huge
German encyclopaedia of classical learning, Pauly-Wissowa-
Krolls Real-Encyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. It
contains a monumental amount of valuable information, fully and
carefully analysed. But it is, even for scholars, painful to read.
The sentences are clogged with parentheses and citations and crossreferences,
the language is thick and technical, and even the format,
close type in double column, is repellent. I never use it without
thinking of Lemprieres classical dictionary, a single volume, far
less scholarly and far better written, which, in his last years at
school, was the favourite reading of John Keats.
Even the format of most classical books is ugly. The essential
Teubner series, containing practically every Greek and Latin
work, with Latin prefaces and a list of manuscript variations and
conjectures, is hideous. The Oxford Classical Texts and the Bude
series are better, but they scarcely attract the reader. Why is it
that one can buy an edition of Donne or Goethe which is a pleasure
to handle, and can hardly find a Juvenal or Euripides which does
not look like a medical text-book
21 . A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 499
The false parallel with science caused many more errors and
exaggerations in classical study. One odd one was the habit of
Quellenforschung^ the search for sources, which began as a legitimate
inquiry into the material used by a poet, historian, or philosopher,
and was pushed to the absurd point at which it was
assumed that everything in a poem, even such a poem as the
Aeiieidy was derived from earlier writers. It is a typical scientific
assumption that everything can be explained by synthesis, but it
omits the essential artistic fact of creation, so
The scientific approach, as well as the expansion of knowledge,
has also been responsible for the fragmentation of classical study.
For several decades the majority of scholars have preferred writing
small studies of single authors, of separate aspects of single authors,
of tiny areas of social and literary history, of topics obscure and
peripheral and unexplored. Meanwhile, much remains to be done
on the great central subjects. There has been a widespread belief,
not without foundation, that scholars actually chose to write on
subjects which were safe because so few people knew anything
about them. In Germany the custom was invented of awarding
doctoral degrees only to students who had produced a piece of
original research*. Because of the close relation between American
and German universities in the latter part of the nineteenth
century, the habit spread to the United States, where it now rages
unchecked. Hundreds of Ph.D. candidates every year produce
dissertations on subjects which often interest neither themselves
nor anyone else ; and which the doctors seldom re-explore in the
light of their later, more mature knowledge. The defence usually
oifered for this practice is that each of the dissertations is like a
single brick, which helps to build the great edifice of scholarship.
The image is true enough as far as it goes ; but the terrain is getting
more and more littered with scattered heaps of bricks which are
manufactured and tipped out without any plan whatever, unless
it be to cover every inch of exposed ground. As they accumulate,
the task of scholarship becomes not less but more difficult. And
meanwhile, those looking in from outside see no cathedral arising,
and very few builders have appeared. For brick-making does not
produce architects.
It is, then, the fundamental fault of modern classical scholarship
that it has cultivated research more than interpretation, that it has
500 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
been more interested in the acquisition than in the dissemination
of knowledge, that it has denied or disdained the relevance of its
work in the contemporary world, and that it has encouraged
the public neglect of which it now complains. The scholar has
a responsibility to societynot less, but greater, than that of the
labourer and the business man. His first duty is to know the truth,
and his second is to make it known. For classical scholarship is
one of the main channels through which the uniquely valuable
influence of the culture of Greece and Rome, still living and fertile,
still incalculably stimulating, can be communicated to the modern
world^the world that it has already, not once but twice and thrice
and oftener, saved from the repeated attacks of materialism and
barbarism.
22
THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE
There is an important group of modem poets who may be
called symbolists.^ They believe that single events and
individual persons are petty, transient, unimportant that they
cannot be made into subjects worthy of art unless they are shown
to be symbols of eternal truths. This in itself is a Greek idea.
Plato taught that every thing in the world was merely a poor copy
of its perfect pattern in heaven, and that it could not be understood
except by those who knew that pattern. 3 Plato meant philosophers.
The symbolists, on the other hand, would say that only imaginative
artists could see high significance in trivial daily things. No
doubt that is their own conception: they are not conscious Platonists.
Yet manyofthe most memorable symbolswhichcomposetheir
vision of life come from the rich imaginative world of Greek myth.
They have not written much, but their books have been very
influential. Many contemporary poets are now engaged on
intensifying and elaborating their discoveries. Their leaders, and
their most notable works inspired by Greek legend, are
:
Stephane Mallarme (i 842-98):
Herodtas (1869)
The Afternoon of a Faun (1876)
;
his friend Paul-Ambroise Valery (1871-1945):
The Young Fate (1917)
Fragments of 'Narcissus' (1922)
The Pythian Prophetess (igzz)
;
Ezra Pound (born 1885):
Personae of Ezra Pound (collected 1917)
Cantos (1933-47);
his friend T. S. Eliot (born 1888):
Prufrock and other observations (1917)
Ara Vos Prec (1920)
The Waste Land (1922)
Sweeney Agonistes (1932).
Together with these we may consider one prose-writer. His
style and his aims differ from theirs in many respects; yet he is
502 22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE
linked with them by his use of Greek legend, and by sharing
several other important techniques and attitudes. This is
James Joyce (1882-1941):
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Ulysses (1922).
The influence of Greek and Roman culture on the symbolist
poets is often overlooked because their method is not like that of
the classical writers. They leave much to the imagination. But
do the Greek poets also not leave much to the imagination ? Yes, but
the Greeks state the essentials, and allow the hearer to supply the
details. The symbolist poets do not state the essentials. Instead,
they describe the details, which, although not central, are so vivid
as to haunt the mind.
This is the technique of Debussy and Ravel in music, of Monet
and Whistler in painting. Such artists leave as much as possible to
the imagination of the beholder, who thus becomes an artist himself,
for he must help to create the poem, or the musical impression,
or the picture which is adumbrated for him. The impressionist
artists and writers intend this. They believe that most people are
unable or unwilling to contribute any effort to the appreciation of
beauty. They believe alsoand here again Plato would have
recognized them as his pupils^that the most important truths and
beauties are too lofty or too fragile to be described. But they deny
and here they are un-Greek^that the essential truths can be
approached more and more closely by systematic thought. On the
contrary, they think that, just as the best way to see a faint star is to
look to one side of it, so the best way to reach a profound or
beautiful idea is to grasp a detail which, although apparently peripheral
and even irrelevant, still carries the mind inevitably to the
bright centre. This conception is Chinese and Japanese, and was
encouraged by the growing admiration for Far Eastern art in the
later decades of the nineteenth century. Whistler, who was a close
friend of Mallarm^ collected Japanese pictures and emulated the
elusiveness of oriental art ; among Pounds best poems are several
groups of translations from early Chinese lyrics ; and Mallarme, in
one of his most decisive announcements of his own ideals,^ asserts
that he
will discard the greedy art of a cruel
coTxntry, and . . .
copy the limpid, sensitive Chinese
22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE 503
in painting, upon frail porcelain, a few lines which merely evoke
evening, a crescent moon, and a lake gazing upwards like an azure
eye. The carefully irregular metres and cryptic allusions of Eliot
and Pound, the distilled and compressed thought of Valery, the
evasive dreamlike fancies of Mallarme, are all produced by the
extreme sensitivity and subtle psychological awareness which are
characteristic of many modem poets. They are also a deliberate
retreat from the intrusive, the obvious, and the vulgar, towards
privacy and remoteness, towards the difficulty of the ideal. This
reaction is a fact of great importance for the social function of
modem literature. It is largely oriental in inspiration. Certainly
it is not, in the central sense, classical.
Nor are these poets classical in their form, in their logic. It is
not that their works are vague. They are precise enough in describing
the particular details which the reader is to notice.
Mallarme tells us how many reeds he would paint beside the lake.
Pound presents phonetic transcripts of American and English
dialects in his Cantos. (Joyce, too, is scmpulously exact in reporting
and echoing every noise heard in a bar, every advertisement
glimpsed in a shop-window.) But what they state is the detail.
The central thought, and the articulation of the detail with
the central thought, are left for the reader to work out. And
the transitions from one impression to another are made with the
bewildering rapidity and irregularity of a dream, so that even the
details appear evasive, evanescent. The logical sequence of such
writing is, therefore, extremely obscure, and is sometimes shaped
not by the laws of thought so much as by some private excitements
of the writer. To say that these authors have not a classical sense
of form does not mean that they do not use external patterns
created by the Greeks. (As a matter of fact, they sometimes do.)
It means that they eschew symmetry, continuity, smoothness,
harmony, and logic, in favour of abrupt, unforeseeable, apparently
arbitrary transitions (not only between sections of one passage but
between sentences and phrases), a general pattern which resembles
an unrehearsed monologue or a random conversation rather than
any regular progression of well-balanced ideas, and a deliberate
avoidance or concealment of the intellectual substructure of the
whole.
If you look at one of Claude Monets pictures, you will first of all
see a mass of delectable colours. As you gaze, it assembles itself
504 22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE
into a play of different lights on the fa9ade of a buildingor is it
a wood, or a cloud? No, it is a large church. It is a cathedral.
Step closer. There is nothing now except blurs of blue and gold
and opalescent rose. Step back and look again. It is the great door
of Rouen Cathedral, with the two towers rising above it. Such an
impressionist picture is clearer than impressionist poetry, because
it is bound to a recognizable scene with a structure not dictated by
the painters fancy but imposed on him. And yet, in Monets
cathedral, what we see is sunlight. The architecture is only an
arrangement of surfaces on which light reacts; and the massive
stones that rise into arch and column, the precise carving and
disposition of the statuary, the complex interplay of weight, thrust,
mass within the structure, are all melted into a rainbow.
All these writers have endeavoured to use classical patterns, as
though they felt the need of some form to guide them. But the
results have usually been distorted or fragmentary. Eliot, for
instance, has published fragments of an Aristophanic melodrama
called by the mock-tragic title Sweeney Agonistes, Apparently he
intended to develop the contrast between the squalor of to-day and
the nobility of the classical past, so far as to create a mock tragedy
in which the characters were typical American and British vulgarians
like Sweeney and Doris, the dialogue the blatant empty
jabbering of pubs and parties (intensified by an occasional sentence
of startling brutality), the lyrics a series of nightmare jazz choruses,
but the form that of the purest and most symmetrical classicism.
However, he has never finished it. In Herodias Mallarme created
three fragments of a miniature Greek drama, but he could not
finish that either. Valerys Fragments of^Narcissus^ also are incomplete
in form, though not in thought.
Joyces Ulysses shows with particular clarity how these writers,
though wishing to be free, yet find themselves bound to adopt some
externally suggested form, which is often classical in origin. To
hold the vast discharge of reminiscence and description which
Joyce wanted to use in evoking Dublin life, he had to find some
large, firm mould. If he had not, the whole thing might have been
as shapeless as its last chapter, Mrs. Blooms drowsy interior
monologue, the single sentence which runs for forty pages, or its
successor Finnegans JVake, which is a nebula of dream-particles
held together only by the magnetism of association. He therefore
22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE 505
chose to model it on Homers Odyssey
y
to which he added the
unities of time and place. The main plot resembles that of the
Odyssey: a resourceful middle-aged wanderer makes his way
through trials and temptations towards his home, wife, and son,
while a young man sets out into life, which tests and educates him
as he makes his way towards his lost father. The climax is the
scene in which, after long separate wanderings, the two meet
at last. The wandering Jew, Bloom, saves the student Stephen
Dedalus from a drunken row into which he is driven by hysterical
memories of his refusal to worship God at his mothers death-bed;
the two go home to Blooms house. Stephens own family has not
given him a home, Blooms wife is unfaithful, and his little boy is
dead. Now the bereaved father has found the orphaned son.
But many readers could go through Ulysses without realizing
that it was patterned on the Odyssey. The original manuscript had
quotations from Homer as chapter-headings; but Joyce removed
them before publication. s The title Ulysses^ is an indication; but
it is obscured by Joyces own pseudonym. He calls his young self
Dedalus ; and there is no tradition of any link between Ulysses and
the craftsman Daedalus. Even a reader who had seen a general
resemblance to the Odyssey would surely not observe that every
chapter in Ulysses^ almost all the characters who appear for more
than a moment, and many of the inanimate things they use are
designed to be parallel to elements in the Odyssey. For instance,
the four women of Odysseus wanderings reappear in Ulysses.
The secret nymph Calypso is the typist Clifford, who corresponds
with Bloom but remains invisible; the young princess Nausicaa is
the adolescent Gerty MacDowell, towards whom he directs lewd
thoughts on the sea-shore; Circe, who turns men into beasts, is
the keeper of the brothel where he meets young Dedalus ; and the
faithful wife Penelope is his faithless wife Molly. The Cave of the
Winds is imaged by a Dublin newspaper-office; the giant Polyphemus
is a coarse violent insular Irishman; Odysseus burning
log is Blooms cigar; and so on. Most of these parallels are too
obscure to be recognizable without the work of the scholiasts who
knew Joyce and apparently received the clues from his own lips,^
Many of them are so distorted as to be meaningless. For example,
the clever hero Odysseus got his crew out of the power of Polyphemus
by making him drunk, sharpening and heating a treetrunk,
and burning out the giants one eye. Blooms cigar plays
So6 22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE
no such part in the plot, and the correspondence of the two burning
sticks is therefore a piece of supererogatory elaboration
The parallelism between details of Ulysses and the Odyssey is
close but artistically pointless. What Joyce wanted from the epic
was its structural plan, and that, except in the barest outline, he
failed to take. The plot of the Odyssey has, with justice, been
admired by most of its readers. With superb skill and yet with
apparently effortless ease Homer solves the problems of bringing
Odysseus and his son Telemachus closer and closer together in
their quest without letting them meet until just before the climax,
of telling all the previous adventures of Odysseus long wanderings
so as to prepare for his single-handed heroism at the end, of maintaining
and increasing the suspense from episode to episode, of
providing a satisfying final resolution, and of concentrating the
readers attention upon the main figures throughout. But Joyce
has rearranged the incidents of the epic into eighteen sections
which have a far looser connecting structure, and most of which
are united only by that weakest of bonds, coincidence. For pages
and pages he reports events only because they happened to occur
in Dublin on the i6th of June 1904. Had he not been determined
to observe the unity of time, he might have reported everything
that occurred on the 15th too, and made the book twice as long.
The same criticism applies to the plot, and to the treatment of the
characters. The Odyssey is the story of a quest: father and son
search for each other (although really Odysseus is not looking for
Telemachus but trying to regain his home and his wife). Ulysses
is not the story of a quest. Bloom and Dedalus merely wander
through Dublin, unguided by any single purpose. They do not
know each other and belong to dissimilar worlds. When they
meet, Dedalus is too drunk to understand what has happened ; he,
not Ulysses-Bloom, occupies the centre of attention throughout
;
and their chance association can never grow into a real father-son
relationship. Thus, the climax of the book is that Dedalus rejects
his true mother and is found by a false father. This rambling inconclusive
story-line is responsible for much of the disappointment
Ulysses causes to its readers. For the rest, Joyces lack of selectivity
can be blamed. The book begins by centring attention on stately,
plump Buck Mulligan, who drops out ofsight after a few chapters f
it continues through brilliantly vivid descriptions of unimportant
people and things; and then, after an imreadable chapter in the
22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE 507
form of question-and-answer, meant to represent the gradual
focusing of the mind after a bout of drunkenness, ends with a vast
irrelevant monologue by Mrs. Bloom, who has never appeared and
is almost as unknown to us as she is to Dedalus.
Joyce and the symbolist poets are, then, too sensitive or too
wilful to accept the creative discipline of classical forms. But they
admire and use the creations of classical legend. Greek myths
play a more important part in the symbolism of these poets than
any other material (except nature-imagery), and are all the more
powerful because they are, though not childish, apparently unreasonable.
First, they all employ Greek mythical figures to symbolize
certain spiritual attitudes : to make them permanently intelligible
and yet vividly realall the more real because they are distant from
the vulgar, violent, accidental, transitory Here-and-Now. Mallarm^
was convinced, and perhaps the others too believe in part,
that only the ideal is valuable, and that the ideal is life purged of its
inessential attributes by art, or by death. (The first words of his
epitaph on Poe describe the poet, now immortal, as
changed by eternity into Himself at last.)^
So, to take a complex personal emotion and to embody it in a
symbolic figure of legend is to immortalize it, to make it art.
The most famous of these symbolic figures is the Faun in
Mallarmes The Afternoon of a Faun, Mallarme himself calls the
poem an eclogue, so that it is one of the latest in the long succession
of pastoral poems which begins with Theocritus.^^ Half dream
and half music, it is the monologue of a faun half Caliban and half
Ariel. He has captured two nymphs ; they have escaped ; he dreams
of them, wonders if the brief incomplete embrace was itself a
dream, dreams of capturing others . . . perhaps Venus herself . . .
sacrilege ... he sleeps in the noonday heat, to dream again. The
Faun symbolizes mans erotic dreams of women, dreams which are
composed not only of animal desire but of reverence for fragile and
delicate beauty, and of aspiration towards an ideal all the more
desirable because it is elusive or dangerous. Hairy, horned, goatlike
in lust is the Faun; but he is also a musician and a poet; a
dreamer. Without the dreams, his desires would be merely bestial
;
without the desires, his dreams would be empty. Mallarme
So8 22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE
had the good fortune to have his work translated into music by
Claude Debussy, whose Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
follows the dream as sensitively, as caressingly, as the Fauns flute
evokes the line of a white back.
The princess Herodias in Mallarmes Herodias is the antithesis
of the Faun. Young, lovely, virginal as the moon, she is a symbol
of the proud pure beauty which repels everything that can violate
it^from the touch of her old nurse to the savagery of lions, from
the perfumes which would drown her immaculate hair to the
thought of the lover whom the perfumes might bring nearer. She
loves the horror of virginity, which she defends, throughout a
dialogue with her cringing caressing nurse, in tones as sharp and
metallic as the Fauns were warm and musky. And yet she protests
too much. She knows it. In her last speech she accuses herself of
lying, and foresees her childhood, which is her maidenhood,
breaking apart like cold bright stones through which are thrust the
irresistible stalks of growth.^^
After a few experiments and a long silence, Mallarmes admirer
and pupil Valery produced in 1917 a poem which combined many
of the themes of The Afternoon of a Faun and Herodias^ while outdoing
them both in obscurity.^^ This is The Young Fate {La
Jeune Parque)^ a monologue in some 500 lines. Parque is in
Latin Parca, one of the three Fates; but the doubt and ignorance
and passionate excitement of the speaker show that she is not, or
not yet, one of the three inexorable spirits who live in the world of
eternity, for ever spinning, measuring, and cutting the threads of
human life. Still, she is a creature of Greco-Roman inspiration,
adoring the sun and recoiling from a serpent whom she calls
Thyrsus (the Bacchic symbol of passion). The poem describes, in
a flow of iridescent metaphors mixed with tinsel eccentricities,
the questioning, anxiety, despair, excitement, orgasm, remorse,
and calm fulfilment experienced by a young woman, or spirit, at
a crisis of her life. She passes from one group of states to another,
its opposite and enemy: from sleep (after a dream of a snake by
which she was known more than wounded) to waking, from calm
to fear, from impassibility to tenderness, from unreflective activity
to thought, from ignorance to self-knowledge, from simplicity to
complexity, from winter to spring, from virginity to dreams of love
and fears of motherhood, from troubled night (filled with reminiscence
of sunbright thoughtless day) to a terrifying dawn when
22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE 509
the very earth underfoot moves and threatens to lapse into sea, and
then at last to the welcome and richer day. She symbolizes not
only the passage of a girl into womanhood, but the pangs of the
soul confronted with the choice of examining itself or simply
living, the rewarding agony of the ideal when it is forced to become
part of reality ; and much else. Valery has combined these tensions
into one living figure who, speaking at the moment of her most
difficult choice and change, is rightly called a young Fate.
In a broken monologue called Fragments of ^Narcissus\ far less
precious in imagery and more skilful in sound, Valery used the
figure of Narcissus, who died for love of his own beauty mirrored
in a forest pool, to symbolize the self which is happiest away from
others, contemplating and adoring the inexhaustible As
Narcissus bends lower and lower to embrace his dear image, as he
touches and breaks the liquid mirror and enters the dark eyes
which grow closer and closer to him, he reaches the last ecstasy of
self-annulling self-absorption.
Much of the imagery in these poems is sexual; and although
Valerys commentators and Valery himself have usually written as
though his chief problem were that of the mind divided between
the external and internal worlds of contemplation, his poetry also
expresses a horror of sexual love as a power which dominates, uses,
and humiliates the independent self. The young Fate and Narcissus
both prefer calmer satisfactions. Narcissus abandons himself *
entirely to himself. The Fate finds that her own love for herself
awakes a hidden serpent. A third poem. The Pythian Prophetess^
completes the trilogy.^^ Here Valery presents the horrors and the
agonies of a woman mastered by a power which is within her and
yet is not herself, under the figure of the priestess who could
prophesy only when possessed by Apollo. Chiefly, the poem
symbolizes the pangs of the artist who finds himself forced, at the
cost of his own peace and independence, to utter the words dictated
by the creative spirit ; but the sexual undertones which make
it complementary to Narcissus are unmistakable, and increase its
power,
Joyce also used symbolic and mythical figures to describe himself
as a young man. He called himself Stephen Dedalus : Stephen
because he owed his education to University College by St.
Stephens Green, and Dedalus after the mythical inventor.^
^
Exiled from Athens, and kept in the island of Crete by King
510 22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE
Minos, Daedalus made wings of wax and feathers, taught himself
and his son Icarus to fly, and escaped through the air.^^ Joyce felt
this myth very deeply. The last words of the diary which concludes
A Portrait of the Artist are an invocation to the old father,
old artificer to help him in leaving Dublin and launching himself
on the unknown, while its epigraph is a quotation from one of
Ovids versions of the legend.^ Daedalus was the explorer of
unknown arts whom he wished to emulate. To conceive Ulysses
and perhaps Finnegans Wake in Dublin was for him the equivalent
of Daedalus inventions. And not only in novelty, but in nature:
for Daedalus was both the constructor of the labyrinth, to which
Joyces two vast books are comparable in secrecy and intricacy,
and also the maker of wings on which to escape from an island
prison. Joyces wings were the talent that took him out of Dublin,
and the imagination that raised him, for a time at least, above the
sordid daily world.
As well as Greek mythical figures, these five writers use Greek
stories. Through them they interpret important spiritual experiences,
beliefs, aspirations. This is one of the original purposes for
which myths are created. It is because men are wicked and because
natural catastrophes resemble the acts of an avenging god that
people tell the story of the Flood, in Babylonia, Judea, and Greece.
It is because purity is felt to increase a fighters strength that men
make the legends of Samson and Galahad. Every nation has such
stories, many of them as silly, as terrifying or disgusting, as
unintelligible or as haunting as dreams, which they are.^^ The
Greeks have the greatest store of clear, memorable, beautiful
myths. Far from being dead, they are still alive and fertile in our
mind.
One of these stories appears as early as the Odyssey. The hero
Odysseus is carried far from his homeward way by storms and
disasters. At the advice of the sorceress Circe, he visits the world
of the dead in order to ask the seer Tiresias his best route home.
It is a grim ordeal, but, for the clever determined Odysseus, not an
overwhelming one. He carries out the right rituals, interviews the
right ghost, pays his devoirs to his mother and friends, and, after
the appearance of several great personages of the past, withdraws
discreetly.^^
Other Greek heroes visited the underworld^Heracles and
22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE 51
1
Theseus by force, Orpheus by art; but no great poem on their
adventures has survived, although the Orpheus legend has become
part of world literature. In Latin the myth was taken up by
Vergil, who gave it a deeper meaning. His hero Aeneas, exiled and
landless, visits the underworld, guided by the immortal Sibyl and
carrying as a symbol of immortality the golden bough.^s From his
dead father he learns how to reach and establish his future home,
and is shown a limbo of heroes still unborn, in which the mighty
Romans who are to be his heirs, in a Rome yet uncreated, pass in
all their majesty before his eyes.
Obviously the myth means many things; but one of its chief
meanings is that the brave man must conquer death, or go through
hell, before he finds his home. In the early and medieval Christian
church Christ himself was represented as having spent three days
in hell after his crucifixion and before his resurrection, exercising
his kingly power by delivering some prisoners and triumphing
over the devils. There is no mention of this in the gospels: it
was not part of the original story of Jesus, and was an adaptation
of the legend of the heros successful journey through the world of
death. Then another great poet took up the tale. Exiled for ever
from his own home, wandering like Odysseus and Aeneas among
strange men and cities, Dante wrote a poem in which he himself,
guided by Vergil, passed through hell in order to make his way to
his home in heaven, where like Penelope his lost love Beatrice
awaited him.
One of the modern symbolists has used this m5rth in poetry.
Ezra Pounds largest poem bears the provisional title Cantos,
which acknowledges a debt to Dante. It begins with a vigorous and
partly unintelligible version of the Homeric account of Odysseus
visit to hell,^^ and goes on to several scenes in which figures whom
Pound hates, such as capitalists, warmongers, and journalists, are
put into obscene and hideous Dantesque hells. Yeats asserted that
the other motive of the Cantos was transformation, and that Pound
was inspired by Ovids Metamorphoses,^^ but I cannot see much
effect of this influence in the poem, except for a few references to
the characters of Ovids myths,
Joyces Ulysses is the next large treatment of the legend. But
Joyce makes the visit to hell relatively unimportant. According to
his scholiast, Paddy Dignams funeral in the rat-haunted cemetery
is the parallel to Odysseus visit to the world of death. The witches
512 22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE
sabbath at the end of section 2, the drunken dream in which
Dedalus passes through nighttown, and which gives all its readers
the impression of being beset by devils meaner but not less evil
than Dante's, is said to correspond to Odysseus visit to Circe.27
Despite that official version, we feel that in this chapter Joyce is
really describing hell, the hell he foresaw in A Portrait of the
Artisti^^ the hell whose descending circles are poverty, drunkenness,
and lust.
Most artists have used myths to ennoble contemporary life.
Louis XIV was portrayed by his court painters among the Olympian
gods. Below the worlds hugest skyscrapers Americas genius
for invention and Americas titanic energy are imaged by the
figures of Prometheus and Atlas. But the symbolists sometimes
use Greek myths (that is, the stories as distinct from the figures)
to degrade life : to show, by contrast with the heroism or beauty of
classical legend, how sordid the men and women of to-day have
made themselves. That is the chief purpose of the epic parallel in
Ulysses, It contrasts the strong, noble, statuesque past with the
nasty, poor, brutish present, in which everything is dirt and
humiliation, even sexual love, even the courage of combat (Dedalus
is knocked helpless and just saved from a thrashing), even the
dignity of renunciation (when his mothers beseeching ghost
appears to him, Dedalus yells out the crudest of obscenities).
Ulysses is not mock-heroic like Tom Jones, but anti-heroic.^^ No
one who has read it can doubt its power. It has been called an
explosion in a sewer. The commonest criticism of it is that its
filth is exaggerated ; but few of those who offer this criticism have
spent the first twenty years of their lives in a large industrial city.
The truth is not that the filth is exaggerated, but that it is not
balanced by the gaiety, vigour, and native wholesomeness which
are part of mans life, even in Dublins and even in slums; and that
it underestimates the power of chance, even in squalid surroundings,
to provide moments of fun and pauses of beauty. Its model,
the Odyssey, is better balanced. The Odyssey is not all a heroic
narrative. In the baroque age it was despised for its vulgar
realism. 30 Its hero wears no plumes and has no quarterings. He
loses his armour, his men, his ships, and his treasure, and is cast
naked on a strange island where princesses do their own washing.
When he reaches home he has to live in a swineherds hut and
cringe like a beggar in order to get near his own house. No one
22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE 513
recognizes him in his home, except his old dog, which greets him
and dies of joy among its lice. Is the death of a verminous old dog
on a dunghill not the nadir of squalor? No. The last gesture of
Argus was one of self-forgetting nobility, and he remains a heroic
figure in our hearts, while the phantom of Blooms lost son, in an
Eton suit with diamond and ruby buttons and an ivory cane, is
deliberately and effectively cheap, vulgar, and repellent. 3 ^
Less filthily, more beautifully, but no less despairingly, T. S.
Eliot has used Greek legend to cast a pure but revealing light on
the meanness of modern life. The poets of the Renaissance used
Greco-Roman myth and history as a noble background to dignify
the heroic deeds they described. 32 Eliot does the opposite. When
the Renaissance poet compared his hero to Hector or his heroine
to Helen, he made them more brave and more beautiful. By comparing
Sweeney leaving a pick-up girl to Theseus deserting his
mistress Ariadne, Eliot shows the modern infidelity to be vile

because the world which tolerates it is ignoble, coarse, repetitious,

and complacent, and because even the actors lack that style which,
in a heroic era, elevates a crime into a tragedy. 3 3
Sweeney is one of the figures Eliot has created to typify certain
tendencies he sees in our world. By his name, Sweeney should be
the descendant of Irish peasant immigrants to America ; he may
have crossed Eliots path in Boston, where his kin seized power
from the gloved hands of the late George Apley and other Brahmins;
34 he is a tough, hairy, somatotonic cave-man with no regard
for the feelings of others, a liking for low associations, and a talent
for making offensive gestures. In Sweeney among the Nightingales
he sits carelessly over his coffee after a meal in an inn, chatting
with the prostitutes who shared it : he feels confident and euphoric.
Royal and triumphant, King Agamemnon was murdered by his
wife after a banquet; and the nightingales sang then as they are
singing now. Eliots immediate purpose in mentioningAgamemnon
is to bring out the full horror of the situation. Until the last stanza,
he is merely describing a taproom scene, suspicious, even sinister,
but not murderous, something out of Stephen Dedalus nighttown.
But as soon as Agamemnons cry (ah, I am struck a deathblow,
deep within!) is evoked, the room darkens, the faces change,
the sunset looks like blood on the floor. There is also a deeper
purpose: to accentuate by contrast the sordidness of to-day, when
3076 x*l
514 the symbolist POETS AND JAMES JOYCE
even our crimes are vulgar, The last stanza says that the nightingales,
after the murder of Agamemnon,
let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
This sentence is Eliots own addition to the legend. With its
revoltingly skilful sound-effect, it fuses into one image the contrasting
ideas of beauty and squalor which dominate the poem.
They say that every composer has his favourite instrument;
and, less credibly, that all his music can be distilled into one pet
phrase. Certainly a great deal of Eliots poetry grows out of the
contrast between the brutal materialism of to-day and the frail life
of the spirit which is bound to suffer in conflict with it, although it
will survive, maimed or transfigured. This contrast appears in a
crude form in Sweeney among the Nightingales, It is refined in
The Waste Land^ 2. Philomela was kidnapped, raped, imprisoned,
and mutilated by her sisters husband Tereus ; her tongue was torn
out ; but she wove her story into tapestry, sent the dumb but speaking
work of art to her sister Procne, and joined her in a revenge so
horrible that they all ceased to be human and changed into birds

Procne to the swallow, and Philomela to the nightingale which,

although invisible and imprisoned in the night, still sings for ever
of passion and of pain. This myth made one of the first poems in
any European language when it re-entered literature from Ovid
in an old French adaptation.^^ It lived through centuries of song
(Thilomel with melody), grew dull in the baroque age, and
revived for the poets falsely called romantic

Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow37

to sing again, not less poignantly, above the waste land of the
twentieth century.
The poet is both bird and prophet. In both incarnations he is
opposed to force, brutality, materialism, lovelessness. There is
another figure in Eliots poetry, more complex than the nightingale,
which symbolizes that opposition. This is Tiresias, the Greek
prophet whom Eliot calls the most important personage in The
Waste Land,^^ Tiresias appears in some very strange legends. He
warned Oedipus of his unbelievable doom; and it was to find him
that Odysseus ventured into the world of the dead. But before
that he had been changed into a woman for seven years and then
back into a man, so that he had experienced love from both the
22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE 515
mans and the womans point of view. Because he declared that
women have more pleasure in it than men, and thereby decided
against Juno in a dispute with her husband Jupiter, the indignant
goddess struck him blind ; but Jupiter compensated this by giving
him the power of prophecy. ^9 fp
Tiresias has several meanings in Eliots poetry. In a way, he is
Eliot. For Eliot in writing his early poems imagined himself to be
feminine in weakness and delicacy, in contrast with the masculine
violence which rules the world. In 1917 he personified himself as
Mr. Prufrocka name composed oiprude 2x16. frocks the same two
elements, hypersensitivity and femininity. In The Waste Land
Mr. Prufrock becomes Tiresias,
old man with wrinkled dugs,^
and identifies himself not with the enterprising man who takes, but
with the defenceless woman who is taken
:
I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed.^^
Defenceless because of his femininity, Tiresias is also helpless
because he is blind. In Sophocles Oedipus he is led on stage by
the hand, tapping his way with a stick, groping and dependent as
Oedipus himself is to become scarcely two hours later. And yet,
although blind, he is a seer. Blind to the ordinary daylight, he can
see into the darkness. His blindness is the cause and condition of
his power of second sight. For Eliot he symbolizes the fact that
those who understand the world most deeply, the poets and thinkers
who have the inward eye, are blind and helpless in practical daily life
;
and that they gain the rare gift at the cost of the common sense.
Finally, Tiresias is old. His age makes him wise, but it also
makes him impotent. The world which surrounds him is full of
young violent unfeeling men like Sweeney, who know nothing of
the past and see nothing of the future. Like Tiresias, Eliot has
many centuries of antiquity present to his mind; as he broods on
them, they help him to bear the blows of the present; but they
make him old and weak. Elsewhere, in a less successful image, he
compares himself to an aged eagle, the far-sighted bird. The
theme recurs in the epigraph to The Waste Land\
I myself saw the Sibyl at Cumae, hanging up in a bottle, and when
the kids said to her ^^Sibyl, what do you want? she answered I want
to die.
Si6 22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE
This is an odd piece of folk-lore.^3 The Sibyl was a prophetess
who had a life-span of a thousand years, but without eternal youth,
so that she gradually wasted away into nothing but a bodiless
prophetic voice. It was she who guided Aeneas through the world
of death. When Trimalchio saw her in the bottle, she had perhaps
been changed into a grasshopper, dry, thin, but shrill. She combines
the chief meanings that Eliot finds in Tiresias: she is female,
she is weak, she is so old that she longs for death, but she is
a seer.
We have discussed the use of Greek legend in the work of the
symbolists, both to supply symbolic figures and as a source of
immortal stories. The classical world has another function for the
symbolist writers, which is less important, which it shares with
other worlds of thought, but which must still be mentioned. This
is to provide a decorative background of metaphor and allusion.
Images, beautiful but frail, almost too small to be called symbols,
are drawn from it. When Mallarme looks at the glass of champagne
in which he is to toast poetry and fellow poets, he sees the
froth changed into the foam of magic seas, in which there is a
glimpse of the white flanks of the Sirens.44 When Eliot thinks of
the splendour and brutality of military power, he images it in the
eagles and trumpets of Rome.^s
These writers are extremely sensitive to artistic beauty^beauty
made by men, as distinct from natural beauty. Wordsworth found
strength and consolation in the memory of a host of golden
daffodils. But for Eliot, half a dozen quotations from poetry are
the fragments he has shored against his ruins. They come at the
end of The Waste Land, heaped together hastily, almost despairingly.
46 One is a phrase from the late Latin poem that haunted
Marius the Epicurean, The Vigil of Venus,^'^ which evokes (in the
rhythm of Swinburne) the swallow, sister of the nightingale. So
also, part 4 of The Waste Land^which is concerned with the
theme of Death by Wateris an evocation of the many epitaphs on
drowned sailors in the Greek Anthology.48 This is highly specialized
art. The masses cannot be expected to understand it. It would
be stupendous if they could. Ezra Pound once cried:
The thought of what America would be like
If the classics had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep.4^
22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE 517
But most of this group believe that the mass-man is Sweeney, who
cannot hear the nightingales.
The debt of these writers to Greco-Roman literature is difficult
to assess. Naturally. The symbolists are elusive poets, and
Joyce is a cryptic novelist. Their methods tend to disguise and
transform all the material that passes through their minds, until
nothing is left but a hint, a nuance, a grotesque, a parodic reminiscence,
a phrase repeated in a dream, a poignant echo. They do
not care to explain. They never shout. They speak gently to those
who wish to hear. Pound was bitterly attacked and derided for
publishing the following poemr^o
Papyrus
Spring . . .
Too long . .
.
Gongula . . .
But hardly any of his critics cared to understand the title and listen
for its suggestions. Yet they are clear, and boldly imaginative.
Searching through the ruins of what were once Greek-speaking
villages in Egypt, scholars have found many heaps of papyri miraculously
preserved for fifteen or twenty centuries (see p. 468). Most
of the writings on these papyri are not literary: they are letters, or
school exercises, or tax-sheets. But occasionally we find poems
or prose pieces by famous authors. Sometimes these are works
which vanished in the Dark Ages and had been given up for lost.
Sometimes they are merely fragments^yet precious, like the hand
or head which is all that remains of a lost masterpiece of sculpture.
A few words on a tom sheet of papyrus may be all that we can
recover of a great poem; but they speak in the accents of immortality.
Now, the word Gongula occurs twice in poems by the exquisite
Greek lyricist Sappho. It was the name of one of Sapphos
pupils. We know scarcely anything about her, except that she was
dear to Sappho. What Pound has done in this poem, therefore,
is to write four words containing something of Sapphos own feeling
for nature, something of her passionate yearning, and the name
of one of those she loved. He has created a fragment of a poem
which Sappho herself might have written.
This technique shows how infinitely adaptable classical material
5i8 22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE
can become. A few decades earlier, poets like Heredia and Landor
were composing poems on Greek themes in which every detail was
as firm as marble, as clear as sculpture. The technique changed.
The Parnassians were succeeded by Mallarmejust as Ingres and
Puvis de Chavannes were succeeded by Seurat and Monet, with
their vague outlines and shimmering deceptive colours. Yet Greek
and Roman themes stirred the imaginations of both these very
different groups of poets, and with each of them grew into new and
valuable poetry.
As well as cultivating the technique of elusiveness, these writers
approach the Greco-Roman world in a different way from their
predecessors. They are not scholars. Compared with Shelley, for
instance, or Milton, or Goethe, they are amateurs. They range
rather more widely, and do not dive so deep. Joyce calls himself
only a shy guest at the feast of the worlds culture he appears
to have had a fair amount of Latin and not much Greek ; however,
in his Jesuit school and his Roman Catholic college he was given
a certain amount of critical insight into classical literature.
Mallarme and Valery had a good French education, which still
gives intelligent boys a wider acquaintance with literature than that
of any other country ; but the chief interest of each was in a nonclassical
field. Eliot, who went to Harvard and Oxford, was president
of the Classical Association in 1941 : however, he disclaims
any specialist knowledge of Greek and Latin. Pound is a brilliant
smatterer, with a remarkable gift for extracting vivid pictures from
partly understood poems in Latin, Greek, Italian, Proven9al, and
miscellaneous dialects. ^ 3
But these writers believe it is impossible to conquer a central
truth by a central invasion. Therefore, they do not think of Greek
and Latin literature as a discipline to train the mind, or as a storehouse
of wisdom. They find in it, first, an excitement of the
imagination, and, together with that, an aesthetic consolation
against the stresses, dangers, and vulgarities of life. Other symbolist
poets have found these outlets elsewhere: Yeats in Celtic
mythology, in occultism, in Hindu mysticism; Rilke in his private
treasure-stock of remembered pictures, statues, noble lives, and
visions. This little group itself has other excitements and consolations^
Eliot in mystical Christianity, for example^but those
it derives from Greece and Rome are among its most intense.
We have shown how myths and legendary figures acted as
22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE 519
stimuli on these five writers. To read their work is to be convinced
that they also loved the classics as consolation. This is one of the
chief subjects of The Waste Land, Our present life (Eliot believes)
is brutal, hard to understand. Its cruelties and problems, if we are
conscious of them, must be looked at and made endurablenot
through any philosophical theories or plans of political action
(which are all inadequate)^but through the frames of noble
legends, through mystical words which haunt the mind, through
beautiful phrases of poetry, graceful sounds of music, pictures
themselves beyond intellectual understanding:
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold . . ,
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala.s^
Through this poem and others of Eliot's, we hear the voice of the
nightingale, which is a cry of eternal pain, transformed into music.
The transformation was the work of the Greek spirit, which has
provided for these five, as for other less-known poets of their
generation, both comfort in facing the vileness of life, and stimulus
to soar, although wounded, above it.
23
THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS
AT the present time the most interesting development of
l\ classical influence in modern thought and literature is the
reinterpretation and revitalization of the Greek myths. This is
going on in two different fields, and apparently in two different
directions. One is almost wholly literary, and mainly dramatic.
The other has produced a great deal of literature indirectly, and
will produce more, but is primarily psychological and philosophical.
For century after century men have been captivated by the
Greek legends, have told them in different ways, elaborating some
and neglecting others, have sought different beauties and values
in them, and, when they gave them conscious interpretations, ha.ve
educed from them many different kinds of truth. However, there
are three main principles on which the myths can be interpreted.
One is to say that they describe single historicalfacts. The second
is to take them as symbols of permanent philosophical truths. The
third is to hold that they are reflections of natural processes^
eternally recurring.
Many of the m3rths are about human beings, and gods in human
shape : so they need hardly be changed to be interpreted as accounts
of historical events. This kind of interpretation began in Greece
itself, with Euhemeros {fl. 300 b.c.). He explained all the legends divine, human, and semi-
humanas being ennobled versions of
the exploits of real warriors and chiefs long ago, who had been
changed into gods by their admiring tribes. (The technique of
rationalizing myth as the reflection of history is called, after him,
euhemerism.^ And indeed, an essential part of Greco-Roman
religious and political thought was the idea that men, by showing
superhuman excellence, could become gods. The most famous
example was Hercules, who made his way to heaven through his
twelve labours and his heroic death. There were also Bacchus,
and Castor and Pollux, and Aesculapius ; then Aeneas, and Romulus.
Alexander the Great was treated as a god during his lifetime.
After his example it was not too difficult to deify dead emperors
23 . THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS 521
(not all, but those who had done great services for mankind) and to
worship Caesar as the Saviour and the Prince of Peace.^
Again, some Christian writers have believed that the legends
about pagan divinities were really stories about the devils who
went to and fro upon the earth before the revelation of Jesus
Christ. 3 This is the interpretation given by Milton. In Paradise
Regained Satan reproaches Belial for suggesting that the best way
to tempt Jesus would be to set women in his eye and in his walk
;
and he implies that the sons of God, who the Bible says went in
unto the daughters of men,^ were Belial and his companions
masquerading as the Greek deities:
Have we not seen, or by relation heard,
In courts and regal chambers how thou lurkst,
In wood or grove, by mossy fountain-side.
In valley or green meadow, to waylay
Some beauty rare, Calisto, Clymene,
Daphne, or Semele, Antiopa,
Or Amymone, Syrinx, many more.
Too long^then lay^st thy scapes on names adored,
Apollo, Neptune, Jupiter, or Pan,
Satyr, or Faun, or Silvan ?5
#
Then some scholars hold that the warrior heroes, Achilles,
Agamemnon, Ajax, and their peers, were personifications of
warring tribes, and that their victories and deaths represented the
conquests of one clan or another during the great migrations.
Historians of religion think that many of the myths in which a god
is associated with an inferior personage commemorate religious
revolutions, in which the cult of one deity was replaced by that of
another. For example, if a divinity usually known in human shape
is described as occasionally transforming himself into an animal,
or killing an animal, or being accompanied by an animal, that
would mean that the worship of the animal was abolished, replaced
by the worship of the anthropomorphic god, and only dimly
remembered. Finally, many legends are believed to record great
inventions or advances in civilization: the culture-hero Dionysus
or Bacchus represents the discovery of wine, Triptolemus and
Hiawatha the discovery of agriculture, the Argonauts the exploration
of the unknown seas east of the Mediterranean, the Golden
Fleece the wealth of the Black Sea trade-route, and Prometheus
522 23. THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS
the discovery of fire, metal, and the handicrafts on which
civilization is built.
In the nineteenth century there was a school which taught that
the myths were not echoes of single events, but cryptic representations
of profound philosophical truths. This school began in
Germany, with G. F. Creuzers The Symbolism and Mythology of
the Ancient Peoples (1810--12), but it had a wider influence in
France.^ Creuzer's book was translated and expanded into a tenvolume
treatise by the French scholar J. D. Guigniaut as The
Religions of Antiquity^ considered principally in their Symbolic and
Mythological Forms (1825-51); and many other such books were
produced in France during the forties, fifties, and sixties. The
most notable was Hellenic Polytheism^ by the brilliant Louis
Menard. It was through him and his pupil Leconte de Lisle that
Greek legends, instead of being merely pretty rococo decorations,
became, for the French Parnassians, grand and beautiful expressions
of profound truths. ^ Strange to see how the symbolic
interpretation of legends which was carried out so thoroughly in
the Middle Ages with Ovid Moralized^ reappears in France five
hundred years later, but now without its Christian colouring.
Myths have also been thought to be symbols of important
processes, either in the external world or in the soul. Max Muller
(1823-1900), the German naturalized Englishman who was one of
the founders of comparative philology, held that nearly all the
myths symbolized the grandest phenomenon in the physical
universe : the passage of the sun through the heavens every day and
through the twelve signs of the zodiac every year. Thus, he interpreted
almost every hero, from Hercules and his twelve labours
and his flaming death to Arthur and his round table and his twelve
knights, as a sun-myth. This theory went back long before him,
at least as far as C. F. Dupuis (1742-1809), who declared that Jesus
was really the sun and his twelve disciples the signs of the zodiac.
It is not now generally accepted. One of the books which helped
to explode Dupuiss version of it was a very amusing essay by
J. B. Peres, How Napoleon never existed (1835), which proves that
Napoleon Bonaparte^whose name means certainly Apollo, from
the good region of the East^was really the sun, and that his twelve
active marshals were the Ram, the Bull, the Heavenly Twins. . . ,
23 . THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS 523
A large group of myths has been associated (notably by Sir J. G.
Frazer in The Golden Bough) with the processes of reproduction,
sexual and agricultural, and with the connexion made between
these two processes in the primitive mind. Such were the myths
of Demeter and Persephone in the Mysteries ; such were the legends
of Venus and Adonis, Attis and Cybele, Isis and Osiris. There is
something of this in the Christmas story too. For there is no
evidence in the Bible that Jesus was born in December; but it
seems right that the infant Saviour should be born about the winter
solstice, to bring new life to a world apparently cold and dead. Our
rejoicing round the Christmas-tree is a relic of a pagan winter
ritual which used the evergreen as a symbol of the longed-for
resurrection, to come in the spring-time.
Psychologists now regard myths as expressions of permanent but
unacknowledged psychical attitudes and forces. This interpretation
was launched by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). He pointed to
the many parallels between famous and widespread legends and
the symbols which occur in dreams to represent (under an acceptable
disguise) powerful instinctive drives. ^ Accordingly, he gave
a Greek legendary name to the most powerful of all, the son^s love
of his mother and jealousy of his father. He called this, after the
tragedy of the royal house of Thebes, the Oedipus complex. The
parallel attitude, in which the daughter loves her father and is
jealous of her mother, he named the Electra complex, because it
recalls the tragedy of the princess who hated her proud cruel
mother Clytemnestra. And the self-adoration and self-absorption
which may make a man or woman dead to the whole external
world were first and most graphically found in the m3rthical youth
who died for love of his reflection in a pool: so, after Narcissus,
the neurosis is called narcissism.
Freuds suggestions are now being elaborated by C. G. Jung
(born 1875), particularly in his Psychology and Religion^ Psycho^
logy and the UnconsciouSy and Integration of the Personality, as
well as in the periodical Eranos which he sponsors. The essence
of this interpretation of the myths is that they are symbols of the
desires and passions which all mankind feels but does not acknowledge.
Girls wish to be surpassingly beautiful and to marry the
richest, noblest, handsomest man in the world, who will find
them in spite of the neglect and hostility of their family and
their surroundings. They relieve the tension of this desire by
SZ4 23. THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS
saying that it has already come true, by re-telling or re-reading the
story, and by identifying themselves with its heroine Cinderella.
Boys wish to be the only object of their mothers love and to expel
all their competitors, of whom father is the chief. They do so by
telling the story of a gallant young man who, as part of his adventurous
career, kills an unknown old man who turns out to be
his father, and marries a beautiful queen who turns out to be his
mother. Oedipus, Cinderella, Psyche, Helen of Troy, Don Juan,
Aladdin or Gyges, David the slayer of Goliath or Jack-thegiant-
killer, Sindbad or Ulysses, Hercules or Samsonall these
characters are not so much historical individuals as projections of
the wishes, passions, and hopes of all mankind. The great legends,
and even the great symbols, such as the mystic flower, and the
mystic numbers three, seven, and twelve, keep recurring throughout
human history and human literature, not only in Europe but
all over the world. They are constantly being remodelled. They
emerge again and again as superstitions, or foundations of great
creeds, or universal patterns of art and ritual. Jung calls them
archetypes of the collective unconscious
:
patterns in which the
soul of every man develops, because of the humanity he shares
with every other man. Every married couple dreams of having
a child which will benot imperfect, not even ordinary, but
superb, the solver of all problems, good, strong, wise, heroic. This
dream becomes the myth of the miraculous baby.^<^ And, in the
deepest sense, the dream is true. Every baby is a miracle.
According to Jung, it is because of this universality that the great
legends can be attributed to no one author, and can be rewritten
again and again without losing their power. The work done on
them by many generations of taletellers and listeners is truly
collective. They represent the inmost thoughts and feelings of
the human race, and therefore they are^within human standards
^immortal.
We must not, however, think that all legends are saccharine
wish-fulfilments. Certainly the Greek myths are not. There is
need of a book which will analyse them, tracing the manifold
relations which link them to the myths of other nations and to the
more conscious art of the Greeks, and explaining how they differ
from other groups of legends. One essential difference is that
many of them are tragic: the stories of Narcissus, Arachne,
Syrinx, Phaethon, Oedipus himself. They knew, the wise Greeks,
23. THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS 525
that the realization of the extreme wishes of mankind usually leads
to tragedy. Cinderella lives happily ever after. But Oedipus
blinds himself and goes into exile. Hercules, with his own body
changed to an instrument of torture, burns himself to death.
Meanwhile, in literature, work of remarkable vitality has been
produced by a number of modern authors who have been retelling
Greek myths as plays or storiesoccasionally giving them a modern
setting, but more frequently retaining the ancient milieu and
characters. Oddly enough, few of them actually treat the myths
as symbols of the unconscious, or seem as familiar with psychological
research as Joyce in Finnegans Wake. On the contrary, they
prefer to use the legends as the Greek poets did, making them
carry moral and political significance for a contemporary audience.
Although this movement has outposts in several other countries,
its base is in modern France, and its activities there are by far the
most fertile and interesting. Its chief is Andre Gide (born 1869),
who began as long ago as 1899 with Philoctetes and Prometheus
drops his Chains^ followed by a play on the Gyges legend. King
Candaules (published 1901). He then turned to other methods of
presenting the problems that obsess him ; but his work continued
to presuppose a classical education in his readers (for example, in
the Vergilian allusions of his TIatonic dialogues' justifying homosexuality,
Corydon^ 1924), and he has always considered himself to
be a classicist in style.^^ In 1931 he returned to Greece with a terse
and shocking drama on the Theban legend, Oedipus; and his
latest is a prose tale in the form of autobiography, Theseus (1946),
embodying some material from his unfinished Considerations on
Greek Mythology.
There can be little doubt that Gide was led to become a neo-
Hellenic writer by the example of Oscar Wilde, himself a disciple
of Pater and a good classical scholar. He admired Wilde for two
chief reasons. Wilde was an artist, with a lofty conception of the
artist's place in society, and a technique which curiously blended
sensuality and restraint ; and he was a homosexual, with the courage
of his perversions. In his essay Oscar Wilde Gide describes how,
when he was only twenty-two, he first met and was fascinated by
Wilde. In his marvellously attractive voice, with his exquisite
choice of words, Wilde told fanciful story after story; and then,
drawing young Gide aside, he told him a special tale of two strange
526 23. THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS
lovers. It was a variation on the legend of Narcissus, who died for
love of his own image in the water: Wilde said that the water
had loved Narcissus dearly, because it could see its own beauty
reflected in his eyes. This, the first utterance of Wilde that Gide
records, not only prefigures their relationship, but symbolizes
certain common essentials in their characters : overmastering love
of sensuous beauty, homosexual passion, and cold self-sufficiency.
In the chronology of Gides early works the classical influence
exerted by Wilde reappears. In 1891 and thereafter Wilde told
Gide the sequel to the legend of Narcissus, with many other
variants on the Greek myths; in 1899 Gide produced Prometheus
drops his Chains^ a sequel to the legend of Prometheus. In 1893
Wilde published Salomiy dramatizing an oriental story from the
fringes of the Greek world, in a style of classical restraint; in 1901
Gide published King CandauleSy dramatizing an oriental story
from the fringes of the Greek world, in a style of classical restraint.
Both plays deal with sinister distortions of sexual passion, and both
authors have added a still more sinister twist to the original plot.
And surely Wildes Dorian Gray (1891) is the elder brother of
Gides Immoralist (1902) ? There is much in Gide which was not in
Wilde; and there was something in Wilde which found no echo
in Gide. Yet the two had many characteristics in common,
including their strangest and their strongest. The rest of the story
is hinted at in Gides Mopsus and told in If the Seed die not.
A few dramas on Greek mythical themes were produced in
Germany before and during the First World War. Among them
were Hugo von Hofmannsthals Electra (1903), a play of outrageous
violence, later set to psychopathic music by Strauss ; Franz WerfeFs
Trojan Women (1914), a tragedy of war in which the heroine is
Hecuba, who suffers all the agonies of defeat and yet has the courage
to survive; and a melodramatic Antigone (1917) by Walter Hasenclever,
in which the tyrant Creon and his marshal bear an obvious
resemblance to Wilhelm II and Ludendorff.^^
In America a considerable impression was made by Eugene
ONeills Mourning becomes Electra (1931), in which the family
relationships, most of the incidents, and some of the moral issues
of the tragedy of Agamemnon are restated in terms of nineteenthcentury
New England; but narrowed by a coarse insistence on the
theme of sexual repression, and by the omission of the greater
religious and moral problems faced by Aeschylus in the Oresteial^
23 . THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS 527
Sex is also the leading motive of the recent adaptations of Medea
made in America by Robinson Jeffers and in France by Jean
Anouilh. Euripides knew well, when he wrote the tragedy, that
much of Medeas criminal frenzy was due to Jasons rejection of
her love and the prospect of endless sexual starvation which she
faced. But he knew there was more in it than that. He knew that
it would lessen Medeas tragic grandeur if, instead of being a great
lady spurned, an exile beggared, a comrade deceived, and a proud
woman humbled, she were shown mainly as a half-savage girl
writhing in the frustration of lust. Anouilh makes little more of
her than that : she appears as a foul-mouthed Russian gipsy, and,
instead of escaping in sombre triumph at the end, burns in her own
caravan like the subject of a cheap crimepassionneL Jefferss Medea
is a woman of more stature, (Jeffers is a shamefully neglected poet
:
none of his creations lacks a memorable grandeur.) But since one
of his chief themes is the daemonic power of the sexual impulse,
and its close link with the urge to kill, he presents Medea mainly
as a beautiful woman changed into a fury by the distortion of that
impulse.
Doomed heroism is the theme of two other adaptations of Greek
myth. One is the tragedy Icarus (1927) by the young Italian poet
Lauro de Bosis.^^ It shows Icarus and his father Daedalus as
heroes of thought, the discoverers of iron, the first men to fly
through the air. They personify the creative mind of man, and
its greatest works^knowledge and poetry. It is a fine conception,
expressed in some eloquent speeches and lyrics.^^ Unfortunately
the plot^which makes Icarus fall from the sky after he has refused
the love of Queen Pasiphae, who calls on her father (the Sun) to
punish him^is a relatively meaningless intrigue, unworthy of the
poets ideals. De Bosis ended his own life with a lofty idealistic
gesture. He was an opponent of Mussolini. After working underground
for some time, he bought an aircraft, flew over Rome
scattering anti-fascist leaflets, and, like his own Icarus, soared up
again to his death.
Then the contemporary philosopher Albert Camus has embodied
his belief that life is absurd in several tales and plays and in a
group of essays called The Myth of Sisyphus!^ After trying to
outwit the gods and conquer death, Sisyphus was sent to hell and
condemned to push a huge stone up a mountain: an endless
punishment, because the stone always rolled down again when it
SzS 23. THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS
reached the top. Although many of us lead similar lives here and
now, Camus says we are not tragic or heroic because we are not
aware that our tasks are hopeless^that life itself is absurd. To
realize that, and to rise above it, is the true victory. The struggle
towards the summits is enough in itself to fill a mans heart. We
must conceive Sisyphus as happy. This is not so new as Camus
thinks. It is the very voice of Byron to his own proud Titanic
kinsman, Prometheus
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence
:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itselfan equal to all woes

And a firm will, and a deep sense,

Which even in torture can descry
Its own concentered recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.
Prometheus was the chief inspiration of a Swiss mystic, who
carried out the most powerful single transformation of Greek myth
in modern times. Although he won the Nobel Prize in 1919, Carl
Spitteler is still almost unknown outside central Europe.^ Yet he
is a remarkable poet. Bom in 1845, he studied for the church, but
abandoned it. He made his own religion. After spending eight
years as a tutor in Russia, he returned, and published a strange book
called Promethetcs and Epimeihens (i 880-1).
Prometheus and Epimetheus was a cloudily complex elaboration
of the ancient myth of the two brothers, Foresight and Hindsight,
Vision and Repentance : one wise, unselfish, eternally progressing,
and eternally suffering; the other simple, grasping at wealth
without reflection, greedily accepting the perfect woman Pandora
although her dowry contained all the troubles of mankind. One is
a martyr to his own independence, the other a victim of his own
complaisance. They are two aspects of the human soul. In the
poetry of the revolutionary era Prometheus^the creator, the
enemy of God, the crucified martyr^was a favourite hero.^^ In
Spittelers book, however, both brothers hold the stage. They
23 . THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS 529
occupy a world in which Greek legends are curiously interwoven
with Christian and Gnostic supernatural notions and Spittelers
own mysticism, a world ruled not directly by God but by an angel.
The angel offers its viceroyalty to Prometheus, who refuses, in
order to keep the liberty of his soul. But Epimetheus accepts. He
becomes rich, powerful, and unsuccessful. He fails to guard the
angeFs three children (Myth, Hiero, and Messiah) from the attacks
of the evil spirit Behemoth. His brother Prometheus is recalled
from beggary and exile, and saves the kingdom of the world, which
the brothers then leave to the Messiah.
This book, published under a pen-name, was a failure. It was
too big for the Swiss critics like Keller ; it was soon overshadowed
by another work written in the same apocalyptic vein and quasibiblical
prose, but with more violence and assuranceNietzsches
Thus spake Zarathustra and it was too hard to understand without
prolonged study. Reading complex allegories is like solving
cryptograms^you must feel fairly certain that there is some message
before you start. Few were sure of Prometheus and Epimetheus,
Twenty years later Spitteler wrote an epic, Olympian Spring
(1900-6, revised 1910). This is a magnificent story in bold
spacious six-beat rhyming couplets, telling how the Olympian
dynasty of gods, at the summons of Fate, emerged from a long
sleep in the underworld, climbed Mount Olympus (passing the
dethroned chivalry of Kronos riding down), competed for the
kingship and for Heras hand, and then, with their natures
and relations defined, wandered freely throughout the world,
in full exercise of all their daemonic powersuntil at last the
happiness of heaven began to break up, and with it the rule of
Zeus. He created Heracles, and sent him down to save suffering
mankind.
These two works, together with Prometheus the Sufferer, a
revised and reinterpreted version of the first, give Spitteler his
claim to fame. Prometheus and Epimetheus has many remarkable
qualities. Olympian Spring, for which he was awarded the Nobel
Prize, is clearly the greater work of art.
Both are allegories. They are tales of visible and physical
conflict between superhuman beings, but they image a number of
conflicts between the spiritual forces of the human world. Yet,
like The Faerie Queene, they tell their stories so vividly and make
their characters, though strange, so real that our pleasure in them
S076 M m
530 23. THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS
is not limited to understanding their deeper meanings. And, like
all powerful symbolic artists, Spitteler creates images and incidents
which we remember apparently for their own sake, and which,
as we look at them, become slowly translucent, allowing us to
penetrate into film after film, layer after layer of significance, all
contained and vitalized within them.
There is no space in this book to discuss what all the meanings
are. Some are obvious. The new gods, making their way up to
Olympus, and competing for primacy, and acquiring their full
strength, and dispersing in manifold activities over the world,
symbolize the growth of the human spirit through childhood to
energetic unreflective youth, and the difficulties, conflicts, and
sufferings of developing into manhood. They remind us also how
strangely a nation, or a race, or an empire, or a civilization appears
out of darkness, how happy is its springtime of energy, how surely
its death is fated, and how it may survive if, instead of dominating
others, it sends out a saviour to them. Many other meanings are
buried far deeper within the poems. But even a first reading will
give anyone who loves poetry a number of scenes to haunt him
quite as constantly as the symbolic scenes in Faust: Prometheus
retreating into exile with his lion and his dog ; the catastrophic rush
of Kronos into ruin, like a giant fir-tree felled on a mountainside and
hurtling down, leaving only a late echo of its fall.
Most of Spittelers mythical figures are Greek in origin.^3 His
fundamental pessimism, his judgement that life is beautiful but
bad, stems partly from Schopenhauer through Burckhardt, and is
partly pure Greek. Nietzsche too, thinking independently along
the same lines, evoked a similar pessimism from his study of Greek
art. However, Spittelers characters are Swiss, and indeed German,
in execution. They suffer and fight, fear and hate, more than the
gods of Hellas. Monsters, not like the Python that Apollo slew
but as dangerous as Fenris-Wolf, threaten them. Their Olympus
is not the serene peak floating heaven-high over the Aegean: it is
a meadow-shouldered Alp and a thunder-wrapped and lightningblazing
Valhalla. Hebe herself, bringing the new gods the food of
immortality, leaps and yodels like an Alpine cowgirl in a dirndl.
Nevertheless, Spittelers feeling for the Alps is finely conveyed.
We said that Wordsworth was one of the few mountain-poets:
Spitteler is certainly the greatest.
It is hard to liken him to other artists. In music, he is akin to
23 . THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS 531
Bruckner, with his long unhurried pace and simple nobility; to
Strauss, with his love of the mountains and of heroic strife ; and to
Wagner, in his immense conceptions and his primitive sense of
doom. In literature there is no one quite like him, for he combines
the lofty grandeur of Landor with the religious mysticism and the
driving energy of Nietzsche. The painter most like him is his
Swiss contemporary Arnold Bocklin.^s
But Spitteler was more than a nineteenth-century artist. He
was like a natural force. The world he inhabited was the world
which we enter when, far up on the ridge of a mountain, miles
from any road or town, we feel a new rhythm of life beating
slowly, ponderously, through us; the torrent roars far below, the
glens re-echo it, the wind shouts in our ears, the peaks all around
are not still, but seem to be heaving and straining in a thousandyear-
long struggle, clouds ten miles wide gallop under a heavenbroad
arch, forests and glaciers march and countermarch in
eternal war, and the whole universe is a realm of aeonian conflicts,
slow and mighty, which human pygmies cannot fully understand,
but must revere.
In recent years there have been many more retellings of the
Greek legends, in poetry, prose, and drama: too many to mention
here. (Those in English and American poetry are fully and sensitively
discussed by Professor Douglas Bush in the later chapters
of his Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry.)
The most interesting single group, however, is the neo-Hellenic
dramas produced by the modern French playwrights. We have
indicated Andre Gide as the leader of this movement in France.
Not all the dramatists mentioned can be called disciples of his
;
yet they have all adopted many of his attitudes to myth, transforming
and sometimes distorting the legends in the same way as he
does ; and they share something of his basic spiritual outlook. His
work can therefore be considered along with theirs. His most
important books on Greek legendary themes have been listed. Of
the others, these are the chief
:
Jean Cocteaus Antigone (193a), Orpheus (1926), and The
Infernal Machine (1934);
Jean Amphitryon g8 (1929), The Trojan War will
not take place (1935), and Electra (1937);
532 23. THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS
Jean Anouilhs Eurydice (1941), Antigone (1942), and Medea
(1946);
Jean-Paul Sartres The Flies (1943).
Before we consider these plays in detail, we might ask why so
many modern playwrights have gone to Greek mythology for their
plots. There are several different answers.
First, they are in search of themes which can be treated with
strong simplicity^themes which have enough authority to stand
up without masses of realistic or impressionist detail to make
them convincing. The same tendency is exemplified in contemporary
music by Stravinskys Oedipus Rex and Saties Gymnopedies,
and even better in art by the paintings of Chirico and the sculptures
of Maillol.
Then these themes are not only simple in outline, but profoundly
suggestive in contentand it is here that the neo-Hellenic dramatists
join hands with the psychologists, for they know that every
great myth carries a deep significance for the men of every age,
including our own. Thus, under the German occupation, by
rehandling the legends of Antigone and Orestes, Anouilh and
Sartre were able to deal with the problem of resistance to an unjust
but apparently irresistible authority, not only more safely but much
more broadly than if they had invented a contemporary plot. And
similarly, because one element of tragedy is the audiences foreknowledge
of the coming disaster, there was a deeply tragic quality
in Giraudouxs play showing all the efforts and sacrifices made by
statesmen on both sides to avoid the Trojan war, which was forced
on them by the passionate folly of mobs and demagogues. Since
his play was produced in 1935, it was not only a Greek but a
contemporary tragedy.
Also, since the French intellectuals are always defending themselves
against the Olympians, Gide and Cocteau and the others
find a certain relief in humanizing, debunking, and even vulgarizing
some of the formidable old traditions. By bringing the myths
nearer to humanity they make them more real. On the other hand,
they also find the myths to be inexhaustible sources of poetry. One
of the gravest defects of modern drama is that it lacks imaginative
power. It is quick, clever, sometimes thoughtful, always realistic.
But the great dramas of the world do not stay on the ground. They
leave it and become poetry. Because of the modern worlds
23 . THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS 533
emphasis on material power and possessions it is extremely difficult
to write a contemporary play which will rise, at its noblest moments,
into poetry; but contemporary problems, treated as versions of
Greek myths, can be worked out to solutions which are poetic,
whether the poetry is that of fantasy or that of tragic heroism.
In form, the plays are restrained without being rigidly classical.
Except for Cocteaus The Infernal Machine^ they observe the
unities of time and place closely but unobtrusively, and all maintain
the indispensable unity of action. They are all in completely
modern prose, which in Cocteau and Giraudoux often mounts into
poetic imagery, and in both these two and the others often descends
into vulgarity and slang. The chorus of Greek tragedy appears
only vestigially : a few women talking flat prose in Gides Oedipus,
a single commentator (like the Chorus of Henry V) in Anouilhs
Antigone and Cocteaus Antigone (where Cocteau himself took the
role at the first performance).^^
The plots are almost always the same in outline as the myths on
which they are based. They could scarcely be different. It would
be ridiculous to write a play proving that Julius Caesar was not
assassinated, or that Troy was never captured and burnt. What
can be done, though, is to take the story of Caesars murder or the
fall of Troy, and give it new implications, explain the facts in an
odd and interesting way, cast strange lights on the characters
involved, and, by remodelling values, motives, and results, to
emphasize the infinite uncertainty and complexity of human life.
Euripides was the master of this art in Greece : he specialized in
dramatizing little-known legends, such as the story that the gods
kept Helen in Egypt and sent a beautiful ghost to Troy instead.
We have already seen how a romancer of the late empire not only
contrived to distort the fall of Troy into a stab-in-the-back defeat,
but imposed his fiction on generations of medieval poets.^^ Every
writer who attempts to create anything on a basis of myth must add.
or subtract, or alter.^^
One distinguished French novelist has destroyed, or inverted,
a very famous legend^not because he dislikes Greek and Roman
poetry but because he prefers nature to statuesque heroism. This
is the Proven9al writer Jean Giono, who tells us in his autobiography
that the discovery of Vergil was a revelation as blinding for him
as a religious conversion. He has written several works designed
534 23. THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS ,
to recapture in prose the pastoral and animistic richness he feels in
classical literature. In his Birth of the Odyssey (1938) he tells the
story of the return of Odysseus, situates it in a fertile country-side
more like southern France than barren Ithaca, and reduces the
hero himself to a nervous and ageing liar, who invents the stories
about the Cyclops, and Scylla and Charybdis, and so forth, merely
in order to account for the years he spent en route living with
bewitching women like Circe, and to compensate for his shabbiness
and timidity as he approaches his home. His yarns are picked up
by a blind old guitarist, who makes them into new ballads and
sings them round the country-side.
The details of this story are carefully calculated to be antiheroic.
For instance, Odysseus is terribly afraid of Antinous, the
strong young athlete with whom Penelope has been living in
adultery; but, getting into an argument, he hits Antinous by
accident, puts him to flight, chases him, and sees him caught in
a landslide that throws him mutilated into the sea. Hence the tale
that Odysseus killed all the suitors of Penelope. Instead of the
faithful old dog Argus, a pet magpie recognizes the returning
Odysseus; but, to avoid being detected by Antinous, he crushes
it to death. In one version of the legend he was killed unwittingly
by his own sonnot Telemachus, but Circes child Telegonus.
But Gionos book ends with the rebellious Telemachus preparing
to murder his father in cold blood. Although the story is ingenious
and the descriptions vivid, the inversion of the heroic saga of
Odysseus is pretty artificial. Such an unsubtle and pacific
character would never even have regained his home, far less fought
successfully through ten years of war at Troy.
Apart from this one instance, the modem French taletellers and
playwrights keep the outlines of the legends; but they rehandle
them in such a way as to bring out unexpected tmths. For instance,
there is not much authority for believing that Hector and Odysseus
made a concerted effort to avert the Trojan war by negotiation, but
were forced into it by unknown hotheads ; yet it is certainly plausible
that the two cautious heroes should have planned for peace rather
than for war. And although Giraudoux, in inventing a blustering
militarist and an excited propagandist to precipitate the conflict,
has created characters more appropriate to modem Germany and
France than to Bronze Age Greece, the anachronism does not
vitiate the main tmth he is conveying.
23 . THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS 535
Anouilh^s Eurydice is unlike most of the others, because it is
entirely modern in setting and yet almost unintelligible without
knowledge of the myth. The story is that Eurydice, wife of the
master musician Orpheus, died suddenly; that he, by the power of
his music, gained entrance to the world of the dead and was allowed
to bring Eurydice backon condition that he would not look at her
before they reached the living world ; that he forgot his promise,
lost her for ever, and wandered about in despair until he was torn
to pieces by the savage maenads of Thrace. In Anouilhs play
Orpheus is a cafe violinist who meets a touring actress in a railway
station and falls in love with her, but loses her when he insists on
questioning her about her previous lovers. She is given back to
him by a mysterious Monsieur Henri (who would be quite meaningless
if he were not understood as part of the Greek myth) on condition
that he shall not look her in the face until morning. But he
asks her again for the whole truth, and stares her in the face, and
loses her again in death. His failure is a symbol of the fact
(worked out in such detail by Proust) that a lover cannot keep from
trying to find out everything about his sweethearts life, even if it
will kill their love.
In Gides Prometheus drops his Chams Prometheus has left his
crag ; but he still keeps his eagle as a pet, and feeds it on his own
vitals. Why? Because he likes to see it looking handsome; and
because he, like each of us, enjoys having a private eagle, not
hanging round his neck like a dead albatross, but loving him and
living on his hearts blood. And Gides Oedipusin which one of
Oedipus sons writes a book closely corresponding to works by
two of Gides disciples,^^ and where the Sphinx is only the
monstrous enigma of life, intimidating every youth, but ready to
disappear as soon as the youth answers its riddle with the word
Man (that is, by asserting that human nature creates its own
standards)surely this play, in which everyone is corrupt but
proud, is a reflex of Gide himself and of the corrupt but proud
children of his spirit. Of all these neo-Hellenic works, Giraudouxs
Amphitryon 38 is the richest in its power of revealing unexpected
truths about great subjects : the love of husband and wife, the power
of any woman over any man (even a god in mans disguise), and
the relation of man and the gods.
All these pla^^vrights are good psychologists ; and they have all
discovered new and yet credible motives for the actions recorded
536 23. THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS
in mythical tradition. In the autobiography of Theseus Gide says
that when Ariadne gave him a thread to guide him back out of the
monster-haunted labyrinth she was really trying to attach him to
herself; that this was why he later abandoned her on a desert
island ; and that, when he forgot to mount the white sails which
would tell his father he was safe (thus indirectly causing his fathers
suicide and his own accession to the throne), he did not really
forget, any more than he forgot Ariadne on Naxos. In the same
book Oedipus says that he put out his eyes, not to punish himself,
but to punish them for not seeing what they ought to have seen.
Creon is usually the typical harsh tyrant ; but in Anouilhs Antigone
he explains very coolly and patiently that, so far from being cruel,
he is merely an administrator of law and order and efficient
government, an ideal nobler than any individuals private code of
morals. Yes, and after the tragedy, after Antigone has hanged
herself, after Creons own son has denounced him and killed
himself, after his own wife has cut her throat, he only sighs heavily
and goes off to do his duty by presiding at a cabinet meeting:
a death as complete as that of the others. The most striking
reinterpretation of motives, though not the deepest, is in Cocteaus
The Infernal Machine, where the Sphinx, although a deity vastly
more powerful than, the arrogant young Oedipus, tells him her
secret because he has charmed the human part of her, but, as
Nemesis, looks on with pity at the fulfilment of his burning
ambition, the ambition favoured by the gods : that he shall supplant
his father, and win the kingdom, and marry his mother, and, after
the fuse has burnt down to the explosive, be shattered in the ruins
of his own strength. They kill us for their sport.
Andre Gide stands apart from all the others as an inventor of
repulsive new episodes and vicious motives. For more than two
thousand years men have rehearsed the awful history of the Labdacids;
but Gide was the first to suggest that the sons born of
Oedipus unknowing incest were deliberately (and not without
success) trying to seduce their sisters. The story of Candaules
and Gyges, as told by Herodotus (and retold by Gautier), is spicy
enough : the king is so proud of his wifes beauty that he hides his
vizier Gyges in the bedroom to watch her undressing. But Gide
makes the king, in a phenomenal access of generosity, leave the
room and tell Gyges to substitute for him that night.^i Theseus,
in the legend, carried off both Ariadne and her sister Phaedra. But
23. THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS 537
Gide says that he told Ariadne he had taken a fancy to her young
brothery that she connived at her brothers corruption, and that
Phaedra was then smuggled aboard in the disguise of the disappointed
boy. Bad taste on Gides level, like Neros poetry or
Gaudis architecture, is as difficult to achieve as good taste, and
is at least as rare. Theseus is not the most attractive of mythical
champions, but Gide gives him that peculiarly cynical type of
sexual immorality which most of Gides heroes carry as proudly
as an oriflamme. T never like leaving a desire unsatisfied, he says
as he turns from one sister to another, it is unhealthy. 33 Even
Ariadnes scarf, which lovers of poetry have always known as a
pathetic token of her betrayal and her loneliness, the scarf with
which Ovid says she waft her love to come again to Naxos

as to remind you that I was forgotten,

to a long branch I bound my veil of white34
Gide has succeeded, consciously or unconsciously, in dirtying
even that slight thing. In his story it blows off Ariadnes head, and
is picked up by Theseus, who at once, and publicly, wraps it
around him as a loin-cloth. 3 s
All these authors are eager to keep their plays from being remote,
archaic, unreal. Therefore, although they do not deliberately put
anachronisms on the stage, they make the language as modern as
they can, and frequently lapse into vulgarities of detail and
expression. In Giraudouxs Electra an angry wife talks of having
to light her husbands cigars and filter his coffee.36 Helen of Troy,
like a modern Frenchwoman, says Paris may desert her for a while
to play bowls or fish for eels. 37 In Sophocles Antigone there is
a sentry who reports Antigones crime to Creon in comparatively
blunt and simple language; but in Anouilhs Antigone there are
several sentries, and they accentuate the lonely virginal idealism
of the heroine by very coarse conversations about getting drunk
and going to a brothel. In Cocteaus Orpheus the poet is torn to
pieces because he submits in a poetry competition the oracular
phrase Madame Eurydice Reviendra Des Enfers^ the initial letters
of which form the commonest French obscenity. Gide (except in
his early Philoctetes) tries deliberately to be banal, because he
thinks heroics are false while banality is real. One example will be
enough. After Oedipus discovers his sin and rushes out to blind
himself, Gide makes the chorus remain on stage. Instead of
538 23. THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS
keeping silence or chanting a song of pity and terror, it breaks out
into infuriatingly trivial comments
:
Tts all just a family affair: nothing to do with us. . . . Hes made his
bed, and now hes got to lie in it.^s
In spite of such eccentricities the best of these plays are very
fine, and even the worst of them contain striking and memorable
thoughts. Tragedy must rise above the realities of every day, upon
the wings of imagination and emotion. The great tragedians have
known this necessity, and have used many means of fulfilling it
:
vivid descriptions like the beacon-speech in Aeschylus Agamemnon ;
striking stage-pictures like the storm in King Lear and the sleeping
Furies in The Eumenides\ symbols like the crimson carpet in
Agamemnon^ the jesters skull in Hamlet, the hand-washing in
Macbeth*, metrical richness, both dramatic and lyrical; physical
suffering like that of Prometheus, Philoctetes, Orestes, Othello,
Gloucester, Phedre; and, above all, supernatural appearances

omens, divinities, spirits of health or goblins damned. Yielding

to the decline in taste and the contraction of imagination, most
modern playwrights do not even attempt such bold effects : or, if
ever, do so awkwardl}^ and unconvincingly. However, the French
neo-Hellenic dramatists, stimulated by the example of their
predecessors and strengthened by the myths which they are using
(or: which are using them), employ several of these effects to
ennoble their work.
A powerful new- symbol for the sense of guilt which is basically
weakness and cowardice was created by Sartre in The Flies, when
he showed the blood-guilty city of Argos infested with a plague
of fat black blowflies, and the Furies themselves threatening
Orestes in the shape of monstrous blood-sucking flies. Flies
annoy, and weaken, and in swarms even terrify, but they rarely
kill. With energy and decision, by killing some and driving others
away and ignoring the rest, one can survive. The Flies was produced
when France was occupied by the Germans. Again, in
Cocteaus The Infernal Machine, Jocasta, the pitiful, nervous, but
still beautiful queen, enters leading Tiresias, the blind seer who
foresees her tragedy. Her scarf trails behind her, and Tiresias
treads on it. She cries: T am surrounded by things that hate me!
This scarf has been choking me all day. It hooks on to branches,
it rolls itself round chariot-axles, and now you tread on it. . . .
23 . THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS 539
It s terrifying! It will kill me. That is the scarf with which she
hangs herself; and in the last scene she appears (visible only to the
blinded eyes of Oedipus) with it bound around her neck. In the
same play the wedding of Oedipus and his mother is treated with
masterly tact and imagination. The couple, left alone in the bridal
chamber, are exhausted by the coronation ceremonies, the long
procession, the heavy robes : they move and live half-asleep in an
uneasy dream. Oedipus falls asleep just as he has thrown himself
down to rest, across the marriage-bed, his tired head lolling over
the foot of it. And his head rests on the empty cradle (once his
own) which Jocasta kept in memory of the child she lost ; and then,
as he sleeps, she rocks the cradle.
The authority of legend makes it easier for a playwright to
introduce the supernatural in a mythical play than in a contemporary
drama. The French dramatists are not as a rule content
with imitating the traditional appearances of supernatural beings
in Greek drama. They prefer to give their creations new forms.
The flies of Sartre are one such creation. The Furies also appear
in Giraudouxs Electra: as little girls who gradually grow into
maidens and then into tall powerful women, while the revenge of
Orestes approaches its maturity. In the same play, a vulture is
seen in the last act, at first floating very high above the head of the
doomed Aegisthus, and then gradually, gradually planing lower.
Cocteaus Oj^pheus is really a surrealist extravaganza, clever but
silly. However, it contains one impressive deity : Death. Neither
a crowned skeleton nor a winged angel, she appears as a beautiful
impassive young woman, who puts on a surgeons white coat and
mask, and, while Eurydice, her patient, is dying, directs the manipulation
of machines as intricate and terrifying as those of modern
hospitals. No horseman, no reaper could be so effective for to-day.
But the most impressive of all these figures is the Sphinx in
Cocteaus The Infernal Machine, At first only a girl whom young
Oedipus meets on the road, she changes into a winged monster,
half-woman, haif-lioness ; and the proud Oedipus falls before her,
bewitched and aghast.
Much might be said of the eloquence of Giraudoux, who wrote
exquisite prose, and whose characters talk in fiashingly vivid
images, following the French dramatic tradition of raisonnement,
disquisitions on abstract themes. If anything, his characters do
discuss too much. But Giraudoux and Cocteau are the only two
540 23. THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS
of these writers whose style reaches real eloquence at great moments
.
One example will suffice. When Oedipus falls before the Sphinx,
he is paralysed. He shouts T will resist!' And she replies:
Tt is useless to close your eyes, to turn your head away. My power
does not lie in my gaze nor in my song. When I act, I am defter than
a blind mans fingers, swifter than a gladiators net, subtler than the
lightning, stiffer than a charioteer, heavier than a cow, more dutiful than
a schoolboy wrinkling his brows over a sum, more rigged and sailed and
anchored and balanced than a ship, more incorruptible than a judge,
greedier than the insects, bloodier than the birds, more nocturnal than
an egg, more ingenious than an Asiatic torturer, more deceitful than the
heart, more supple than the hand of a cheat, more fateful than the stars,
more diligent than the snake as it moistens its prey with saliva; I can
secrete and produce and abandon and wind and ravel and unravel so that
when I will these knots of mine they are tied, and when I think them
they are tightened or loosened; so delicate that you cannot grasp them,
so pliant that you feel them like a creeping poison, so hard that if I let
them slip they would maim you, so taut that a bow could draw a note of
divine anguish from the bond between us; clamped like the sea, like the
pillar, like the rose, thewed like the octopus, complicated like the
mechanism of a dream, invisible above all else, invisible and majestic
like the blood in the veins of a statue, a thread binding you in the
multiple swirls and twists of a stream of honey falling into a cup of
honey. 39
We opened this discussion by asking why these playwrights
chose Greek legends for their subjects. The central answer is that
the myths are permanent. They deal with the greatest of all
problems, the problems which do not change, because men and
women do not change. They deal with love; with war; with sin;
with tyranny ; with courage ; with fate : and all in some way or other
deal with the relation of man to those divine powers which are
sometimes felt to be irrational, sometimes to be cruel, and sometimes,
alas, to be just.
24
CONCLUSION
WE have come a long way. We have traced the river of Greek
and Roman influence in literature from its first mingling
with the life of modern Europe, among the forests and wildernesses
of the Dark Ages, through the softer landscapes of the
Middle Ages, which it helped to enrich and adorn, into the
tremendous fertility of the Renaissance, a hot summerland of
bright flowers and clustering fruit; then past that, flowing along
a bed now carefully controlled, lined with marble and watched by
statues, through the baroque era; then bursting out again in new
and unexpected courses with the age of revolutionsometimes
meandering with a mazy motion through the rich fancies of a young
poet in love, sometimes, with a melodious roar, breaking down old
traditions and surging high against the very temples of Christianity
itself; then, in new channels, flowing strongly and graciously
through the literature of the nineteenth century and into that of the
twentieth, right on into our own time, when modern psychologists
and playwrights look with admiration and with awe at the immortal
figures of faun and hero, nymph and god, borne along in its eternal
stream.
We have not been able to follow all its wanderings, to trace all
its varied currents, or to do more than indicate a few of its many
effluents. It would have been attractive to explore some of the
countries lying a little beyond its main course: to look, for instance,
at the fantastic lyrics of the Spaniard Gongora, to examine
the famous but forgotten Adonis of the Italian baroque poet
Marini, or to admire the Homeric tragedy and the fine odes of
Ronsard^s Polish admirer Kochanowski. Many modern authors,
too, must be omitted, because, although they felt the power of
Greco-Roman influence, they expressed it less creatively or more
eccentrically than their contemporaries. In England, one might
point to Robert Bridges; in America, to the imagist H. D.; in
Germany, to Stefan George.
It would have been interesting, again, to follow the course
of Greek and Roman philosophical thought through the life of
modem Europe and America, showing how much Voltaire owed
542 24. CONCLUSION
to it, how it moulded the mind of the medieval church, how
the logic and metaphysics of the Greeks have become part of the
intellectual equipment without which no western man can reason.
Or it would have been a novel and valuable approach to history,
to show how many great men have modelled their lives and actions
on the classical heroes of whom they read when they were young.
Charles the Twelfth thought he was Alexander. Jefferson wished
to be Cicero. Napoleon made himself Caesar.
Nor have we been able to mention the many thinkers and artists
of the modern world who, although they wrote little or nothing
showing the direct influence of the classics, still found that
classical literature was of immense value to them as a challenge and
a stimulus. Within the nineteenth century, for example, we might
think of a German composer, an American poet, and a Russian
novelist, of whom this is true.
Wagner, when composing The Ring of the Nibelungs, used to
spend all morning working at his music. After luncheon he sat in
the garden and read Greek tragediesbecause he felt that no other
literature would maintain him at the same lofty pitch of energy and
passion. Not only that, but he evidently conceived his operas to
be modern parallels to the Greek tragedies. Like Aeschylus
Oresteia, The Ring is called a trilogy (with a prelude), while the
gods and heroic deeds and the sense of tragic brooding fate in
the four operas are clearly inspired by the majestic figures of Greek
drama.^
Whitman called the Muses to come away from Greece and Ionia.
His own poetry was boldly untraditional in pattern and feeling.
Yet his friend Thoreau recalls that he loved to ride up and down
Broadway on a bus, sitting beside the driver just above the horses,
with his hair , and beard flying in the wind, declaiming Homer at
the top of his voice.^ In fact, he must have looked rather like
Homer, who would have heard him with a smile of friendship.
Tolstoy began to learn Greek at forty-two. After he could read
it, he wrote to his friend Fet: T have become convinced that of all
that human language has produced truly and simply beautiful,
I knew nothing ; he taught it, on a novel but effective system of
,his own, to his children; and he finally uttered his conviction that
'without a knowledge of Greek there is no education.
3
Or consider education itself. One of the main achievements of
the work of civilization which has been going on for the last twelve
24. CONCLUSION 543
or fifteen centuries has been to teach more and more people more
and more thoroughly. Until late last century the core of that
education was Latin, and sometimes Greek, poetry and prose. It
would be tempting to write a good history of education in terms of
the classical curriculum, and to include tributes to the many fine
teachers who have proved their genius by producing, with the aid
of Greco-Roman literature, many brilliant poets and constructive
thinkers. The largest single group of such teachers would be the
Jesuits, whose pupils include Moliere, Descartes, Tasso, Voltaire,
Calderon, Montesquieu, Corneille, Buffon, Diderot, Goldoni,
Bossuet, Lesage, Chiabrera, and Joyce. Next to them would come
the wonderful teachers of the Renaissance, from the Scot Buchanan
to the Italian Ficino, from Dorat to Erasmus. And close to them
would be the group we tend to forget, althoughwe should remember
them with admiration and affection. These are the fathers who
introduced their sons to the great books and the beautiful languages
of Greece and Rome, who awakened their interest, and helped
them over the dry sands, and stubborn fences, and studied along
with them, until often the sons became famous men whom we
admire as though they had produced themselves out of nothing.
It was for this, more than for their physical existence, that Pitt
and Casaubon, Browning and Montaigne, were grateful to their
fathers.^ That is true fatherhood, not only to beget the body but
to help in making the mind of your son.
However, the subject of this book is literature. It has been
necessary, therefore, to omit everything which does not bear
directly upon it. Philosophy, art, education, and other works of
the Greco-Roman spirit have been mentioned only in so far as they
contributed immediately to modem v/estern literature.
No one would claim that the stream which we have been following
is the only one in the majestic flow of literature. There are
many other currents. Chief of all is the personal experience of
each writer^not only his emotional life, but the political calms
or storms through which he lives, his success or failure in the task
of making money, the city or court or country-side in which he
has his home, the friends and enemies he makes, the works of art
he admires, the religion he practises or neglects. Another powerful
current is the course of history, which with wars and dynasties and
revolutions can make or break the aesthetic patterns of a whole
generation of artists. Still another is the imagination of the
544 24. CONCLUSION
ordinary people of each nation : those who make the ghost-stories
and the songs, the dances, jokes, and proverbs, the fables and
ballads, which are so often literature themselves, and are always
one of the vital forces in literature. Still, the current flowing out of
Greece and Rome has always been a strong one, always productive,
and often central. How strong and how productive it has been, this
book has endeavoured to show. It can also be proved negatively :
imagine that all the books, plays, and poems, in all the European
languages, which were written under direct inspiration from the
classics, should be destroyed. Not only would nearly all the best
work disappearDantes Comedy
y
Shakespeares tragedies, much
of the finest nineteenth-century poetrybut several complete areas
of European literature would drop out of sight entirely, like cities
swallowed up in an earthquake, leaving nothing behind but a few
flowers growing on the edge of the chasm, here a tale of chivalry
and there a little love-song, here a book of letters and there a farce.
That fact is often underestimated or ignored because of a mistake
made by many modern thinkers. The mistake is to believe that the
past is dead. When they are asked how far back they would place
this death, they give various answers. Some say 1776, others 1848,
others 1917; many say the beginning of the Christian era. All
agree that something of the past is still alive, but they differ in
defining how much. They are misled by a false analogy between
the physical death of individual men and the passage of events into
history. Men die, but mankind lives continuously. No historical
fact is dead if it is still actively producing results : for its life is in
the mind of humanity.
Take two simple examples. Languages are meant to be read and
spoken. They are methods of conveying thought through words,
whether the words are uttered or written. As long as they continue
to convey thoughts, they are not dead. Therefore Latin and Greek,
which are still conveying new thoughts to new readers, are not
dead languages. The instance of Hebrew, which survived the
drums and tramplings of seven conquests as a language which was
read but seldom spoken, shows how mistaken it is to think of
unspoken tongues as dead. The only dead languages are those
which no one now either speaks or reads, like Etruscan and Cretan.
Again, one of the fundamental facts in European civilization was
the establishment of the Roman empire, followed by its division
24. CONCLUSION 545
into Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking sections. The fact
continues to be active and vital. Through a continuous chain of
causes and effects it has produced the present political division
between east and west in Europea division now affecting all the
rest of the worldand the long-standing religious schism between
the Greek (and Slavic) Orthodox church and the Roman Catholic
church. We cannot live as though this fact had ceased to exist.
But we can live better by understanding it. We can, for instance,
stop thinking of Russia as an Asiatic nation, when in fact it is a
European society which was partly civilized by the Greek part of
the Roman empire, and then (under the Tartars) isolated and
arrested. Its true relationships are European. It received few
fertilizing currents from the East. For centuries it was part of the
stream which flowed from Greece and Rome through Byzantium
;
and its earliest known rulers were Scandinavian northmen who
eventually found their way to Byzantium not round the Mediterranean
sea-lanes but through the vast Russian rivers. Then that
connexion was cut. But Poland, so like Russia in racial stock and
language, received the stream through Rome and continued to be
enriched by it, while Russia, although clinging to its Byzantine-
Christian religion and its Greek-Slavic letters, was otherwise
isolated. All these events, however distant, are facts which still
exist and affect our lives. To understand them is to help in solving
the problems which they raise.
But here, literature is our concern ; and literature passes into the
background even less rapidly, and changes under pressure even less
radically, than historical facts. Every book from which you can
get new interests and ideas is alive, although it was written many
centuries ago. To realize that is to open a broader universe to
your own mind. The difference between an educated man and
an uneducated man is that the uneducated man lives only for the
moment, reading his newspaper and watching the latest movingpicture,
while the educated man lives in a far wider present, that
vital eternity in which the psalms of David and the plays of
Shakespeare, the epistles of Paul and the dialogues of Plato, speak
with the same charm and power that made them immortal the
instant they were written.
The purpose of this book has been to correct that error as applied
to literature, by showing that the history of much of the best poetry
5076 N n
546 24. CONCLUSION
and prose written in western countries is a continuous stream
flowing from its source in Greece to the present day, and that that
stream is one current in the continuous spiritual life ofwestern man.
From another point of view this could be looked at as a continuous
process of education. Greco-Roman civilization did not die
with the fall of the empire. It taught us. It helped to civilize us.
Its lessons differed at different times.
At first, our vernacular literatures went to it, like children to their
mother, for stories. It told us myths and legends, and we repeated
them: the fall of Troy, the tale of Sir Hector and Lady Helen
and Sir Aeneas, the adventures of Caesar and Pompey, the weird
stories of Midas and Philomel, the loves of Pyramus and Thisbe.
Then, as the nations began to grow, it taught them language

giving them words which would be more than a practical tool for
daily life and become vehicles for thoughtand taught them
philosophical ideas on which to exercise their expanding minds.
These were its chief gifts in the Middle Ages.
In the Renaissance it taught them two new lessons. It gave them
the patterns of literature in which to express the new ideas which
came flooding in : tragedy and comedy, ode and essay and elegy,
epic and satire. And it showed them, exemplified in the bodies of
its statues and the minds of its writers, a new ideal of individual life
lived at its highest intensity for its own sake, humanism ennobled
by the consciousness of its own best powers.
The nations matured. They became aware of themselves not
only as groups but as parts of Europe and as heirs of history. They
penetrated farther back into their own ancestry, rediscovering and
re-creating the past to serve as a frame for their own thoughts. Now
it taught them political lessons : the Roman ideal republic, the Greek
creation democracy, were realized again.
In this latest stage of the growth of our literature, we have turned
again to listen to the legends. This is part of our deeper exploration
of the human mind. Like a man who remembers a tale told him in
his childhood and realizes that it has profound significance, we are
now retelling the Greek myths, finding that they are often the only
illumination of many dark places of the soul, and drawing from
them a hundred meanings which are vital for ourselves.
Throughout the whole process, two fundamental facts have
continued to exist and affect it. One of these is the conflict between
24. CONCLUSION 547
Christianity and Greco-Roman paganism. From one point of
view, this is the conflict between two views of the past : should it be
totally rejected, or should it be accepted and transformed for our
use ? In that form we saw the conflict in the Battle of the Books.
From another point of view, it is the conflict between the view that
the world and human nature are totally bad, depraved beyond
human redemption, and the view that both contain much good
which can be bettered. The condemnation of human nature by
ascetic Christians has often provoked an equally violent countercondemnation
by those who felt that human nature was basically
good, and who admired the Greeks and Romans for eliciting the
best from it. In this conflict, truth does not lie wholly with one
side or with the other. It rests with those who have taken the best
of paganism and transformed it by the admixture of the highest
of Christian thought.
The other fact is the nature of civilization itself. Many of us
misunderstand it. We live in a materialistic world. Most of us
think incessantly about making money, or about gaining power

expressed in material termsfor one group or one nation, or about

redistributing wealth between classes, countries, or continents.
Nevertheless, civilization is not chiefly concerned with money, or
power, or possessions. It is concerned with the human mind. The
richest state in the world, or a world-society of unlimited wealth
and comfort, even although every single one of its members had
all the food and clothing and machines and material possessions
he could possibly use, would still not be a civilization. It would be
what Plato called 'a city of swine, eating, drinking, mating, and
sleeping until they died.s
The Greeks were keen business-men. The Romans built a vast
empire of tremendous power and wealth. But if they had done no
more than that, they would be as dead as the Assyrians. They are
still alive, and working through us, because they realized that
civilization means education. Cwilization is the life of the mind.
Naturally it cannot exist without material security, physical health,
and properly distributed wealth. But these are not ends. They are
means- Their ultimate objective is the good life of the mind. It is
through the mind that we are truly human. The rest, the games and
the food and the shelter and the fighting, we share with the animals.
Civilization means education^not only for children but for men
and women throughout their lives. One of the most varied and
548 24. CONCLUSION
interesting methods of such education is literature. Greece knew
that dramas and songs, tales and histories, are not only amusements
for a moment but, because of their continuously fertile content,
permanent possessions for the mind. This was the discovery of the
Greeks. They were not very rich, or very powerful. Egypt was
richer. Persia was far more powerful. But the Greeks were
civilized, because they thought.
They taught this to the Romans. Rome knew much which the
Greeks never learned or acquired too late. Rome quieted the
warring savages, and built the roads and harbours and bridges and
irrigation-systems, and made the laws. That too is civilization.
But after that, what? The Greeks replied Bread for the souF, and
gave it.
The spiritual food which they received from the Greeks was
passed on by the Romans to the whole of western Europe. It was
purified and strengthened by Christianity, which as it grew brought
in still more nourishment from the Greek spirit. Then the Roman
empire was overthrown, first in the west and later in the east.
Nothing survives of its material wealth and its power. But the
spiritual force of Greece and Rome survives. It conquered the barbarian
conquerors, and then civilized them. It helped to make us.
The true relation between the modern world and the classical
world is the same, on a larger scale, as the relation between Rome
and Greece. It is an educational relationship. Rome was wealthy
and powerful. Much of its wealth and power was used for sensual
pleasuresdrink and the races, parties and yachts, expensive
furniture and gorgeous clothes. But, taught by Greece, many
Romans also used the wealth and power of their state to make
possible, for everyone who could read then and thereafter, a
stronger and more sensitive life of the mind. Now we remember
them. Some tremendous conquerors we know, and some tyrants
:
Caesar, and Nero, and^who was it who beat Hannibal? The
millionaires we have forgotten, except as ridiculous figures who
had dishes of nightingales' tongues and heated gold swimmingpools.
But those we still know and admire are the men (whether
rich or poor) who used their brains: the self-made lawyer who,
after reaching the top of his profession and holding the highest
state offices, made himself a persuasive voice for much of the most
difficult Greco-Roman philosophy; the farm-boy who, putting the
whole Roman destiny into a heroic Greek shape, inspired Dante
24. CONCLUSION 549
and Milton and Tennyson and Hugo and many others; the slave's
son from the barren south whose thrifty father sent him to Greece,
and who returned to write, first satires on the greedy rich, and then
songs of temperate happiness and deeply based patriotism, which
have amused, charmed, and strengthened hundreds of thousands
of modern men. These are Cicero, Vergil, Horace. In Greece we
remember Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Aristotle, while the rich and
powerful and luxurious and ambitious have ceased to exist. Only
thought and art live.
Rome grew powerful through her military and political genius
;
and then, from Greece, she learnt to live the life of the mind. We
have grown powerful through our scientific and industrial genius.
The only way in which we can justify that power, use it for our own
lasting benefit, and contribute something permanent to the development
of the human race, is to understand and spread a system of
noble spiritual ideals. Some of these we ourselves are working out.
Many others we derive from Christianity. And manyin art and
philosophy and literaturewe have received from Greco-Roman
civilization, as a priceless legacy. The real duty of man is not to
extend his power or multiply his wealth beyond his needs, but to
enrich and enjoy his only imperishable possession: his soul.
BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY
There is, as far as I know, no single book which gives even in outline a
survey of the whole field of Greek and Roman influence on modern
literature. It has been partly covered by three series of publications,
which, although they contain many useful facts, are very unevenly
written and organized. These are
:
Das Erbe der Alien, in two groups, both published at Leipzig: the
first, in ten volumes (ed. O. Crusius, O. Immisch, and T. Zielinski),
from 1910 to 1924, the second, in twenty-six volumes (ed.
O. Immisch), from 1919 to 1936;
Our Debt to Greece and Rome, fifty-two volumes (ed. G. D. Hadzsits
and D. M. Robinson) issued first in Boston and later in New York
between 1922 and 1935;
Vortrdge der Bibliothek Warburg (ed. F. Saxl, Leipzig, 1923-32) and
other publications of the Bibliothek Warburg, an organization
which was created in order to foster research in the influence of
Greek and Roman culture on the modern world, and which has
been continuing its work, after moving in 1934 to London, under
the name of the Warburg Institute.
The most useful books and articles which I have met with when
working on special sections of the field are mentioned in the notes on
individual chapters. See in particular note 51 on chapter 5 (Chaucer),
the introductory note on chapter 6 (Translation in the Renaissance), the
introductory note on chapter ii (Shakespeares Classics), and note i
on chapter 14 (The Battle of the Books).
Besides these, the following are among the most valuable single works.
1. C. Bailey (ed.), The Legacy of Rome (Oxford, 1923).
Essays on the various parts of our civilizationlaw, political
organization, &c.^which have been formed or influenced by Rome.
Well written and edited.
2. F. Baldensperger and W. P. Friedrich, Bibliography of Comparative
Literature (University of N. Carolina Studies in Comparative
Literature, Chapel Hill, 1950).
Book 2, Parts 2, 3, and 4, and Book 3, Part 2, compose the newest
and best available bibliography of Greek and Roman influence on
modem literature.
3. K. Borinski, Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheorie von Ausgang des
klassischen Altertums bis auf Goethe und Wilhelm von Humboldt (Das
Erbe der Alten, 9 and 10, Leipzig, 1914 and 1924).
A history of the influence of classical ideas and examples in developing
modem critical standards: brilliantly written, almost too tightly
packed with material.
BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY 551
4. H. Brown, A Bibliography of Classical Influence on English Litera--
ture (Harvard Studies in Philology, 18 (Cambridge, Mass., 1935),
7-46).
A valuable list of books and articles.
5. D. Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry
(Minneapolis and London, 1932).
A survey of the manifold appearances of Greco-Roman myths in
English poetry (excluding drama) during the Renaissance : an indispensable
work, written with fine taste and extensive knowledge.
6. D. Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry
(Harvard Studies in English, 18, Cambridge, Mass., 1937).
A similar survey beginning in the eighteenth century and running
down almost to the present day. This book is quite as gracefully
written as its predecessor, but labours a little under the effort of
covering all the poets who fall within the period and the pattern.
Still, it is nearly always a pleasure and a profit to read.
7. C. L. Cholevius, Geschichte der deutschen Poesie nach ihren antiken
Ekmenten (2 volumes, Leipzig, 1854 1856).
This is the most complete book known to me which deals with
classical influence on any area of modern literature. Its scope is even
broader than its title, for it discusses not only German poetry but
German criticism and philosophy, analyses German prose dramas
and novels, and gives some biographical information about German
authors. i\lthough immensely long (1,283 closely printed pages),
it is clearly and spaciously written. Like many books of its time it
oversimplifies complex characters and movements by dissolving them
into two opposing factors called romantic and classical. It suffers
also from a nationalist point of view which makes its author underestimate
the debt of German to other European literatures, and
sometimes spend an unconscionable amount of space on relatively unimportant
writers merely because they happen to be the chief figures
in a barren period. (Thus, he has more on Bodmers epic about the
Flood, the Noachid^ than on Goethes Roman Elegies or the entire
career of Holderlin.) But it is an important work both for students of
German literature and for those interested in the continuing vitality
of Greco-Roman influence.
8. G. S. Gordon (ed.), EnglishLiterature and the Classics {Oxiotdy 1912).
A collection of essays, originally designed as lectures by experts in
separate areas of this field. Scrappy and uneven, it contains a few
useful articles (for instance, Owen on Ovid and romance) and some
disappointingly superficial pieces; there is no attempt at integrating
them into a comprehensive outline.
552 BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY 9.
O. Gruppe, Geschichte der klassischen Mythologie und Religions--
geschichte wahrend des Mittelalters im Ahendland und wahrend der
Neuzeit (supplementary volume of the Ausfuhrliches Lexikon der
griechischen und romischen Mythologie^ edited by W. H. Roscher;
Leipzig, 1921).
This book describes the different views of Greco-Roman mythology
held by the Europeans of the Dark and Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, the baroque period, and modern times. Although it
pays some attention to the handbooks of mythology on which many
poets and artists fed their imagination, and mentions a few of the
modern works of art which have re-created classical legends, its chief
emphasis is upon the successive theories which thinkers have devised
to explain the origin and meaning of the myths. In treating them
Gruppe gives certain eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century
writers more, and the medieval and Renaissance scholars much less
space than they deserve; but, because of its continuity, scope, and
anal5^icai penetration, his book is a valuable groundwork for further
study of the subject.
10. O. Immisch, Das Nachlehen der Antike (Das Erbe der AJten, new
series, i; Leipzig, 1919).
A short book developed out of a series of war-time lectures. It is
interestingly written, and contains some useful information, but
suffers from trying to resist the attacks of German modernists and
nationalists on classical education, by proving that German life and
language were largely built on Latin and Greek foundations, rather
than to explain what types of Greek and Roman influence are still
potent in European thought.
11. W. Jaeger, Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture (3 volumes, translated
by G. Highet, Oxford and New York, 1939-44).
The viotd paideia means both civilization and education*. The
Greeks differed from other nations in this: they believed that men
progressed in civilization, not by gaining power or wealth, but by
educating themselves. Their great bookstragedies, epics, histories,
speeches, philosophical worksare great because they were designed
to educate their readers; and that is why we still profit from reading
them. Professor Jaeger works out this thesis in detail, for all the best
books in Greek literature from Homer to Demosthenes. A masterly
work, full of deeply fruitful ideas.
12. Sir R. Livingstone (ed.), The Legacy of Greece (Oxford, 1921).
Essays on the immortal forces of Greek cultureart, philosophy,
literature, medical science, and many othersshowing how they
continue to be relevant to our own life. A companion to no. i in this
list; well written and full of material.
BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY 553
13. R. Newald, Nachleben der Antike ig20-ig2g and Nachlehen der
Antike {Jahresberichte iiber die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft
2'^z. 3. 1-122 and Supplementband 250. 1-144, Leipzig
1931 and 1935).
Bursians Jahresberichte is a periodical which prints elaborately
detailed bibliographical and critical surveys of various fields of
classical scholarship, each survey covering a period of ten to twenty
years and linking up with an earlier article. These are the first it has
published on the survivals of Greek and Roman culture in the modern
world. They are very full and careful, and deal not only with literature
but with other realms of thought, such as law and religion.
Together, they are intended to list the books and articles that appeared
between 1920 and 1930, and to lead into the Warburg bibliographies
(see no. 24).
14. F. O. Nolte, German Literature and the Classics: a Bibliographical
Guide (Harvard Studies in Philology, 18 (Cambridge, Mass., 1935),
125-63)-
Another useful bibliography on the same plan as no. 4.
15. L. Petit de Julleville (ed.), Histoire de la langue et de la litterature
franpaise (8 volumes, Paris, 1896-9^ and 1908-122).
This is an admirably written and very comprehensive history of
French literature, now rather out of date on disputed points, but
indispensable as a groundwork. Although it does not bear centrally
on this subject, I have cited it so often in the notes that it should be
listed here.
16. H. Peyre, UInfluence des litteratures antiques sur la litterature
franpaise moderne: etat des travaux (Yale Romanic Studies, 19,
New Haven, 1941).
A sensitively written survey of the recent books and articles on this
subject so far as it concerns French. Much more than a bibliography,
it points out the gaps which still exist and makes many stimulating
suggestions for books which need to be written.
17. F. E, Pierce, The Hellenic Current in English Nineteenth-century
Poetry* {Journal of English and Germanic Philology^ 16 (1917),
103-35)-
A first-rate article, succinct but complete.
18. J. E. Sandys, a History of Classical Scholarship (3 volumes, Cambridge,
1903-8).
The most complete and best balanced account of the subject in
existence. It traces the progress of Greek and Latin studies from
their beginnings in Greece and Rome (where many of the methods
554 BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY
and materials of modern philology were worked out), through the
Middle Ages and Renaissance down to our own time. Its style is
necessarily dry, but now and then becomes surprisingly sympathetic.
Its chief weakness is that it pays far more attention to the biographies
of individual scholars than to the large central trends which are more
important in the history of scholarship.
19. E. Stemplinger, Die Befruchtung der Weltliteratur durch die
Antike {Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift, 2 (1910), 529-42).
A bibliographical survey of five or six important areas of the subject,
with suggestions for further work : contains some books which I have
not seen mentioned elsewhere.
20. J. A. K. Thomson, The Classical Background of English Literature
(London, 1948).
This work came out while I was finishing the revision of the present
book: I thought it would be better not to read it, in order to avoid any
suspicion of plagiarism. But the reputation of its author and the
pleasure I have gained from his earlier books assure me that it will
be worth reading.
21. T. G. Tucker, The Foreign Debt of English Literature (London,
1907).
A well-informed work emphasizing the interpenetration of all the
western literatures. It suffers a little from the authors determination
to explain all about the literature of each nation before going into its
influence on English, but it is useful for undergraduates.
22. G. Voigt, Die Wiederhelehung des classischen Alterthums (Berlin,
1880-1^).
This fine old book is still a mine of information for those who are
beginning to study the Renaissance, particularly about the gradual
rediscovery of the achievements of the Greek and Latin genius.
23. Vom Altertum zur Gegenwart (no editors name, introduction by
E. Norden and A. Giesecke-Teubner, Leipzig and Berlin, 1921^).
A collection of twenty-nine essays, mostly about 10 pages long,
on almost every conceivable aspect of the relationship between the
Greco-Roman world and our own. Some of them are very good,
some quite useless; a number are spoilt by being little more than
counter-propaganda directed against nationalist, socialist, and
progressive proposals for changes in the German educational
system; and the emphasis of the whole is on the relatively narrow
field of German literature and society rather than on the whole
European and American civilization which has roots in Greece and
Rome. A two-page index, no notes.
BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY 555
24. The Warburg Institute, A Bibliography of the Survival of the
Classics 1931-3 (2 volumes, London, 1934).
A superb collection of names of books and articles over a remarkably
wide range, with full bibliographical information and critical
summaries of each item.
25. T. Zielinski, Cicero im Wandel der Jahrhunderte (Leipzig, 19123).
A history of Ciceros influence in the modern world, originally
written to counter Mommsens attack on his character and neglect
of his permanent significance. Like everything Zielinski wrote, it is
brilliantly original and packed with unusual informationalthough
it is very thin on the Middle Ages, and stops at the end of the eighteenth
century. Quotations in this book are from its third edition
:
there was a fourth in 1929, but the text remained virtually unchanged.
Often Zielinski rises to genuine eloquence, as in these paragraphs from
his concluding pages
:
Anyone who has had the pleasure of travelling along one of those
great roads which have long been among the chief highways of the
human racethe roads which run northwards and westwards from
the plain of Lombardy through the Alps^will always remember his
experiences. He has felt the very pulse-beat of world history. All the
ages have left their memories behind them : here a Roman watch-tower
built for the wars of Marcus Aurelius, there a knightly castle recalling
a Hohenstaufens visit to the strange land across the mountains; this
gorge speaks of Hannibal, this dam of Napoleon, this bridge of Suvorov
;
that lake was ennobled by an epigram of Catullus, yonder valley by a
terzina of Dante, this view by a page in Goethe^s diary ; on this rock,
like a strayed bird, the memory of Tristan and Isolde with their grievous
love once alighted.
Every reader of Cicero will have a similar experience, if he has a
sense of history; and that experience alone is enougheven if the
caricaturists are right in all they sayto give him thoughts and feelings
of incomparable depth. This phrase of Ciceros was locked by Jerome
in his heart, in spite of his dream vow; with that, Diderot endeavoured
to destroy the superstition of posterity. That thought charmed
Petrarch; by this, in the midst of tormenting doubts, the mind of
Luther was much and deeply moved. Here is the pearl that Bossuet
set in the gold of his style ; there the steel out of which a Jacobin forged
his dagger. This sentence won a delicate worldly laugh from the pretty
admirers of the patriarch of Femey; and that moved the terrorized
judges of Louis XVI to tears. It is a unique and unforgettable pleasure
;
but one must not be afraid of the effort it takes, for it cannot be denied
that it is easier to walk over certain other paths than to travel the
Roman road,
Notes oni. introduction
1 . Latin was the regular language for the debates of the legislatures of
Hungary until 1840 (Toynbee, A Study of History, Oxford, 1939,
5. 496 n.) and of Poland until later. The last considerable English poet
who wrote Latin as well as English verse was Walter Savage Landor, who
died in 1864 (see p. 446).
2. It is strange to visit towns in former Roman provincessay, in
Turkey or north Africaand find that nobody can read or write except an
occasional merchant and official, while large Greek and Romaninscriptions
surviving from the empire have been built into farm-house walls or used
as foundation-stones. Expeditions have found papyrus copies of Homer,
Demosthenes, and Plato, fragments of what were once useful libraries,
buried under remote Egyptian villages on the fringe of the Sahara desert,
now inhabited by illiterate peasants. See C. H. Roberts, The Greek
Papyri, in The Legacy of Egypt (ed. S. R. K. Glanville, Oxford, 1942),
especially 265-6.
3. The story of Hamlet is told in Saxo Grammaticus. For the runes,
see Saxo, 3. 6. 16: proficiscuntur cum eo bini Fengonis satellites, litteras
ligno insculptas (nam id celebre quondam genus chartarum erat) secum
gestantes. On Bellerophon see IL 6. 168-70.
4. There is a fine Anglo-Saxon poem, The Ruin, on the remains of
Roman Bath, written by someone who did not know who had built the
noble halls which now lay in destruction, but admired them and felt the
pathos of their death.
5. As early as the third century B.c. the Jewish scriptures were being
turned into Greek for the use of Jews in Egypt who could not understand
Hebrew. This is the version called the Septuagint, which means seventy,
from the story that it was made by seventy-two rabbis (see c. 6, n. i,
p. 594). S. Lieberman, Greek in Jewish Palestine (New York, 1942), has
brought out the great penetrative power of the Greek language even into
Rabbinical teaching in Palestine itself.
6. The dialects and languages of the western part of the empire did not
entirely disappear for many generations; and we do not know the stages
of their disappearance. Some few, like Basque, survived in remote
comers. But the essential fact is that they were backwaters or underground
streams, while the main river of civilization flowed through Latin.
Meillet puts it well in his Esquisse d^une histoire de la langue latme (3rd ed,,
Paris, 1933)
f
230:
Les trouvailles de la Graufesenque ont montr^ que, au sifecle de I^re
chr^tierme, la langue dun atelier de potiers du Sud de la France 6tait encore le
gaulois: rien de moins imprdvu. Encore au in et au iv si^cle, on sait que le
gaulois subsistait dans les campagnes. . . , Tout moyen fait d6faut pour determiner
quand, au fond des campagnes dEtrarie, le dernier paysan a park
retrusque ; quand, dans les valkes de TApennin, le dernier paysan dOmbrie a
park Tombrien; quand, au pied des Alpes, le dernier paysan de Ligurie a park
le figure. Un seul fait est sur: toutes ces langues sont mortes; a partir du
NOTES ON L INTRODUCTION 357
moment ou se r^pand le latin, on nentend plus parler daucune; elles se sont
^teintes obscur^ment comme sest ^teint en Prusse, au xvi si^cle, le dernier
sujet parlant pmssien, comme sest 6teint, sur les bords de TElbe, le polabe au
XVIII si^cle, sans quon sache quand est mort le dernier sujet parlant polabe,
comme s^teint, comme vient de s*^teindre sans doute, en Pom^ranie, le dernier
sujet parlant slovince/
7. Caesar, when he saw Brutus attacking him, is reported to have said
You too, my boy?/cat cnjy riicvov; (Suet. D. luL 82. 2). Many of the
court jokes recorded by Suetonius are in conversational Greek; Martial
and Juvenal both complain that Roman ladies used affectionate Greek
phrases in public, as a modern English-speaking girl might say cheri
;
and
there is an odd letter from Augustus to his wife which begins in Latin and
slips into Greek and then back into Latin, two or three times in the same
sentence (Suet. D. Claud. 4).
8. The alphabet used by Russians and other Slavic peoples is called
Cyrillic after its reputed inventor, St. Cyril (827-69), the missionary to
the Slavs, who based it on Greek as pronounced in his day, and invented
extra letters for Slavic sounds unparalleled in Greek. On the civilizing
power of Byzantine Christianity and culture among the eastern Slavs see
S. H. Cross, The Results of the Conversion of the Slavs from Byzantium,
in Annuaire de Vlnstitut de Philologie et d^Histoire Orientales et
Slaves, 7 (1939-44). On the dissension of the empires and the sack of
Constantinople see Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, c. 60.
Cf. also Stanisiaw Koscialkowski, Rome and Byzantium in the Culture of
Mediaeval Europe, in The Bulletin of the Polish Institute of Arts and
Sciences in America, 4 (1945-6), which emphasizes the power and magnificence
of Byzantium as a world-capital.
9. On the extinction of Greek in western Europe, see P. Courcelle, Les
Lettres grecques en occidefit deMacrobeaCassiodore (Paris, 1943) ; M. Roger,
UEnseignement des lettres classiques d'Ausone a Alcuin (Paris, 1905); and
G. R. Stephens, The Knowledge of Greek in England in the Middle Ages
(Philadelphia, 1933). Knowledge of Greek disappeared from the provinces
of Spain, Britain, and Africa during the fifth century (Courcelle,
390). It was very hard for St. Augustine to learn Greek in Africa early in
that century, and then the province was cut off by the Vandal invasions
(Courcelle, 193 f., 205 f.). The often-repeated assertion that Greek
culture survived in Ireland during this period is very difficult to accept or
substantiate: see Roger, 268 f. ; Courcelle, 390, and n. 2 on that page. It
lived on in Gaul until the sixth century (Courcelle, 246 f.). In Italy itself,
the tradition of Greek culture was first broken by the invasions of Alaric
(beginning in a.d. 400), revived under the Ostrogoths with Boethius and
Symmachus (on whom see p. 41 f.), and then died about the end of the
sixth century. The Bible, however, had been translated into Latin in
good time^first about the end of the second century a.d., in the version
called the Itala, used by St. Augustine, and then, by the Balkan saint
Jerome with the help of Jewish scholars, towards the end of the fourth
century. His rendering is now known as the Vulgate, the uolgata lectio or
popular edition. It did not win general acceptance at first, but the
558 NOTES ON 1 . INTRODUCTION
influence of Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) helped to make it what it
now is, the official Bible of the Roman Catholic church. (It is strange to
think that the very word testament, in the titles Old Testament and New
Testament, is a mistranslation of the Greek ScadijKr} = agreement or
covenant.) During the late Middle Ages, in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, a few scholars appear who have acquired a knowledge of Greek,
such as Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon (see S. H. Thomson, The
Writings of Robert Grosseteste^ Bishop of Lincoln, Cambridge, 1940); but
the tradition of Greek learning was not re-established in the west until
Boccaccios time. On the relation between ancient and modern Greek
and the quarrel between the popularizers and classicizers in modern
Greek, see A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford, 1939), 6. 68 f.
On the Arabian intermediaries of classical thought, see R. Walzer,
Arabic Transmission of Greek Thought to Mediaeval Europe, in The
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 29 (1945), i. 160-83.
10. Latin died as a national language during the barbarian conquests
of the sixth and seventh centuries a.d. Childebert I made France Frankish
in 536; Sisebut and Swinthila made Spain Visigothic in 612-29 ; Rothari
conquered the last Roman parts of Lombardy in 650. These changes
were marked by the codification of the conquerors laws (e.g. the Langobardic
code in 643) and the composition of histories written from their
point of view (e.g. Gregory of Tourss History of the Franks). Books and
documents from the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries show that even
written Latin was breaking up and melting away. Manuscripts are full
of shocking mistakes in grammar and even in spelling. Mass-books show
that the priests who used them scarcely understood their ritual language.
A deed of gift by Childebert I, dated to 528, has phrases like^ro nos, per
locis; and ille, ipse, unus now come to be used as articles. Gregory of
Tours, himself a bishop, constantly apologizes for the bad Latin he writes,
and says that most of his contemporaries can understand a rustic talking
patois but not a professor discussing philosophy; while Pope Gregory
the Great bluntly says that he does not care if he makes barbarous mistakes
in language. Glossaries now begin to be produced, not explaining
difficult words, but explaining ordinary Latin words by simpler or more
rustic words. And one of the surest symptoms of the onset of the Dark
Ages now appearsthe spread of illiteracy. From the fifth century
onwards, people begin to sign with an X, which means I cannot read or
write, but I am a Christian*. On the entire subject see G. Grober,
Sprachquellen und Wortquellen des lateinischen Worterbuchs, in
Archiv fur lateinische Lexicographic, i. 35 f., and F. Lot, A quelle epoque
a-t-on cess6 de parler latin?*, in Archivum Latinitatis medii aevi, 6
(1931). 97 f-
Meanwhile, the birth of the modem languages of western Europe was
long delayed by the superiority of Latin as a written medium, by the
authority and convenience of church Latin and legal Latin, and

probably most of allby the unsettled political conditions of the Dark

Ages, which made it difficult for any one local dialect to conquer its competitors.
In French, the oldest document is the Oaths of Strasbourg
NOTES ON 1 . INTRODUCTION 559
(a.d. 842) ; but when Roger Bacon was travelling in France in 1260, he
found that many of the inhabitants could not understand one another's
dialects. The earliest literary documents in the language that flowed as
the main stream into modem French date from the tenth century, and the
first long poem is Alexis, c. 1040. In 1520 the king ordered that the
official language should be French, which then ousted Latin in deeds and
documents. The oldest document in Italian is a short cantilena dated to
about 1150. Dantes magnificent work fixed the literary language as the
Florentine dialect, in a form which continues with little change to-day,
although other Italian dialects are still spoken and even printed. The
growth of Spanish was retarded by the Moorish invasion and occupation.
The first documents in something like modem Spanish date from the
tenth century : the first great work of literature is El cantar del mio Cid,
which shows in its very title the Arabic influence (Cid = the Arabic
Sayyid, lord) and is dated about 1140. Castilian became the official
language of Spain under Ferdinand III (1217-52), and even invaded Italy
along with the Spanish forces: it has left traces in modern Italian.
German dialects were for long in confused competition, so that no single
literary language was worked out. Also, Latin seems to have been used
for cultural purposes much more exclusively than in western countries,
with less contact between educated men and the ordinary people. German
is used in deeds from the middle of the thirteenth century. Modern
German is usually dated from Luthers translation of the Bible (1522-34)
;
but his opponents in the Catholic states, and certain groups who spoke
other dialects, refused to accept standardization, so that unification of
the German language did not come until the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. The dialect Luther actually chose was that used by the
chancery of the duke of Saxony.
11. Some of the Christian propagandists, like Lactantius and Minucius
Felix, wrote elegant classical Latin. Others, such as Tertullian and
Cyprian, are deliberately non-classical: although they did not write
vulgar Latin, they used a new revolutionary language to fit their new and
revolutionary subject-matter. But the majority of the writers of the early
church simplify both their vocabulary and their syntax when they are
addressing the general public.
12. The largest and most important part of Petronius Satirica was
discovered as late as 1650 in the little Dalmatian port of Trogiror
perhaps rediscovered, after having already been found during the Renaissance,
stolen from its owner, hidden, and lost (see A, C. Clark in The
Classical Review, 22 (1908), 178 ).
13. Vergil, Buc, 4, on which poem see pp, 72, 422, 524. Cf. E. Norden,
Die Gehurt des Kindes (Leipzig, 1924), on the entire theme.
14. Aug. Cow/. 3. 4. On the influence of Cicero in the early Christian
church, see E. Zielinski, Cicero im Wandel der Jahrhunderte (Leipzig,
1912^), cc. 7 and 8. A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 5. 583 n., even
conjectures that the description of the communistic practices of the early
Christians in Acts iv. 32-5 is exaggerated, and is ultimately based on
Plato, Republic, 5, 4620,
s6o NOTES ON 1, INTRODUCTION
15. The vital period for the synthesis of Greco-Roman philosophy and
Christian thought was the fourth century. Then it was that Christians
like Augustine and Jerome, by taking over what they could use of the
tradition of Greco-Roman culture, and giving it a new life from their own
source of spiritual energy, far surpassed their pagan contemporaries in
depth and power. This synthesis continued, in spite of opposition, to
exert its creative influence throughout the Dark and Middle Ages. On the
naivete of the Christian writers, Professor Werner Jaeger of Harvard
writes me: The love of simplicity in the Church Fathers is often only a
traditional Christian attitude, and the sophisticated style in which they
actually write proves that it is a concession which they had to make, just
as nowadays even the most fastidious aesthete starts with a bow to the
common man. See also Prof. Jaegers Aquinas lecture, Humanism and
Theology (Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wis., 1943), 334*
16. This rule is often called ecclesia uiuit lege Romana. O. Cassola, in
La recezione del diritto civile nel diritto canonico (Tortona, 1941), p. 5,
suggests that the phrase is first adumbrated in the Lex Rihuaria, tit. 58. i
et episcopus archidiacono iubeat, ut ei tabulas secundum legem Romanam,
quam ecclesia uiuit, scribere faciunt.
On this subject see also H. O. Taylor, The Classical Heritage of the Middle
Ages (New York, and P. Hinschius, Geschichte und Quellen des
kanonischen Rechts, in von Holtzendorffs EncycL der Rechtszvissenschaft
(Berlin, 1890^), v. i. The existence of Roman law in Italy was continuous
throughout the Dark Ages. Its study revived during the Middle Ages and
the church began to systematize it. In the eleventh century the famous
Florentine manuscript of Justinians Digest (the sixth-century codification
of Roman imperial law) was discovered and had a fructifying influence on
the legal system of the church. The Bolognese monk Gratian finished the
codification of canon law about a.d. 1140: see Le Bras, Canon Law, in
The Legacy of the Middle Ages (ed. C. G. Crump, Oxford, 1926).
17. Pliny, Ep. ad Traianum, 96.
18. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 2. 7. 7.
19. It should not be forgotten that, after the split between the empires,
the Roman empire lived on in the east, centred on Constantinople, for
nearly a thousand years after the fall of the western empire. E. Bach,
Tmperium Romanum, in Classica et Mediaevalia, 8 (1945), i-z, shows
that even in the twelfth century the Byzantine emperor still considered
himself the sole legitimate ruler of the world, the heir of Rome, J. B. Bury,
in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1946), s.v. Later Roman Empire, points
out that modem diplomacy is another survival from Rome, having been
continued in the Byzantine empire and transmitted through it to the
Venetian republic, and thence to the west; but surely the Roman Catholic
church also preserved much of the Roman diplomatic tradition. It should
also be remembered that the Christian church, like the empire, split into
an eastern and a western section. The Greek Orthodox church can therefore
claim to be a spiritual heir of the Roman empire, comparable to the
Roman Catholic church; but it has been gravely weakened in the past
NOTES ON 1. INTRODUCTION 561
500 years by the fact that first Constantinople and then Moscow have
been taken over by non-Christian governments.
20. There is an excellent description of the Franlts Casket, with a
picture, in E. V. K. Dobbies edition of The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems
(New York, 1942), preface, p. cxxvf. (By the way, the object which Weland
is giving to Beadohild is surely the cup with which he drugged her.)
See also W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance (London, 1922^), 48 f., and The
Cambridge History of English Literature, i. 3.
21. It is almost superfluous to recommend Miss Helen WaddelFs
stimulating book. The Wandering Scholars (London, 1934).
22. For a discussion of Gombo, see E. L. Tinkers 'Gombo : the Creole
Dialect of Louisiana {Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society,
April 1935). There are lots of charming songs and fables, some satires,
and many flne recipes in Gombo, but hardly anything else.
23. This is why the Chinese use Mandarin ofiicially: there are so
many provincial dialects in that vast country which are mutually unintelligible
that some vehicle is needed to carry the whole of Chinese
culture.
24. See J. A. Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy, and in particular c. 2
of his volume, The Revival of Learning.
25. This makes a curious parallel to the earlier introduction of Greek
into Italy in the second century B.c. It came in then through the same two
channels: (i) Roman generals brought back vast quantities of Greek
objects of art from the wars; and (2) three Athenian professors who were
visiting Rome as envoys (Critolaus, Diogenes, and Cameades) gave
lectures while waiting for the Senates decision on their plea, and thus
created an immediate demand for more Greek knowledge in Rome.
26. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, c. 66.
27. As early as 1494 Lascaris printed an edition of the Greek Anthology
all in capitals, imitated from inscriptions, but the example was rarely
followed.
28. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, c. 66.
29. J. A. Symonds, The Revival of Learning, c. 2.
30. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 2. 2. 62-4.
31. Lincoln modelled his oratory largely on the English prose of the
baroque age, and it is full of Ciceronian cadences and structural devices
derived through the baroque writers from Greek and Latin : for instance,
the triple arrangement, or tricolon, which appears so often in the Gettysburg
Address
:
we cannot dedicate^we cannot consecrate^we cannot hallow this ground*.
government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Lincoln blends this very skilfully with the equally Ciceronian device of
antithesis
:
living and dead . . . add or detract . . . long remember^never forget . . . died
in vain^new birth of freedom/
Most of these devices have become so much the general property of
modem western nations that it is a surprise to be reminded that they are
S6a NOTES ON 1 . INTRODUCTION
Greek and Roman artifices which we had to learn with difficulty and
practise with care, or to find modem books written by uneducated people,
in which they are used seldom and with difficulty. For a more detailed
discussion of this subject, see c. i8, p. 330 f.
Notes on 2. the dark ages: English literature
1. See R. W. Chambers, Beowulf (Cambridge, 1932^), 3, with his
quotation from Gregory of Tours, Hist. Franc, no; H. M. Chadwick, in
The Cambridge History of English Literature (ed. A. W. Ward and A. R.
Waller, Cambridge, 1920), i. 3; C. W. Kennedy, The Earliest English
Poetry (New York, 1943), 54 and 78 f. ; and W. W. Lawrence, Beowulf and
Epic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), c. 2. On the Geatas in particular
see the discussions in Chambers, 2-12 and 333-45.
2. Bodvar Biarki, who may have been the prototype of Beowulf, won
fame by killing a monstrous great bear. Another view is that Beowulf
himself was the son of a bear, a bear-like spirit : hence his riddling name,
*bee-wolf, since the bear is death to bees. If this is true, he reaches even
farther back in history, to the point where man is just emerging from the
animal world. See Chambers (cited in n. i), 365 f., and Rhys Carpenter,
Folk tale, Fiction, and Saga in the Homeric Epics (Sather Classical
Lectures, 20, Berkeley, CaL, 1946).
3. Iliad, 6. 179-83.
4. For the sake of brevity the account in the text has been simplified.
Strictly we should distinguish between different types of short heroic
poems, since it is probable that only formal lays, and not songs and ballads
of heroism, grew into the full stature of epic. See C. M. Bowra, Tradition
and Design in the Iliad (Oxford, 1930), c. 2, and A. J. Toynbee, A Study
of History (Oxford, 1939), 5. 296 f.
5. Beowulf, 1063-1159.
6. Beowulf, 2200-10, 2397-509.
7. Beowulf, 1-52, the funeral of that mysterious monarch Scyld Scefing.
8. Beowulf, 853-1159.
9. Beowulf, 2892-3075.
10. This judgement depends partly upon taste, but partly too on
objective facts. Homer, for instance, has proportionately a much wider
vocabulary, many more types of sentence-structure, far subtler varieties
of metre, and a more delicate sense of language than the author of Beowulf,
without being less powerful in scenes of conflict. No doubt this is because
there was a longer tradition of composition behind him, and a larger range
of dialects and poetic styles fromwhichhe made his language (see pp. 481-2)
.
But it is quite wrong to believe that one cannot praise Beowulf if one
admires the Iliad. Beowulf contoms much fine and memorable poetry, and
has often been unfairly criticized : for example by Taine, who writes
:
*On ne peut traduire ces id^es fich^es en travers, qui deconcertent toute
r^conomie de notre style modeme. Souvent on ne les entend pas ; les articles,
les particules, tons les moyens d*6claircir la pensee, de marquer les attaches des
termes, disassembler les id^es en un corps r^gulier, tous les artifices de la raison
NOTES ON 2. DARK AGES: ENGLISH LITERATURE 563
et de la logique sont supprim^s. La passion mugit ici comme une Anomie b6te
informe, et puis cest tout/ {Histoire de la litterature anglaissy Paris, 1905^*,
1.5.)
The critics have recently been criticized by Mr. J. R. Hulbert, "Beowulf
and the Classical Epic (Modern Philology, 44 (1946-7), 2. 65-75). Ue
defends the plan of the poempacked as it is with digressions sometimes
obscurely told and abruptly introducedby suggesting that the poet was
using the allusive, associative method of such sophisticated writers as
Browning and Conrad. This is possible, but, considering the simplicity
of Old English society and thought, scarcely probable. Mr. Hulbert is
right in saying that the style of Beowulf is strong and impressive, but he
has been misled by Matthew Arnold into thinking that Homers style is
prosaic. In fact, it is as rich, strong, and poetic in both simplicity and
elaboration as that of Shakespeares tragedies. (On this point also see
p. 481 f.) The truth is that Beowulf, like the life it describes, belongs to a
more primitive stage of history than Homer. Judging from their fragments,
the early epics of the fighting Romans, such as Naevius Punic
War, must have looked a little like Beowulf, Naevius poem is lost, but
Beowulf has been miraculously preserved, like the shields and helmets and
drinking-horns which are still found in the Scandinavian peat-bogs, to be
treasured both as rare historical relics and as true works of art.
II. In recent years there have been several studies of possible classical
influence on Beowulf, and in particular of the supposed influence of Vergil.
The following are the main arguments
:
(a) We could scarcely explain the existence of such a broadly constructed
epic poem without the model of Vergil (F. Klaeber, Aeneis und
Beowulf, in Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen,
n.s. 26 (1911), 40 f. and 339 f.). This means that no Anglo-Saxon poet
was capable of conceiving a large-scale poem from his own imagination
and from the earlier heroic Anglo-Saxon poems he had learnt in his youth.
That is an assumption which by its nature cannot^ be* proved, and is
improbable. Large heroic poems have been composed in a number of
countries outside any possible Vergilian influence (we shall soon be dealing
with The Song of Roland, whose author or authors obviously knew no
Latin), and the Anglo-Saxon poets have no lack of originality and boldness.
What they did lack was the finer taste which would have allowed the
composer of Beowulf to construct his epic more graciously and richly and
symmetrically. If he had reallyknown the Aeneid, Beowulfwould have been
better built. In addition, as Klaeber himself admits, there is hardly anything
in common between the general plan of the Aeneid and the general
plan of Beowulf.
(b) A number of incidents in the Aeneid and in Beowulf are similar.
(Klaeber gives a list; there are others in T. B. Haber, A Comparison of the
"Aeneid^ and the "Beowulf, Princeton, 1931.) Some of these parallels are
ludicrously far-fetched : for instance,
(
Beowulf lands in Denmark and is interrogated by coastguards.
Aeneas lands in Libya and is interrogated by his mother Venus in disguise.
564 NOTES ON 2, THE DARK AGES:
Others are genuine resemblances, as when both heroes tell of their past
exploits, at a royal banquet These resemblances, however, prove not
that one poet copied the other, but that the scenes and customs they
described were similar : which we know to be true. In order to show that
Beowulf copied the Aeneid m describing a heros feast or funeral we should
have to prove that the Anglo-Saxons had no such customs of their own.
But we know that they, and their predecessors in Europe, had a culture
very similar to that of the Homeric Greeks and Trojans. (See H. M.
Chadwick, The Heroic Age, cc. 1 5-19.) It is therefore more probable that
the author of Beowulf described customs practised or known through
tradition among his own people than that he borrowed from an account
in a book written in an alien language and a different national tradition.
(c) Some of the descriptions of nature in the Aeneid and Beowulf are
similar. (Thus, C. W. Kennedy, The Earliest English Poetry, 92-7,
suggests that the description of the haunted tarn where Grendel lives,
Beowulf, 1357-76, is imitated from Vergils Aeneid, 7. 563-71.) It is
possible that the poet of Beowulf copied such descriptions from Vergil,
but it is highly improbable. First, because there was a much larger and
handier reservoir of poetic description on which he could draw: the
existing Old English poetry, which must have been far greater in volume
than the few fragments which have survived to modem times. Mr.
Kennedy himself points out on pp. i8o-a how the poet of Exodus inserted
incongruous conventional descriptions of battle and blood-stained water
into his account of Pharaoh pursuing the Hebrews into the Red Sea;
and Mr. Rhys Carpenter, in Folk tale. Fiction, and Saga in the Homeric
Epics, 6-9, reminds us how full a collection of stereotyped descriptions
and phrases oral poets possess and transmit. Then, secondly, the Anglo-
Saxon poets, if they did not use traditional descriptions in their own
tongue, were well able to evoke the scenery of the gloomy north without
borrowing details from an Italian poet. The splendid descriptions of the
sea in many Old English poems, and the fine elegiac account of Roman
ruins in The Ruin, are evidence for their powers of original observation.
(d) Turns of phrase in the Aeneid and Beowulf zie similar, e.g. swtgedon
ealle (B. 1699) and coniicuere omnes (A, z. 1) ; wordhord onleac (B, zsg) and
effundit pectore uoces (A. 5. 482). (T. B. Haber, op. cit. in note ^,31 f.)
My knowledge of Anglo-Saxon does not permit me to offer a useful
opinion on this point; but from translations, the parallels look like
coincidences of fairly obvious imagery (e.g. tossed on the waves of care)
and the like, rather than imitations. And certainly the differences in
language which can be observed are far more striking than the resemblances,
(e) Vergils Aeneid was well known in northern Britain, and would
surely have appealed to a poet versed in Germanic traditions (Lawrence,
Beowulf and Epic Tradition, 284-5). This argument is usually pushed
much too far, and should be balanced by the following qualifications
:
(i) Priestly scholars knew Vergil during the Dark Ages in Britain, but
they did not write long secular heroic poems in the vernacular. Aldhelm
IS reported to have sung vernacular songs to attract people to hear the
ENGLISH LITERATURE 565
gospel, but he was only making a one-way bridge over a gulf he would not
cross. The greatest of these scholars, Alcuin, wrote a letter to a British
bishop expressly decrying the taste for poems of heroic legend (Chadwick,
The Heroic Age^ 41 f.) and calling a hero like Beowulf a damned
pagan.
(2) We do not hear, and it is difficult to imagine, that professional
bards, like the maker of Beowulf^ already steeped in their native tradition
of heroic poetry, were enabled to learn enough Latin to study the Aeneid.
In the Dark Ages, and for centuries afterwards, the way to learn Latin
was to start with the Latin Bible. But the knowledge of the Bible shown
in Beowulf is so extremely thin and vague that the poet can hardly have
been able to read the Vulgate directly. Bede himself knew the Bible and
the church fathers far better than Vergil, and Vergil was the only classical
author he knew first-hand (M. L. W. Laistner, 'Bede as a Classical and a
Patristic Scholar, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, series 4,
vol. 16, 73 f.). How then could a bard who barely knew the opening
chapters of Genesis be so familiar with the difficult Aeneid as to imitate
it in detail and in general plan? There is a parallel to this in the first
appearance of the Trojan story in French medieval literature. Benoit de
Sainte-Maure, who put the legends into French poetry, took them not
from the Aeneid or the Latin Iliad but from a short romance in prose
which was far easier to read ; and even then he did not follow it carefully.
See p. 53.
(3) When at last the two traditions, of Latin and of Anglo-Saxon
poetry, blended, the results were grand. The blending begins with
Caedmon, and goes on through the later poems attributed to him, through
Cynewulf, to The Dream of the Rood and Phoenix. But all such poetry,
although it uses the Anglo-Saxon poetic conventions, is religious in content
as well as purpose. Anyone who at that time learnt enough Latin to
understand the Aeneid would be dedicated to the service of God, and
would not write a poem on monsters overcome in bloody battles, not by
the power of the spirit but by strength of arm and magical weapons.
(4) In general, the sort of imaginative stimulus experienced by sensitive
modern writers after reading a moving book is not likely to occur in
primitive poets. As we see from Phoenix, when they copy a book, they
copy it carefully and obviously. But they do not write poetry of their own
containing reminiscences of classical poetry. That road leads not to
Grendels cave, but to Xanadu.
12. Lady Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men (London, 1910), 2. ii. 4.
13. See H. M. Chadwick, The Heroic Age (Cambridge, 1912), 47-8.
F. A. Blackburn, 'The Christian Coloring in the Beowulf (PMLA, 12,
n.s. 5 (1897), 205-25), analyses the passages which show acquaintance
with certain elementary Christian doctrines, and shows that they could
(and probably must) have been added after the poem assumed virtually
its present shape as a pagan epic. For instance, the numerous mentions
of God could be replaced by Wyrd, 'fate, without in the slightest altering
the meaning ; and sometimes Wyrd has been allowed to remain in such
passages.
S66 NOTES ON 2. THE DARK AGES:
14. Beowulf
y
107 f., 1261 f. (Cain and Abel): orcneas in 112 is variously
translated sea-monsters, and hellish things, from the Latin root of
Orcus. The Flood appears in 1688-93.
15. A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford, i939)> 5 * bio f.
16. This is the point of view expounded by J. B. Bury in The Invasion
of Europe by the Barbarians (London, 1928): see also p. 478 of this book
on Fustel de Coulanges.
17. There is a fine example of this, reported by a Roman historian,
from an earlier but similar era. After Hannibal had crossed the Alps, he
determined to give his exhausted troops new courage for their first battle
with the Romans in Italy. So, as a living example of the gallantry that
despises death, he brought out some of the wild Alpine tribesmen
(evidently Celts) whom he had captured en route. He offered them the
chance of winning their liberty by fighting duels, the victor to be set free.
They accepted gladly, seizing the weapons and dancing a highland fling,
cum sui moris tripudiis. And then, during the fighting, the spectators
expressed just as much admiration for the loser, if he died well, as for the
winner: ut non uincentium magis quam bene morientium fortuna
laudaretur (Livy, 21. 42).
18. Hige sceal J^e heardra, heorte >e cenre,
mod sceal ]?e mare, ]?e ure maegen lytlad (Maldon, 312-13).
19. Bedes phrase quasi mundum animal ruminando implies a charmingly
naive comparison of the meditative cowhand, chewing the cud of scripture
in the byre, to his own cattle.
20. Bede calls them doctores and multi doctiores uiri. It is often assumed
that Caedmon was attached to Whitby Abbey when he began to make
poetry. See, for instance, Stopford Brooke, English Literature from the
Beginning to the Norman Conquest (London, 1898), 127: Caedmon . . .
was attached in a secular habit to the monasteryone of its dependants.
Similarly A. Brandi, in Pauls Grundriss der germanischen Philologie
(Strassburg, 1908), 2. i. 1027: Caedmon . . . lebte zunachst als Laie in
einer Klostergemeinschaft usw. ; E. E. Wardale, Chapters on Old English
Literature (London, 1935), 1 12 ; and many others. This assumption is not
justified by Bedes story, which in fact points in the other direction.
According to Bede, Caedmon was a farmhand, with a cottage of his own.
When he got the gift of song, he told the foreman of the farm and he was
taken to the abbess. Obviously the foreman said This looks like Gods
work, we must ask Abbess Hilda, and took Caedmon up to the abbey.
Now, it is not stated that the farm on which Caedmon and the foreman
worked was, or was not, attached to the abbey. But ifCaedmon had already
been a member of Whitby community, Bede would almost certainly have
said that he had already been an earnest hearer of the Word, a humble
worker on the abbey estates who listened to the preaching and pondered
it deeply in his heart, and other things of the kind. This is the argument
from silence; but it is less dangerous than the assumption that there
was only one farm-foreman near Whitby, and that he and his men were
employed by the abbey.
ENGLISH LITERATURE 567
21. See D. Masson, The Life ofJohn Milton, 6 (New York, 1946), 557,
n. I ; other Hterature on the subject is listed by C. W. Kennedy (cited in
n. i), 163.
22. Hymn to Apollo, 172.
23. The poem on Christ is in three parts. Only the second part
(440-866) is signed by Cynewulf, and there are marked differences
between the three sections in manner and matter. The original is Gregory,
Homiliae in euangelia, 2. 29 (Migne, Patrol, Lat. 76. 12 13-19).
24. On the source of Juliana see J. M. Garnett, The Latin and the
Anglo-Soxon Juliana" (PMLA, 14, n.s. 7 (1899), 279-98). Juliana died
about A.D. 309. Cynewulf was paraphrasing a life of her similar to those
now in The Acts of the Saints, but the actual biography he used is lost.
25. Rune letter-names are all nouns; but I could not find a modem
name whose letters could all, like hee, serve as nouns.
26. For this point, and a sympathetic sketch of Cynewulfs work, see
K. Sisams Gollancz Lecture in The Proceedings of the British Academy,
1932.
27. The opening is hwcet!, the traditional cry by which the bard called
his listeners attention, and the young hero, geong Heeled, is in line 39.
28. LdiCteiritms, De auephoenice. The myth of the phoenix is ultimately
a product of Egyptian * animal-worship, and probably arose from the
observation of strange migratory birds. It reached the Greek world
through Herodotus description of Egypt (2. 73, possibly from Hecataeus).
On its rich symbolism see J. Hubaux and M. Leroy, Le Mythe dupMnix
dans les littiratures grecque et latine (Paris, 1939).
29. Ambrose, Hexaemeron, 5. 23. 79-80, is the original of Phoenix,
443 f. Job xxix. 18 is quoted and paraphrased in 546-69.
30. For instance, lines 15-20 of Lactantius poem are from Vergil,
Aen. 6. 274-81; 21-5 from Homer, Od, 4. 566-7, plus Od. 6. 43-5, plus
Lucretius, 3, 18-23.
3 1 . Phoenix, 9-1 2, tr. J . D. Spaeth, OldEnglish Poetry (Princeton, 1922).
32. Lactantius, De aue phoenice, 16 1-6:
A fortunatae sortis fatique uolucrem
cui de se nasci praestitit ipse deus!
femina sit, uel mas, seu neutrum, seu sit utrumque,
felix quae Veneris foedera nulla coiit!
mors illi Venus est, sola est in morte uoluptas:
ut possit nasci, appetit ante mori.
33. See W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance (London, 1922^), 2. 4 f., and
appendix, note A.
34. Lactantius, De aue phoenice, 11-14:
Cum Phaethonteis fiagrasset ab ignibus axis,
ille locus flammis inuiolatus erat;
et cum diiuuium mersisset fiuctibus orbem,
Deucalioneas exsuperauit aquas.
35. Phoenix, 38-46, tr. Spaeth (cited in n. 31),
36. Phoenix, 52, tr. Spaeth (n. 31).
568 NOTES ON 2. THE DARK AGES:
37. Phoenix^ 675-7, tr. Spaeth (n. 31). There is a poem on the Incarnation
in this same odd blend of Latin and Anglo-Saxon : see J. S. Westlake
in The Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge, 1920), i. 7.
146-7. Childish as it is, it has a certain charm; but, what is more
important, it shows (like jlfrics schoolbooks) a high degree of interpenetration
between Latin and Old English, many centuries before other
European nations ventured to bring the vernacular speech into contact
with the learned language.
38. See A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 2. 322-40 and 421-33.
There is a much more detailed study by L. Gougaud, Christianity in
Celtic Lands (tr. from authors manuscript by M. Joynt, London, 1932):
see especially iSsf. Mr. Gougaud tends to minimize the conflict, saying
(213) that the British church was *a little aloof but not separatist and
independent. Others might think the differences went deeper. The
British church is often called the Irish church, and sometimes, more
correctly, the Celtic church. Established in Britain before the fall of the
Roman empire, as a part of the original Roman Christendom, it was
largely submerged by the Saxon invasions of England. After them it
continued its existence in the northern and western areas (including
Brittany). Gildas was a typical member of it. From Wales and Ireland
it worked back into Scotland and Saxon England, sometimes competing
with the Roman missionaries who later made their way up from the south,
and then meeting them head-on at the synod of Whitby. But its tradition
was quite continuous, so that it should really be called the church of
Britain. On p. 240 f. Mr. Gougaud asks where the Irish got their knowledge
of classical culture. From south Wales? through Alexandrian or
Byzantine missionaries? through refugees from Gaul? He concludes,
with arguments which seem convincing, that the Irish got their culture
and their interest in Christianity from the original British church, which
had imbibed a certain amount of Latin culture as the church of one of
the provinces of the Christian Roman empire ; and that they then started
Latin schools to help in the understanding of the scriptures and the Latin
writings of the church fathers.
39. See L. Gougaud, Christianity in Celtic Lands, 185 f. P. F. Jones,
The Gregorian Mission and English Education, m Speculum, 3 (1928),
335 f., shows that Augustines mission was not educational but purely
religious. The essential thing was to convert the new Saxon pagans first,
and then teach them. Only after his mission had done its work could
Theodore and Hadrian start their school. The fact that Augustine often
wrote to Rome to consult Gregory on points that now appear quite trivial
shows how closely he was supervised by the pope. It might be added that
it shows a striking resemblance to the administrative methods of the
Roman empire. When Pliny the younger was sent out to regulate the
finances of the province of Bithynia, he wrote back to submit every problem
slightly above his level to the emperor Trajan, with just the same meticulous
precision.
40. Bede, Hist, eccl. 4. i ; M. Roger, HEnseignement des lettres classiques
d^Ausone h Alcuin (Paris, 1905), 286 f. This school, however, did not
ENGLISH LITERATURE 569
establish any solid and lasting tradition of Greek scholarship in England
at the time. During the Dark Ages and the early Middle Ages, Greek
books were very rare in England, and men who could read them still
rarer : see the useful thesis by G. R. Stephens, The Knowledge of Greek in
England in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1933).
41. Roger (cited in n. 40), 261 and 288-303.
42. See M. L. W. Laistner, Bede as a Classical and a Patristic Scholar,
in The Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
^
series 4, v. 16, 69 f.
43. M. L. W. Laistner (cited in n. 42) has shown that Bedes purely
classical learning was practically confined to Vergil and Plinys Natural
History. Other authors (with a few exceptions, p. 74) he quoted from
citations of their works made by grammariansin fact, from the Readers
Digest type of collection which was one of the favourite approaches to the
classics throughout the Dark and Middle Ages well into the Renaissance.
But his first-hand knowledge of the Christian poets like Prudentius, and
of the fathers (especially Jerome), was enormous. See also Mr. Laistner
s
The Library of the Venerable Bede, in Bede^ His Life, Times, and
Writings, ed. A. H. Thompson (Oxford, 1935).
44. See W. Levison, Bede as Historian, in Bede, His Life, Times, and
Writings (cited in n. 43). This brilliant article suggests that Bede was
drawn towards history by his interest m two convergent subjects:
chronology and hagiography.
45. Dante put him in heaven among other great teachers, including his
own admired master St. Thomas Aquinas (Paradiso, 10).
46. On Johannes Scotus Erigena or Eriugena, see L. Gougaud,
Christianity in Celtic Lands (cited in n. 38), 302 f.; C. R. S. Harris,
Philosophy, in The Legacy of the Middle Ages (ed. C. G. Crump,
Oxford, 1926); P. Kletler, Johannes Eriugena (Leipzig, 1931); and
M. L. W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe 500-900 A.D.
(New York, 1931), 197 f.
47. This entry is for a.d. 839. Quotations from the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle are taken from R. K. Ingrams Everyman translation. On the
phrase from the pirates country, my colleague Professor E. V. K.
Dobbie informs me that the text reads of Heredalande, which is a placename,
and which has been identified with a region near Hardanger in
Norway.
48. On their fate see W. Levison, England and the Continent in the
Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946) and H. Waddell, The Wandering Scholars
(London, i934^)> 2:. 5.
49. See Gougaud (cited in n. 38), 395.
50. Alfred, preface to the Hierdeboc.
51. Gregory himself speaks of his book as the Regula pastoralis {Ep. 5.
49 Migne). In English studies it is often called Cura pastoralis.
52. So P. G- Thomas in The Cambridge History of English Literature
(Cambridge, 1920), i. 6.
53. Boethius set out to bridge the widening gap between Greek and
Latin culture by translating books on all the sciences which prepare the
mind for philosophy, then all the works of Aristotle on logic, ethics, and
570 NOTES ON 2. THE DARK AGES:
physics, and then all the works of Plato. His comparatively early death
prevented him from realizing more than a small part of this grand design.
Nevertheless he became, through his surviving translations, one of the
founders of the educational system known as the quadrivium, and was
revered by nearly every medieval educator (e.g. Sigebert, De scnptoribus
ecclesiasticisy 37; Migne, PatroL Lat. 160. 555). His translations covered
music, arithmetic, geometry, and Aristotelian logic. On his importance
as a translator see P. Courcelle, Les Lettres grecques en Occident de
Macrohe a Cassiodore (Paris, 1943), 260-78.
54. De consolatione philosophiae. There are a handy edition by Adrianus
a Forti Scuto and G. D. Smith (London, 1925) and ample bibliographies
in Courcelle (cited in n. 53) and H. R. Patch, The Tradition of Boethius
(New York, 1935).
55. The Menippean form was introduced to Latin literature by Varro
in the first century b.c., and, after long disuse, popularized again by the
philosopher Martianus Capella in another work which became a foundation-
stone of medieval education, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury :
this was written not long before Boethius* own day.
56. Much of the prose looks like deliberate imitation of Cicero: the
clausulae, for instance, are consistently Ciceronian. The verse interludes,
providing moments of calm and lyricism after long passages of dialogue,
fulfil something of the same artistic and emotional function as the choruses
in Seneca.
57. Boeth. Cons. Phil. 4. 7 : omnis enim (fortuna) quae uidetur aspera
nisi aut exercet aut corrigit punit.
58. See the close analysis of Boethius* sources by P. Courcelle (cited
in n. 53), 278-300. I have seen only an abstract of the same author*s
thesis, La ^Consolation^ de Bohce: ses sources et son interpretation par les
commentateurs latins du IXe au Xllle siecle (Paris, !6cole nationale des
Chartes, 1934). In both works M. Courcelle shows how deeply Boethius*
thought is penetrated with Neoplatonism, and suggests that he learnt
both Greek and philosophy at Alexandria, as a pupil of Ammonius.
59. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ad fin.
60. George Meredith, Lucifer in Starlight.
61. Boeth. Cons. Phil. 4. 4:
Nullane animarum supplicia post defunctum morte corpus relinquis?* *Et
magna quidem,* inquit, quorum alia poenali acerbitate, alia uero purgatoria
dementia exerceri puto.*
Courcelle (cited in n. 53) offers on pp. 300-4 what looks like an acceptable
solution of the problem of Boethius Christianity by suggesting that
he was endeavouring to produce a reconciliation and synthesis between
Neoplatonism and the Christian faith.
62. See W. Jaeger, Paideia, 3 (New York, 1944), c. i, especially p. 30 f.
63. For accounts of Boethius* enormous influence in the Dark Ages
and the Middle Ages, see M. Manitius, Geschichte derlatdnischen Literatur
des Mittelalters, i (Munich, 1911), 33-5, and H. R. Patch, The Tradition
of Boethius (New York, 1935), with its very full notes and bibliography.
ENGLISH LITERATURE 571
Boethius^ book was one of the great best-sellers, almost greater than
Vergil. Copies of it were made all over western Europe, and are listed in
library catalogues of monasteries from Durham to Cremona. Something
like 400 manuscripts still exist. No other book, except the Bible, was so
much translated in the Middle Ages. It was put into English by Alfred
about 900, by Chaucer about 1380 (two translations that enriched not
only English thought but the English language), by Queen Elizabeth
herself, and by others less well known. There is a fragment of a Provencal
poetic paraphrase of it dated as early as the tenth century. Jean de Meun,
whom we shall meet in a later chapter, turned it into French prose about
1300, and there was a translation attributed to Charles of Orleans before
14Z2. In the fourteenth century the Franciscan monk Alberto of Florence
turned it into Italian, the Dominican Antonio Ginebreda into Catalan,
and the Byzantine Maximus Planudes into Greek. A German translation
was produced by Notker Labeo about 1000 (see H. Naumann, Notkers
Boethius: Untersuchungen uber Quellen und Stil, Strassburg, 1913).
Finally, Boethius is quoted again and again in the Middle Ages. Particularly
noble echoes occur in Dante, who calls Boethius Vanima santa, and
puts him in Paradise beside the Venerable Bede {ParadisOy 10. 125). For
instance,
nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria; e ci6 sa il tuo dottore {Inf. 5. 12 1-3)
is usually thought to be an echo of Cons. Phil. 2. 4. i
:
*in Omni aduersitate fortunae infelicissimum est genus infortunii fuisae
felicem.*
(It has, however, been thought that the phrase ^our teacher might better
apply to Vergil, in which case the words could be an allusion to Aeneid,
2. 3 :
Infandum, regina, iubes renouare dolorem.)
Another such echo is the beautiful close of the entire Commedia :
Lamor, che move il sole e Taltre stelle.
This was inspired by Boethius, Cons. Phil, 2. 8
:
O felix hominum genus,
si uestros animos amor
quo caelum regitur regat!
a noble utterance, which Dante quoted again in De mon. i. 9. 25-8.
The fourth chapter of Mr. Patchs book cited at the beginning of this note
surveys thework ofmany of the medieval authors who echoed and imitated
Boethius, and lists some of the countless prisoners who found consolation
in reading him. Even the mercurial Casanova was given a copy by the
prison doctor, and was grateful, saying: Je vous en suis bien oblige;
il vaut mie\ix que Senfeque; il me fera du bien {Memoires, ed. R. Veze,
Paris, 1926, 4. 196-7).
64. Boethius, Cons. Phil. 2. 7 : sed materiam gerendis rebus optauimus
quo ne uirtus tacita consenesceret.
572 NOTES ON 2. THE DARK AGES:
65. Alfred*s translation, c. 17, translated and edited by W. J. Sedgefield
(Oxford, 1900), who observes that Alfreds words might have been
suggested by a commentary on the passage in Boethius. See H. R. Patch
(cited in n. 63), 48-54, for a survey of Alfreds translation.
66. For example, Boethius (3. 4) says:
Quo fit ut indignemur eas (dignitates) saepe nequissimis hominibus contigisse,
unde Catullus licet in cumli Nonium sedentem strumam tamen appellat.
This is an allusion to Catullus epigram against an upstart politician (52)
:
Quid est, Catulle ? quid morans emori ?
sella in curuli struma Nonius sedet.
But Alfred knows nothing of Catullus poetry, and cannot understand
either the abusive nickname struma (wen or carbuncle, as we now call
an ojffensive man a blister) or the curule chair of office used by the higher
Roman magistrates. So he writes:
Hence the wise Catulus long ago became angry and heaped insult and disgrace
on the rich Nonius, because he met him seated in a gorgeous carriage. For it
was a strict custom among the Romans at that time that only the most respectable
people should sit in such carnages. Catulus despised the man because he knew
he was very ignorant and dissolute ; so without more ado he spat upon him. Now,
Catulus was a Roman chief and a man of great intelligence, and he would
certainly not have insulted the man so gravely, had the latter not been rich and
powerful. (Alfreds translation, c. 27, tr. Sedgefield (adapted), Oxford, 1900.)
Homer is mentioned and quoted in Boethius (Cons. Phil. 5. 2, with a
pretty adaptation of a Homeric phrase) ; but Alfred (metr. 30) makes the
allusion naive and vague :
In the East Omems among the Greeks
was in that country in songs most cunning,
of Firgilius also friend and teacher,
of that famed maker best of masters.
Alfreds inadequate knowledge of Roman customs, language, history, and
geography comes out also in his translation of Orosius, which is full of
names. Miss Ann Kirkman (Proper Names in the Old English Orosius,
Modern Language Review, 25 (1930), 1-22 and 140-51) has shown that,
out of the 700 proper names, 490 are misspelt, and are often spelt differently
each time they appear. Persons are called by the names of places,
and vice versa. The difficulty was apparently increased by the fact that
the scribe was not copying by eye, but taking dictation, so that he wrote
things like Plicinius (for P. Licinius) and Pelopensium (for Peloponnensium).
Since surnames were not known in Anglo-Saxon England, Alfred
himself at first could not understand the system by which the Romans had
three names each. He began by using only the first of the three. Later he
used the first and second as though they were alternatives
:
Fabio Maximo quxntum Decio Mure quartum consulibus (136. 32)
Cwintus was a consul, with another name Decius.
But later (143. 35) he understood the system, and he had it right by the
time he went on to translate BoethiusENGLISH
LITERATURE 573
67. Alfred mentions the priests with reference only to Gregorys
Regula pastoralis, but he must have had assistance with the other books.
It was Bishop Asser who wrote the famous biography of Alfred.
68. See the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for a.d. 854, 883, 888, and 889.
69. On the history of the Lindisfame Gospels, see the British Museums
Guide to a Select Exhibition of Cottonian Manuscripts (London, 1931).
70. Ireland too maintained high cultural standards until the Vikings
began to attack it in 795. It was their devastations that caused the dispersal
of the Irish scholars, and retarded Irish culture behind the rest of
western Europe. See H. Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (London,
19347), 2. 5.
Notes on 3 . the middle ages: french literature
1. C. Lenient, La Satire en France au moyen age (Paris, 1893), 28,
quoting Muratoris History of Bologna.
2. The unholy trinity appears in Roland
^
2696-7. H. Gregoire has
suggested that these deities were introduced in order that the monotheistic
Moslems could be presented as idolatrous pagans, as part of the
propaganda for the First Crusade. See his essay Des dieux Cahu,
Baraton, Tervagant in Annuaire de VInstitut de Philologie et d'Histoire
Orientates et Slaves, 7 (1939-44), where he derives Tervagant (in one of
its readings Trivigant) from Trivia, the epithet of Diana of the Crossroads because it is the name
given to the Syrian Ashtoreth in an early Latin
version of i Kings xi. 5-7, Others believe the name is derived from that
of a Celtic divinity.
3. Roland, 139 1-2:
Lencanteiir ki ja fut en enfer
:
Par artimal Il cundoist Jupiter.
This mysterious word is interpreted as coming from arte mathematica
(mathematic art, a common synonym for astrology and magic), but
might simply come from arte mala, evil art.
4. Roland, 2615-16:
Qost Tamiraill, le viel dantiquit^t,
Tut survesquiet e Virgilie e Omer.
5. Most of these long medieval poems and stories bear the name roman.
Most of them deal with chivalrous adventure and fighting, courtly love,
or the marvellous, or some or all of these together. These are subjects
which for over a century now have been called romantic. Specialists in
the period, however, distinguish:
{a) romancestales of Arthurian, Roman, Greek, and Trojan adven-
,, ture in which most of the characters are human beings
;
(6) chansons de gesteadventure poems mainly about Charlemagne
and his circle;
(c) allegories such as Le Roman de la Rose (see p. 62 f.) in which most
of the characters are abstractions.
574 NOTES ON 3. THE MIDDLE AGES:
6. See C. H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge,
1939); Hastings Rashdall, The Mediaeval Universities^ in The
Cambridge Mediaeval History, 6.17; and J. E. Sandys, AHistory of Classical
Scholarship, i. 527 f., who shows, for instance, that Aristotle^s logic had
hitherto been imperfectly known (through Boethius translations of the
Categories and the De interpretatione), but that the other three parts of
the Organon became known between 1128 and 1159, and the Physics and
Metaphysics about 1200.
7. It really contains some horrible Latin. For instance, mere ^ fall
dead; impressionem facer
e
= attack; audiuit quia == heard that; nec destitit
nisi (-j- subjunctive) == and continued until ....
8. Dares, 44 : ruerunt ex Argiuis, sicut acta diuma indicant quae Dares
descripsit, hominum milia dccclxxxvi. Cf. Dares, 12 init.
9. For a pleasant survey of these books, see E. H. Haight, Essays on the
Greek Romances (New York, 1943) and More Essays on Greek Romances
(New York, 1945). Erwin Rohdes Der griechische Roman und seine
Vorldufer (Leipzig, 1914^) is rather old, but still very valuable. The
survival of the romances in modem literature is discussed in c. 9 of this
book, p. 166 f. ; see also pp. 341, 343.
The idea of correcting Homers version of the Trojan war was not new.
Philosophers had often objected to his character-drawing and his theology
(e.g. Plato, Rep. 2. 377 d f.). Historians criticized his conception of the
size and importance of the conflict (e.g. Thucydides, i. 10). Scholars
pointed out inappropriate phrases, gestures, and incidents : so Zoilus the
critic was nicknamed the Scourge of Homer for his pitiless dissection of
the epics. Creative authors wrote books based on the many traditions
about the war which Homer did not use. For instance, Euripides wrote
a melodrama, Helen, on the idea that the gods sent only a phantom Helen
to Troy, to trick the combatants into senseless slaughter (which Euripides
thought was the real meaning of all war), while they hid the real Helen in
Egypt* Vergils Aeneid, with its anti-Greek tendency, radically altered
the emphasis of the Iliad and the Odyssey. But the idea of writing a
completely new account of the Trojan war, to replace Homer, was boldly
original.
Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan produced the most
thorough attempts at such a substitute, but the most interesting and
apparently the best written was a book by their near contemporary
Philostratus. This was the man who wrote a life of the miracle-working
sage Apollonius of Tyana, to compete with the growing tradition of Jesus
Christ and his miracles, his wisdom, and his holiness. Comparable to
this is his dialogue, Heroicus, in which a Phoenician merchant, stormstayed
in the Dardanelles, talks to a farmer who has a vineyard on the
peninsula opposite the site of Troy. The farmer tells him that his land
is protected by the ghost of Protesilaus, the first Greek soldier to be killed
on the Trojan beachhead. The merchant finds this hard to believe. But
the farmer assures him that Protesilaus often appears, larger than life,
talks to him, and tells him all about the Trojan war. (Remember, this is
not in ancient Greece : Philostratus is writing about a.d. 215, when the
FRENCH LITERATURE 575
Trojan war was a prehistoric legend well over a thousand years old.) The
farmer goes on to give a first-hand account of the war, as received from
Protesilaus, who took part in the preparations for it and saw it all as a ghost.
The entire story, we are told, was distorted by the wily Odysseus, who,
after murdering the brilliant inventor Palamedes, persuaded Homer to
alter the incidents of the war, leaving out Palamedes and glorifying
Odysseus himself. The farmer also gives the true version of many other
important events. For instance, how was Achilles killed? He fell in love
with the Trojan princess Polyxena (who escorted Priam to ransom
Hectors corpse), and promised to raise the siege of Troy in return for
her hand. On the wedding-day he went alone to the temple, and was
murdered by a Trojan ambush. Polyxena fled to the Greek camp and
there killed herself. But after death (Philostratus goes on) Achilles
became the husband of Helen, the bravest man with the most beautiful
woman, and they live together in perpetual immortality on the specially
created island of Leuke in the Black Sea.
This is substantially the same story as that told by Dares and Dictys.
It is tempting to conjecture that the brilliant Philostratus first outlined it,
creating the ideas of Achilles romantic love-death and of a complete,
authentic, eyewitness account of the Trojan war; and that Dares and
Dictys then filled it out with variations and some rather mechanical
supplements. However, H. Grentrup, in De Heroici Philostrateifahularum
fontibus (Munster, 1914), following K. Miinscher, PhilologuSy suppl. 10
(1907), 504 f., has shown that Philostratus wrote his book about 215,
to please the emperor Caracalla (who thought himself a new Achilles, as
Charles XII of Sweden thought himself a new Alexander), while the
Greek manuscript of Dictys was written some years earlier.
A well-written analysis of the Heroicus by E. J. Bourquin will be found
in the Annuaire de VAssociation pour VEncouragement des tudes Grecques
en France, 18 (1884), 97-141. M. Bourquin points out that one of the
purposes of the work was to propagandize for paganism by opposing the
miraculous deeds of the Homeric heroes, living an eternal life near their
tombs, to those of Christian saints. An important predecessor of the
Heroicus was the speech called TpcaiKos by Dio of Prusa (on which see
Grentrup, c. 5). F. Huhn and E. Bethe in Hermes, 52 (1917), 616 f.
suggest that the purpose of the Heroicus is to justify Homer against the
new anti-Homeric history by Dictys ; but this is surely over-simplifying
the relationship of these complex works.
10. Dares, 41 : Antenor et Aeneas noctu ad portam praesto fuerunt,
Neoptolemum susceperunt, exercitui portam reserauerunt, lumen ostenderunt,
fugam praesidio sibi suisque ut sit prouiderunt (a sentence which
gives a good idea of Dares crisp military style). On the departure of
Aeneas, see 43 : Agamemnon iratus Aeneae quod Polyxenam absconderat
eum cum suis protinus de patria excedere iubet. Aeneas cum suis omnibus
proficiscitur.
11. Dares, 13 fin.: Briseidam formosam, non alta statura, candidam,
capillo flauo et molli, superciliis iunctis, oculis uenustis, corpore aequali,
blandam, affabilem, uerecundam, animo simplici, piam. Philostratus
576 NOTES ON 3. THE MIDDLE AGES:
Heroicus contains many eyewitness' descriptions of the Trojan heroes

on which see Grentrup (cited in n. 9), c. 8.

12. For instance, it is odd that, in the version of Dares' which we now
have (than which what could be shorter?), there is a detailed description
of Briseida (n. 1 1), although she plays no part in the story as given there.
But my colleague Professor Roger Loomis writes me : In view of the very
free and original handling which Benoit shows in other respects, it seems
probable that he invented the Troilus-Briseida affair.' For a discussion
of floating medieval traditions about the Trojan war independent of
Dares' and Dictys', see E. B. Atwood, The Rawlinson Excidium Troiae\
in Speculum^ 9 (1934), 379-404.
13. See p. 458. It is delightful to find that there are still unwary readers
who can be caught by the ingenious authors of Dares' and Dictys'. The
latest known to me is Mr. J. P. Harland, who in an essay, The Date of the
Hellenic Alphabet' {Studies in Philology, 42 (1945), 417), repeats the story
of the discovery of the Dictys' book, written on linden-bark', and suggests
that it was in Minoan linear script, which no one has been able to
read to this day.
14. B. P. Grenfell, A. S. Hunt, and J. G. Smyly, The Tehtunis Papyri
(University of California Publications: Graeco-Roman Archaeology),
2 (London, 1907), 9 f., say that the Greek Dictys' cannot be later than
A.D. 200 ; but give no factual reason for this assertion. (It is datable to the
same period as the accounts on the reverse, which were written in 206.)
For a transcription and discussion see M. Ihm in Hermes, 44 (1909), i f.
15. Dictys, 5. 17: (Aeneas) deuenit ad mare Hadriaticum multas
interim gentes barbaras praeuectus. ibi cum his qui secum nauigauerant
cimtatem condit appellatam Corcyram Melaenam.'
16. Saint-Maur was the earliest home of the Benedictine Order in
France, founded by St. Maur, St. Benedict's favourite pupil. The founder
of the science of palaeography, Mabillon, was a Benedictine of the congregation
of Saint-Maur, although it was then based on Saint-Germaindes-
Pres. There is a handy account of Benoit in H, O. Taylor, The
Mediaeval Mind (London, ipso"*-), 2. 253 f.
17. The little Ilias Latina, known throughout the Middle Ages, was a
potted version 1,070 hnes long, of which more than half were devoted to
books 1-5 of the Iliad, It was written in the first century a.d., perhaps
by Silius Italicus.
18. For this point, see F. N. Warren, On the Latin Sources of TMhes
and neas\ in PMLA, n.s. 9 (1901), 375-87.
19. G. S. Hodgkin, Italy andHer Invaders (Oxford, 1892-1916), 3. 294.
20. See G. S. Gordon, The Trojans in England', in Essays and Studies
by Members of the English Association, 9 (1924), and D. Bush, Mythology
and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1937),
39-41, It seems probable that the proud Order of the Golden Fleece was
named after a similar belief, that its holders could date their nobility back
to Jason and the Argonauts. As early as the end of the Roman republic
the learned Varro compiled a book Defamiliis Troianis, tracing the Trojan
ancestry of the great Roman clans.
FRENCH LITERATURE 577
31. Quoted by J. C. Collins, Greek Influence on English Poetry (London,
1910), 47-8.
22. Sidney, Apologiafor Poetry (ed. A. Feuillerat, Cambridge, 1923), 16.
23. Jonson, Every Man in His Humour^ 4. 4; Dekker, The Shoemakers
Holiday
i
5.5. There are many more examples in P. Stapfer, Shakespeare
and Classical Antiquity (tr. E. J. Carey, London, 1880).
24. For instance, it was translated and expanded in Holland by Scher
Dieregotgaf and Jacob van Maerlant; it reached Germany in the earlythirteenth-
century Liet von Troye of Herbert von Fritslar and in an unfinished
poem (1287) by Konrad von Wurzburg.
25. Historia destructionis Troiae, ed. N, E. Griffin (Cambridge, Mass.,
1936).
26. Italian by Filippo Ceffi (1324); French by Raoul Lefevre (1464);
German in 1392, Danish in 1623, Icelandic in 1607, and Qzech in 1468.
There is a metrical version of Guido by an unknown author in a Laud
MS. at Oxford, a very early Scots alliterative version (ed. Panton and
Donaldson for the Early English Text Society), another Scots version
attributed to Barbour, and a Troye-Boke by Chaucers Benedictine pupil,
Lydgate (1420).
27. This is itself an odd distortion of the original story. In Homer there
are two girls taken captive at the sack of Thebe. One is Chryseis, who is
given back to her father. The other is Briseis, whom Agamemnon takes
away from Achilles, thus causing the Wrath. The basis of the story and
its distortions is the beautiful captive, or hostage, who is desired by one or
more of her captors and passes from one to the other.
28. Even in Homer {11. 4. 88 f.) Pandarus is treacherous.
29. See E. Faral, Recherches sur les sources latines des contes et romans
courtois du moyen age (Paris, 1913), 63 f.
30. Cf. F. N. Warren (cited in n. 18). In this connexion there is an
interesting article on Lucan in the Middle Ages by J. Crosland in The
Modern Language Review^ t930* The author points out that, although an
epic poet, Lucan was often classified as a historian and philosopher in the
Middle Ages ; that books based on his poem, such as Li hystoire de Julius
Caesar by Jehan de Tuim, are among the earliest books on ancient history
in vernacular French; and that British authors (such as Geoffrey of
Monmouth and Richard of Cirencester) liked to quote Bell, ciu. 2. 572

territa quaesitis ostendit terga Britannis

describing Caesars defeat in Britain, while French chroniclers magnified
his exploits so as to glorify their Latin ancestors. Since Lucan was more
spectacular than Vergil, he was more often imitated in old French heroic
poetry.
As the sense of history developed, and classical scholarship improved,
attempts were made to compose real historical accounts of Rome and the
past in vernacular French. The two earliest of these deserve attention,
although they lie rather outside the scope of this chapter.
(i) The Histoire anciennejusqud Cesar is the earliest attempt at writing
a universal history in a modern language. Beginning with the creation of
5076 P p
578 NOTES ON 3. THE MIDDLE AGES:
the world, it synthesizes sacred and profane history, to produce a complete
general survey of the past. Much of it is based on Orosius; the
Trojan section comes from Dares; other sources include Vergil and
Valerius epitome of the Alexander story; it breaks off while describing
Caesars Gallic wars. It was apparently written between 1223 and 1230
for the Chatelain Roger of Lille.
(2) Lifet des Romains compile ensemble de Saluste et de Suetoine et de
Lucatif usually known as Les Faits des Ro^nains, is really a biography of
Julius Caesar, drawn not only from the three authors mentioned but from
Caesars own commentaries and their continuations; glosses in manuscripts
(particularly on Lucan); Isidores Etymologies, Josephus Jewish
War, Augustines City of God, the Bible, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the
romances of Thebes and Alexander. What we have is, according to the
prologue, the, first volume of a compilation which was intended to cover
the reigns of the first twelve Caesars down to Domitian. It was written
in or near Paris before 1250, and translated into Italian in 1313. Brunetto
Latini used it for his Treasure. Paul Meyer calls its author a cross between
a Renaissance humanist and a medieval minstrel : for although he followed
his sources carefully, he improvised many insertions of his own which are
absolutely medieval in tone. For instance, he made the battle of Pharsalus
into a medieval conflict, where ot mainte hele jouste fete et maint hel copferu,
dont Lucans neparlepas (p. i46<i): knights called Galeran and Aufamien
did marvellous deeds, and Pompey and Caesar wounded each other in
single combat. And he gave a pen-portrait of Cleopatra (p. i^$h-c) which
was modelled on those of Dares. There is a good edition by L. F.
Flutre and K. Sneyders de Vogel (2 vols., Paris and Groningen, undated),
in which volume 2 gives a detailed analysis of the sources. On both these
works see the introductory essay by Paul Meyer in Romania, 14 (1885),
1-8 1.
31. For a general survey see A. Ausfeld, Der griechische Alexanderroman
(ed. W. Kroll, Leipzig, 1907). The Arch-priest Leos version has been
edited by F. Pfister (Heidelberg, 1913).
32. Shakespeare, Othello, i. 3. 144!.
33. See J. B6dier in L. Petit de Jullevilles Histoire de la langue et de la
littirature frangaise, 2. 76 f. The Aristotle group appears, for instance, at
Lyons and St.-Valery-en-Caux. G. Sarton, Aristotle and Phyllis, in Isis
14 (1930), 8-19, traces the oriental origins of the story, and suggests that
as it appears in the Middle Ages it reflects the protest of the priesthood
against the veneration felt for the pagan thinker Aristotle.
34. This vassalage of the lover to his mistress was called domnei : see the
examples of the use of this word in K. Bartschs Chrestomathie provenpale
(6th ed., revised by E. Koschwitz, Marburg, 1904). But it should be
remembered that, although doubtless feudal in its origin, this conception
was strengthened by the example of the Latin love-elegists, who all call
their mistresses dominae, and practise or advise complete subjection to the
will of the beloved. (This appears first in Cat. 68. 68 and 156, and then
becomes frequent: see Tib. i. i. 46 and 2. 4.)
35. For detailed discussions of the nature and expressions of romantic
FRENCH LITERATURE 579
love, or (as it is more properly called in the Middle Ages) ^courtly love,
see C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936X J- J. Parrys introduction
and commentary to Andreas Capellanuss De arte honeste amandi
(New York, 1941), and A. J. Denomys brilliantly learned Inquiry into
the Origins of Courtly Love {Mediaeval Studies
6 (1944), 175-260).
Father Denomy considers that the chief intellectual currents which
flowed together to create the concept were (a) Neoplatonic mysticism,
which taught that the soul struggles to rise above the body, above matter,
towards union with the Good, which is apprehended and desired through
its beauty; (b) the Albigensian heresy, with its doctrine that spirit and
matter belonged to two different worlds, and its consequent teaching of
extreme asceticism; and (c) Arabic mysticism and philosophy, some of
which originated from Plato. But what he does not prove (p. 257) is that
the troubadours who fixed and developed the concept had anything but the
vaguest notions of the first and third of these regions of thought. On
pp. 188-93 Ee disallows the theory that Christian mysticism had some
influence on courtly love, although he agrees that there are superficial
resemblances between the two; and in note 2 on p. 193 he asserts that the
cult of the Virgin had nothing whatever in common with the concept

on the ground that Christians, obeying an extension of the injunction of

Jesus to St. John (John xix. 26-7), love Mary as their own mother. Still,
it is a little difficult to believe that the artists who created and the worshippers
who revered the statues of young, beautiful, attractively dressed
maidens as part of the cult of Mary were all thinking of the Virgin as they
did of their own mothers, and in no other way.
36. Ovid was at last civilizing the Goths. See Manitiuss list of quotations
and echoes from Ovid in medieval Latin poets and scholars, PMologus,
suppl. 7 (1899). Traube (Vorlesungen und Abhandlungen, Munich,
1909-20, 2. 1 1 3) called the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the aetas
Ouidiana,
37. Dante, Inf. 4. 88 f.
38. See pp. 602-3.
39. Ov. Am. 3. 4. 17: nitimur in uetitum semper cupimusque negata.
40. Ov. A.A. I. 233 f. I owe these quotations to E. K. Rands charming
little book, Ovid and His Influence (Boston, 1925), 132-3 ; see also H. Waddell,
The Wandering Scholars (London, 1934'^), 5 9*
41. Lecta sunt in medium, quasi evangelium,
praecepta Ovidii, doctoris egregii:
lectnx tarn propitii fuit evangelii
Eva de Danubrio, potens in officio
artis amatoriae, ut affirmant aliae (11. 25-9).
This Council of Remiremont is mentioned by H. Waddell in The Wandering
Scholars (London, 1934*^), c. 9. The text of the poem, edited by
G. Waitz, is in Zeitschrift fiir deutsches Altertumy 7 (1849), 160-7. I have
not seen W. Meyer, Das Liehesconcil in Remiremont (1914).
42. Ov. Met. 4. 55-166. See especially 4. 53
haec quoniam uolgaris fabula non est.
58o notes on 3 . THE MIDDLE AGES:
G. Hart, Ursprung und Verbreitung der Pyramus^- und Thisbe-Sage
(Passau, 1889-91), does not attempt to trace the story back beyond Ovid,
but outlines its widespread influence in modern literature. The French
Piramus is discussed by L. Constans in L. Petit de Julleville^s Histoire de
la langue et de la litterature franfaise, i . 244.
43. Ov. Met. 6. 424-674.
44. Philomena, a translation and expansion of the original, is said to be
by Chretien de Troyes (Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in
English Poetry (Minneapolis and London, 1932), 13. The story is mentioned
in Homer, Od. 19. 518 f.
45. Titus AndronicuSy 4. i. 45 f.
46. W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance (London, 1922^), Appendix, gives
the extract ; I add the sources of the songs which the popular troubadour
would know, to show how many of them are Ovidian
:
Qui vole ausir diverses comtes
de reis, de marques, e de comtes,
auzir ne poc tan can si vole
;
anc nuir aurella non lai cole,
quar Tus comtet de Priamus,
e Tautre diz de Piramus ;
Fus contet de la belF Elena
com Paris Ienquer, pois Tanmena;
Iautre comtava dULiXES,
Iautre dEcTOR et d
A
chilles;
Tautre comtava dENEAS
et de Dido consi remas
per lui dolenta e mesquina
;
Fautre comtava de Lavina
con fes lo breu el cairel traire
a la gaita de Fauzor caire
;
Fus contet dApoLLONiCES
de Tideu e dTTiDiocLES
;
Fautre comtava dApoLLOiNE
comsi retenc Tyr de Sidome
;
Fus comtet del Rei Alexandri,
Fautre dERO et de Leandri ;
Fus dis de Catmus quan fugi
et de Tebas con las basti;
Fautre comtava dq Jason
e del dragon que non hac son
;
Fus comtet d^ALCiDE sa forsa,
Fautre con tornet en sa forsa
Phillis per amor Demophon;
Fus dis com neguet en la fon
lo belz Narcis quan si miret;
Fus dis de Pluto con emblet
sa bella moillier ad Orpheu. . . .
Then follow a few biblical myths; a number from the Arthurian cycle;
several tales from the history of early France (among which comes
Lucifer and how he fell), and finally:
The tale of Troy.
Ovids Metamorphosesy 4.
The tale of Troy, and Ov. HeroideSy 17.
The tale of Troy.
>>
The tale of Aeneas.

it
>>

The tale of Thebes.

(Polynices, Tydeus, Eteocles.)
Apollonius of Tyre (a late Greek
romance).
The tale of Alexander.
Ovids HeroideSy 18.
The tale of Thebes, and Ov. Metamorphoses
y 3.
Ovids Metamorphoses, 7.
if
Ovids Metamorphoses, 9.
Ovids HeroideSy 2.
Ovids Metamorphoses, 3.
Ovids Metamorphoses, 10.

FRENCH LITERATURE 581

Fus dis lo vers de Marcabru, (A troubadour.)
Fautre comtet con Dedalus Ovid^s Metamorphoses, 8.
saup ben volar, et d Icarus
CO neguet per sa leujaria.
Cascus dis lo mieil que sabia.
Flamenca, 617-706.
47. See Ovide moralise, ed. C. de Boer (Amsterdam, 1915). This editor
observes that the main sources of the author's explanatory comments are
:
the Bible, Ovid's Heroides and Fasti, Statius, and the mythographers
Hyginus and Fulgentius.
48. Ovide moralise, 3. 1853 f.:
Narcisus florete devint.
Florete quel? Tele dont dist
Li Psalmistres c'au main florist,
Au soir est cheoite et fletrie. (1886-9)
In Petit de Julleville's History of French Literature (i. 248) the moral of
the story of Apollo and Daphne is quoted
:
'Daphne, daughter of a river and cold by temperament, represents virginity
;
she is changed into a laurel, which like virginity is perpetually green and bears
no fruit. She represents the Virgin Mary, loved by him who is the true sun ; and
when Apollo crowns himself with the laurel, he represents God putting on the
body of her whom he made his mother.'
There is a useful summary of the whole movement of allegorizing Ovid,
with details of other works of this kind, by L. K, Born, Ovid and Allegory',
in Speculum, 9 (1934), 362-79.
49. Roman de la Rose, 9-10 (Langlois)
:
an9ois escrist Favision
qui avint au roi Scipion.
50. Hence the popularity, in this period, of stories in which the lovers
die after one night together, or even die just before their first embrace.
A beautiful modern use of the symbolism of the rose, in a rococo setting,
is Ber Rosenkavalier, by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss.
51. See p. 41 f.
52. E. Langlois, Origines et sources du roman de la Rose, 136 f.
53. The sermon in lines 4837 f. = (?) Chaucer, Romaunt of the Rose,
fragment B 5403 f.
54. Roman de la Rose, 5036 f.
:
ce peut Fen bien des clers enquerre
qui Boece de Confort hsent,
e les sentences qui 1^ gisent
;
don granz biens aus genz lais ferait
qui bien le leur translaterait.
On Jean de Meun's translation see H. R. Patch, The Tradition of Boethius
(New York, i935)> 63.
55. Roman de la Rose, 37-8 (cf. the echo in 22605-6 (Marteau)):
Ce est li Romanz de la Rose
oh Fart d'amors est toute enclose.
582 NOTES ON 3 , THE MIDDLE AGES:
56. Roman de la Rose, 12740-14546.
57. Ov. A. A, 2. 279:
Ipse licet uenias Musis comitatus, Homere,
si nihil attuleris, ibis, Homere, foras.
58. Roman de la Rose, 13617-20:
Damer povre ome ne li chaille,
quil nest riens que povres on vaille;
se ciert Ovides ou Homers,
ne vaudroit-il pas deus gomers.
59. C. Lenient, La Satire en France au moyen age (Paris, 115 f.
60. Quoted by L. Thuasne, Le Roman de la Rose (Paris, 1929), 66.
61. Medieval literary theory paid little or no heed to the problem of
finding the proper plan and proportion for a large work. See, for instance,
E. Faral, Les Arts poetiques du Xlle et Xllle siecle (Bibliotheque de
rficole des Hautes fitudes, 238, Paris, 1924), 59-60. Only two of the
theorists examined by M. Faral even mention the question. One of them,
Geoffroi de Vinsauf, merely discusses how to attach the main body of the
work to the beginning. The other, Jean de Garlande, says that a work
should be composed of exordium, narration, petition, confirmation,
refutation, and conclusion^which is, of course, the plan of a Greco-
Roman legal speech, taken from some handbook, and has nothing whatever
to do with writing poetry or imaginative prose. M. Faral goes on to
say, with justice : A la verite, la composition na pas ete le souci dominant
des ecrivains du moyen Sge. Beaucoup de romans, et des plus reputes,
manquent totalement dunite et de proportions. On se Iexplique si Ton
considere quils nont pas ete faits, en general, pour soutenir Texamen
dxm public qui lisait et pouvait commodement juger de Tensemble, mais
pour 6tre entendus par des auditeurs auxquels on les lisait episode par
episode.
62. Roman de la Rose, 13263-4:
Mil essemples dire en savraie
mais trop grant conte a faire avraie.
63. See W. Jaeger, Paideia (Oxford, 1939), i. 2 fin.
64. Roman de la Rose, 1439-15 10 = Ov. Met, 3. 339-510. Echo, une
haute dame appears in 1444.
65. Pygmalion is in Ov. Met, 10. 243-97 = Roman de la Rose, 20817-
1183. Dido and Aeneas appear in 13174-210, and Vergmia in 5589-658.
66. Juvenal is actually quoted in 8709 f., 8737 f., and 9142 f. Jean also
quotes the authority of Theophrastus in bis book hight Aureole. No
such work existed in his time, and none by that name had ever existed.
But there was a book by Theophrastus, which was one of the first to give
philosophical reasons against marriage, and which formed part of the
tradition of misogynistic writing to which Juvenal 6 belonged. It was
known to the men of the Middle Ages because Jerome, writing in the same
tradition, quoted it and called it an aureolus liber, worth its weight in gold
FRENCH LITERATURE 583
{Adu. louin. I. 47). See F. Bock, Aristoteles Theophrastus Seneca de
matrimonio {Leipziger Studien^ 19. 1899), and J. van Wageningen,
Seneca et luuenalis {Mnemosyne, n.s. 45 (1917), 417 .)> for discussions
of the transmission of these misogynistic ideas.
67. Ov. Met, I. 89-112.
68. L. Thuasne, Le Roman de la Rose (n. 60), 27. Lords could not have
known Gallus, whose work was lost. Either he had seen the bogus poems
passing under Gallus* name or he had copied it out of a list of love-poets.
69. For these sources, see E. Langlois, Origines et sources du roman de la
Rose (Paris, 1891).
70. The text of Gersons counterblast is given by L. Thuasne (n. 60),
S3 f-
Notes on 4. dante and pagan antiquity
1. See Inf. 16. 128, 21, 2. As for the adjective divine*, that was not
added by Dante, and has nothing to do with the vision of God in the
Paradiso, butaccording to Scartazzini {Dante-Handhuch, Leipzig, 1892,
413)came into use about the middle of the sixteenth century, and was
carried over from the conventional phrase applied to a supremely great
writer, divine poet*.
2. Letter to Can Grande, 10. Dante knows something of the meaning
of the word tragedy, but he gets it essentially wrong. It means goat-song*.
He explains that this is because it is smelly, like a he-goat
:
dicitur propter hoc a tragos, quod est hircus, et oda, quasi cantus hircinus,
id est foetidus ad modum hirci, ut patet per Senecam in suis tragoediis.
He has heard of the function of tragedy, which is to inspire terror and
pity ; and he is trying to square this with the literal etymology of the word,
through the equation: billy-goat = smelly = repulsive = tragic.
3. Inf, 20. 113.
4. Scartazzini, Dante-Handbuch (Leipzig, 1892), 413; and see p. 577,
n. 30.
5. The key passage on Dante*s earlier view of this problem is De
vulgari eloquentia, 2. 4, where he distinguishes the vulgare illustre, the
vulgare mediocre, and the vulgare humile, and says
:
si tragice canenda videntur, tunc assumendum est vulgare illustre, et per
consequens cantionem oportet ligare.
He goes on to say that the subjects of such canzoni are Salus, Amor, and
Virtus. On the other hand, his statement in the Letter is far simpler:
remissus est modus (Comoediae) et humilis, quia loquutio vulgaris, in qua et
mulierculae communicant.
Either this means that Dante thought women talked in the same style as
that in which he was writing the Paradiso^which seems absurd ; or else
he had dropped the distinction between the three different Italian styles
and was now contrasting the Italian language, which could be used by
584 NOTES ON 4. DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY
anybody (even by unlettered women^whence the half-tender, halfcontemptuous
diminutive), with the Latin language, in which he was
writing his Letter^ and which could be employed only by scholars and
gentlemen. It was not for writing a low Italian style instead of a lofty one,
but for writing Italian instead of Latin, that he was reproached by
Giovanni di Virgilio; and he answered that charge in a Latin eclogue*
modelled on Vergil, to show that he was, in spite of using Italian for the
Comedy
y
a man of culture.
6. The Vision of Er, in the tenth book of Platos Repuhlicy is only one
of many Greco-Roman treatments of this majestic theme, on which see
p. 5 10 f. of this book. The earliest-known such Christian work is the series
of Visions of Wettin, put into a thousand-line Latin poem in a.d. 827
by Walafrid Strabo. There are some interesting early Irish ones, in
particular the Vision of Adamnan and the Vision of Tundale.
7. Purg, 21 ; and see Purg, 22. 64-73, where Statius explains that it was
Vergils Messianic poem which turned him towards Christianity.
8. On Vergils reputation as a Christian see Comparetti, Vergil in the
Middle Ages (tr. E. F. M. Benecke, London, 1895), especially c. 7.
9. Aug. Ep, 137. 12, quoted by Comparetti (note 8).
10. See, among many others, E. Norden, Die Gehurt des Kindes
(Leipzig, 1924), and the psychological interpretation by C. G. Jung, Das
gdttliche Kind (Amsterdam, 1941).
11. For the grateful worship given by the subjects of the Roman empire
to men like Pompey and Octavian who freed them from war, see the summary
in A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford, 1939), 5. 648 f., and
the classical poems and modem treatises quoted in his notes on the
passage.
12. In a pathetic letter to Octavian, he himself said he must have been
mad to undertake the poem:
tanta incohata res est ut paene uitio mentis tantum opus ingressus mihi
uidear (Macrob. Sat. i. 24. ii).
With this compare the numerous expressions of painful though rewarding
effort throughout the Aeneid:
tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem (i. 33)
attollens humero famamque et fata nepotum (8. 731).
It is well known that he wanted to destroy the poem when he died: it
would be limiting our view of his genius too closely to believe that this,
and his expression of despair to Octavian, were due only to his sense of
the difEculty of mastering all the complex material he used.
13. This misspelling began at a very early date, perhaps because of
Vergils nickname Parthenias, Miss Purity. (For a similar reason,
Milton at Cambridge was known as the Lady of Christs.) In the Middle
Ages the name was taken to refer to Vergils powers as a magician, because
uirga means wand.
14. See p. 486,
15. See Inf. 2.
NOTES ON 4. DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY 585
16. Inf. 34. 61-7.
17. Verg. Georg. 2. 136-76.
18. Purg. 6. 76 .
19. Inf. 27. 26-7, 28. 71.
20. There are many examples of this : see any index to the poem, s.v.
Latino. The whole topic is well discussed by J. Bryce, Some Thoughts
on Dante and J. W. Mackail, The Italy of Rome and Vergil, in Dante;
Essays in commemoration I32i-ig2i (London, 1921).
21. Inf. 4. 131 f, : il maestro di color che sanno.
22. Inf. I. 86-7:
tu se solo colui, da cu io tolsi
lo hello stile che mha fatto onore.
23. Aen. 3. 29-30:
mihi frigidus horror
membra quatit gelidusque coit formidme sanguis.
24.
Inf. 13. 44-s
io lasciai la cima
cadere, e stetti come Iuom che teme.
25. Purg. 24. 57 : dolce stil novo. The lyric quoted by Bonagiunta is the
first in Dantes Vita Nuova.
26. In one way Dantes lyrics were a development from Provengal
love-poetry, in another, a reaction against it. They were still much closer
to the troubadours (one of whom, Amaut Daniel, is highly praised by
Dante in Purg. 26) than to any classical poetic style. For discussions see
L. Azzolina, II *dolce stil nuovo* (Palermo, 1903), V. Rossi, II ^ dolce stil
novo* (Florence, 1905), and F. Figurelli, II dolce stil novo (Naples, 1933).
27. In its arrangement of rhymes that manner of Dante had, as it were,
the form of a serventese*Antonio da Tempo in Summa artis riihimici
(1332), quoted and translated by E. G. Gardner, Dante as Literary
Critic, in Dante; Essays in commemoration I32i-ig2i (London, 1921).
28. Inf. IO. 62-3.
29. Inf. I. 83-4.
30. A strong objection to this view is that, when Dante told Vergil
he had taken his beautiful style from Vergils poetry, he was only at
the beginning of his journey through the imiverse of hell, purgatory, and
paradise, not at its end; and therefore he could not be referring to the
style of the Comedy, which was yet to be written. Nevertheless, in Inf. 4,
Dante is presented by Vergil to Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, the
lords of highest song, and they honour him by making him a sixth in
their company. This honour could not have been given to Dante for his
lyrics. In the world of Time, the Comedy is unwritten until the experiences
described in it are over ; but in the world of Eternity, to which Vergil
and those others belong, it is already written, and Dante is honoured for
it. In the same world of Eternity, Dante is Vergils pupil, and the style
of the Comedy can be said (even at its temporal opening) to be taken from
Vergils book.
31. In his Studies in Dante (ist series, Oxford, 1896), Moore points
586 NOTES ON 4. DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY
out one of the most subtle and poignant tributes ever paid by one artist to
another. How is Vergil to leave Dante, after bringing him close to the
beloved vision of Beatrice ? Shall Dante bid a sad farewell to the master
and friend who cannot accompany him up towards the sight of God, and
who must live in desire without hope ? No. After the poets have passed
through purgatory, a glorious procession comes to meet them. Out of
a cloud of flowers cast by angels, like the sun from mists, dawns Dantes
lady Beatrice. Like a child to its mother, Dante turns to Vergil, to say
T recognize the traces of the old flame : the very words in which Vergils
own lovelorn Dido spoke of her irresistible passion (Verg. Aen. 4. 23).
But Vergil has vanished. And then, in a triad of lines, Dante repeats his
name yearningly and lovingly three times
:
ma Virgilio navea lasciati scemi
di s^, Virgilio dolcissimo patre,
Virgilio a cui per mia salute die mi {Purg. 30. 49-52).
He places the name in exactly the same spot of each line as, in telling how
Orpheus lamented for his beloved, tom from him to return to the dead,
Vergil himself had placed the sadly repeated name:
turn quoque, marmorea caput a ceruice reuolsum
gurgite cum medio portans Oeagrius Hebrus
uolueret, Turydicen uox ipsa et frigida lingua
a miseram Eurydicen anima fugiente uocabat,
Turydicen toto referebant flumine ripae {Georg, 4. 523-7).
Everything is in the echo : admiration, sorrow, eternal love.
32. The primary division of hell is into three groups of sins: incontinence,
violence, and deceit. Aristotles division was also into three:
incontinence (uncontrolled desires), bestiality (perverted desires), and
vice (the abuse of reason): d/cpacrta, Sir^pLOTrjSy and /ca/cta (Eth. Nic, 7.
1145^16). This distinction really goes back to Platos division of the soul
into three parts, that which desires, that which is spirited and energetic,
and that which thinks. The sin of uncontrolled desire is incontinence.
Plato would recognize violence as the sin of the spirited element. The
perversion of reason is worst, because it is the corruption of our highest
part, the mind. See K. Wittes Essays on Dante (tr, C. M. Lawrence and
G, H, Wicksteed, Boston, 1898), and W. H. V. Reades The Moral
System of Dantes Inferno (Oxford, 1909), for the many complex details
growing out of, and often obscuring, this general scheme.
33. Charon, Inf, 3. 82 f.; Minos, Inf, 5. 4!; Cerberus, Inf, 6. 13 f.;
Harpies, Inf, 13. 10 f.; Centaurs, Inf, 12. 55 f. The principal medieval
demons are Malacoda and his squad. Inf, 21.
34- Inf, 5. 4-12.
35. 12. 34-45. Moore, *S'twJe^mDawte(ist series, Oxford, 1896),
has pointed out these instances.
36. Although the anti-monarchist Cato was Lucans hero, Dante was
probably influenced, in making him the guardian of purgatory {Furg.
I, 31 f.), by the scene in Vergils heaven:
secretosque pios, his dantem iura Catonem {Aen, 8. 670),
NOTES ON 4. DANTE AND PAGAN ANTIQUITY 587
37- Inf. 2. 32.
38. This is in Purg. 30. 19-21. The two greetings come from Matt,
xxi. 9, and Aeneid 6. 884.
39. Inf. 5. 82: quali colomhe dal disio chiamate,
40. Aen. 6. 202-3 : sedibus optatis.
41. On the beauty of reminiscence, see p. 156 f.
42. Thus, the dead warrior resurrected by a witch (Bell. Ciu. 6. 413 f.)
is strangely alluded to in Inf. 9. 22 f. ; the African snakes, imitated by so
many other modem poets from Bell. Ciu. 9. 700 f., in Inf. 24. 82 f. ; and
Amyclas (Bell. Ciu. 5. 504 f.) in Par. ii. 67 f.
43. Conv. 2. 13. The moral essays of Cicero referred to are Cato (de
senectute), Laelius (de amicitid)^ Definibus, and De officiis.
44. Inf. 26. 52 f. = Stat. Theb. 12. 429 f.
45. Purg. 22. 13 f. and Juv. 7. 82 f.
Notes on 5 . towards the renaissance
1 . His legal name was Francesco di Petracco, which is only a diminutive
form of Peter. He latinized it in order to make it more than a little local
nickname, and to attach it to the main tradition of culture. Later, in the
full Renaissance, many scholars translated their entire names into Greek
or Latin for the same purpose : for instance, Philip Schwarzerd became
Melanchthon (the Greek for black earth = Schwarzerd).
2. Dante and other leaders of the White party, among whom was
Petrarchs father, were charged with cormption in office and with offences
against the Guelph party, supported by the pope. They were exiled by
a decree of 27 January 1302.
3. Petrarch, Fam. zi. 15, tr. by J. H. Robinson and H. W. Rolfe, in
Petrarchy the First Modern Scholar (New York and London, 1914^).
4. Petrarch, Per. mem. 427, for which see Robinson and Rolfe (cited in
ti* 3)> 175 and note:
moribus parumper (?) contumacior et oratione liberior quam delicatis et
fastidiosis aetatis nostrae principum auribus atque oculis acceptum fuit.
5. G. Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums (Berlin,
1880-12), I. ii8f.
6. Ov. Trist. 4. 10. 51 : VergUium uidi tantum.
7. Another modem parallel is the quantity of valuable unpublished
music which is known to exist, but which is inaccessible even to musiclovers
: for example, most of the delightful symphonies of Haydn, much of
the work of Lully, and the later piano compositions of Scriabin.
8. One of the speeches was the Pro Archia (Sandys, A History of
Classical Scholarship
y
Cambridge, 1908, 2. 7 and note). For the story, see
Voigt (cited in n. 5), i. 38 f., and P. de Nolhac, Petrarque et i^humanisme
(Paris, 1907), I. 41.
9. For Salutati, see p. 18. On Petrarchs discovery of Ciceros letters
(Ad Att.y Ad Brut.y Ad Q. fr.) see Voigt (cited in n. 5), i. 43 f., and
Sandys, ibid.
588 NOTES ON 5 . TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
10. See E. Zielinski, Cicero im Wandel der Jahrhunderte (Leipzig,
19123)^ 26 f., for a discussion of Ciceros influence, through Petrarch, on
the ideal of humanism. There is an admirable essay on the same topic in
W. Riieggs Cicero und der Humanismus (Zurich, 1946).
1 1 . Petrarch, Fam. 24. 3 ; Sandys (cited in n. 8), 2. 7.
12. Petrarch determined, in return for a house, to bequeath his library
to the republic of Venice. It would have become the first public library in
western Europe since the destruction of the Roman empire ; but he was
not in Venice when he died, so it was broken up. See P. de Nolhac,
Petrarque et Vhumanisme (Paris, 1907), i. 13, 78-81, and 87 f.
13. Petrarchs imitation of Vergil did not include echoes of Vergils
own words, because he aimed at being an entirely original poet in Latin
:
he actually altered a line in his Eclogues to root out a Vergilian reminiscence.
But the matter and much of the manner of Vergil he did imitate,
and in his Letters he quotes Vergil scores of times (P. de Nolhac (cited in
n. 8), I. 123, n. 2).
14. Dante, Inf. 4. 89: Orazio satiro. Petrarch quotes Horace oftener
than any other Latin poet except Vergil : we have the very text he used
(P. de Nolhac (cited in n. 8), i. 181).
15. Petrarch, Fam. 24. 8quoted by Voigt (cited in n. 5), i. 44 f., and
discussed by de Nolhac (cited in n. 8), 2. 16 f., who shows that Petrarchs
manuscript of Livy lacked book 33. On Petrarchs knowledge of Roman
history in general, see de Nolhac, c. 6.
16. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (cited in n. 8), 2. 8, and
see de Nolhac (cited in n. 8) on Petrarchs romantic passion for Greek.
17. Still, Petrarch was far from understanding the true relationship
between the Greek and Roman cultures ; he put Plato below Cicero as a
philosopher. See de Nolhac (cited in n. 8), i. 214 and 2. 127 f.
18. P. de Nolhac (cited in n. 8), 2. 166-7. The last actual words
Petrarch wrote were part of a biography of Caesar (de Nolhac, i. 85).
19. Sandys (cited in n. 8), 2. 10 ; de Nolhac (n. 8), 2. 147 f. ; Voigt (n. 5),
I. 80 f.
20. P. de Nolhac (n. 8), 2. 189 f.
21. Petrarch, De ignorantia, 1151; Voigt (cited in n. 5), i. 94.
22. The main source of the Africa is Livy, whom Petrarch sometimes
transcribes almost verbatim, as in his account of the death of Lucretia.
The style, vocabulary, and rhythm are modelled on- Vergil and Vergils
imitator Statius. Over forty years after Petrarch died, a real Latin epic on
the same subject and in the same style was discovered^the Punica of
Silius Italicus (a.d. 26-101), which Petrarch had never heard of. The best
that can be said of Petrarchs Africa is that it is better than the Punica.
L. Pingaud, De poemate F. Petrarchae cui titulus est Africa (Paris, 1872),
conjectures that the gap after book 4 represents a lacuna of three books,
and that the whole poem was meant to contain twelve books like the
Aeneid. On Ronsards Franciade^ see p. 144.
23. See p. 41 f. For a summary of the Secret, with extracts in English,
see Robinson and Rolfe (cited in n. 3), c. 7. Those who are interested in
Petrarchs Latin writings should begin with his Rerum memorandarum
NOTES ON 5. TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE 589
lihri, which give a conspectus of his tastes and knowledge. There is an
admirable edition by G. Billanovich (Florence, 1943xxi).
24. See Liszt, Annies de Pelerinage: 2^ Annie: ^Italie\
25. Dante, Purg, 29, especially 106 f.
26. On the deeper significance of the laureateship, and the connexion
between the ideals of Petrarch and Rienzo, see K. Burdach, Rienzo und
die geistige Wandlung seiner Zeit (part i of the Briefwechsel des Cola di
Rienzo, ed. K. Burdach and P. Piur, in the series Vom Mittelalter zur
Reformation: Forschungen zur Geschichte der deutschen Bildung, ed.
K. Burdach, Berlin, 1913-28). Passages of particular interest are: p. 31,
giving the popes charge of paganism against Rienzo; 75 f. on the idyllic
renewal of the youth of Rome; 321 f. and 384 f. on Frederick II; and
504!. on the coronation of Petrarch as a model for that of Rienzo.
Petrarchs changing views of Rienzos policy and character have been
traced through a selection of his letters, translated and annotated, by
M. E. Cosenza, Francesco Petrarea and the Revolution of Cola di Rienzo
(Chicago, 1913).
27. It is often said that the first italic printing-type was modelled on
Petrarchs handwriting. (So, for instance, J. E. Sandys, A History of
Classical Scholarship, Cambridge, 1908, 2. 99.) This is a mistake : it comes
from a misreading of the preface to the Aldine Petrarch of 1501, where it is
stated that the text was based on a manuscript in the poets own hand
(see A. F. Johnson, Printing Types, London, 1934, 126-7). In actual fact,
Petrarch wrote a Gothic hastarda, Alduss type derived from the neo-
Caroline script of the humanists, which, in its cursive form, did not differ
in essential structure from that of Niccolb Niccoli. On this, see James
Wardrop in Signature, n.s. 2 (1946), 12.
28. The Teseida has 9,896 lines, like the Aeneid, if one stanza (3. 69) is
omitted with some manuscripts; but R. A. Pratt, Chaucers Use of the
Teseida^ (PMLA, 62 (i947)> 3* S99)j implies that this is an uncritical
excision, Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterihums (Berlin,
1880-1^), I. 165, says that the story about Boccaccios sitting at Vergils
tomb comes from Filippo Villani, not from Boccaccio himself.
29. The chief classical source is Statius Thebaid. Boccaccio used an
annotated edition, and published his own Teseida with similar annotations
(so Pratt, cited in n. 28). He also used Dantes Comedy, and drew much
material from the medieval Roman de Thebes (on which see p. 56).
J. Schmitt, La Thisiide de Boccace et la Thisiide grecque (Bibliotheque
de Ificole des Hautes fitudes, 92, Paris, 1892, 279-345), disproves the
theory that Boccaccio was using a translation of a Greek romance now lost.
30. See p. 52,
31. Verg. Aen. 3. 588!; Ov. Met, 14. 160 f.
32. On the use of heroic examples, see p. 67 f.
33. Fiammetta, bk. 3 med.
34. Fiammetta, bk. 4 fin. and med.
35. Fiammetta, bk. i ; cf. Le Roman de la Rose fin.
36. This passage is quoted from and translated by J. E. Sandys, A
History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1908), 2. 13. It comes from
590 NOTES ON 5 . TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
the lectures of Boccaccios pupil Benvenuto on Dante: the particular
passage which Benvenuto was explaining was St. Benedicts denunciation
of the corruption of the monasteries {Parad, 22. 73 f.).
37. On The Romance of the Rose see p. 62 f.
38. Chaucer also took some material from Joseph of Exeters Bellum
Troianum (D. Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English
Poetry
i
Minneapolis and London, 1932, 8). Troilus and Criseyde has
nearly 3,000 lines more than II Filostrato, and less than one-third of its
material is directly borrowed from Boccaccio (B. A. Wise, The Influence
of Statius upon Chaucer
^
Baltimore, 1911,4). For an analysis of the changes
Chaucer introduced, see C. S. Lewis, What Chaucer really did to II
Filostrato^ in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, 17
(1932), 56-75-
39. Chaucer used the Teseida not only in the Knights Tale, but in
Anelida and Arcite, Troilus and Criseyde, and several other poems: it
meant a great deal to him. See R. A. Pratt, Chaucers Use of the Teseida"
{PMLAy 62 (i947)> 3' 598-621).
40. The ClerEs Prologue, 26-33.
41. The Tale of the Wife of Bath, 1125-30 Dante, Purg. 7. 121-4.
42. J. L. Lowes, Chaucer and Dante, in Modern Philology, 1915, 1916,
1917, points out such resemblances as:
The Parliament of Fowls, 141 f. and Parad. 4 init.
;
The Parliament of Fowls, 288 f. and Inf. 5. 58-69, plus Bocc. Tes.
7. 62;
Troilus, 2. 22-5 and Conv. 2. 14. 83 f., plus Horace, Art of Poetry,
70-1.
Note also the resemblance of the general plan of The Parliament of Fowls
to Dantes Inferno : e.g. the Roman guide, and the inscription on the gate
(127 f. = Inf. 3. I f.). The eagle in The House of Fame is clearly inspired
by the heavenly eagle in Paradiso, 18 f. And several of Chaucers most
fervent prayers are adapted from Dante: The Second Nun's Tale, 36 f.
= Parad. 33. 1-6, and the final prayer in Troilus (5. 267) = Parad.
14. 28-30.
43. Introduction to the Man of Law's Prologue, 92.
44. Anelida and Arcite, 21.
45- Hor. Ep. i. 2. 1-2:
Troiani belli scriptorem, Maxime LoUi,
dum tu declamas Romae, Praeneste relegi.
46. See an excellent article by G. L. Kittredge, Chaucers Lollius, in
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 28 (1917), 27-137. Confusion
worse confounded has been introduced by the authoress of a recent book
on Chaucer (M. Chute, Geoffrey Chaucer of England, New York, 1946,
166 n.), who, after quoting the two lines of Horace, translated them:
While you are preaching oratory in Rome, Maximus Lollius, I have been
reading Praeneste (i.e., Homer), the writer of the Trojan war.
If a modern writer could believe that the holiday town of Praeneste was
another name for Homer, it must have been easy for a medieval writer,
NOTES ON 5 . TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE 591
with fewer resources at his command, to believe that Lollius was a littleknown
but accomplished historian.
47. The House of Fame, I464-8.
48. E. A. Poe, The Gold Bug, init.
49. The Monk^s Prologue, 3161-9, 83 f. It is most unlikely that by
exametron Chaucer could have meant the six-foot metre (iambic trimeter)
used by Seneca, since hardly anyone was able to scan Senecas tragedies
until well into the Renaissance. See also Troilus and Criseyde, 5. 1786,
where, addressing his poem, he says
:
Go, litel book, go litel myn tragedie
to join Vergil and other epic writers.
50. Here are some other mistakes of the same type
:
(<2) And Thetis, Chorus, Triton, and they alle (LGW, 8. 3422).
Et senior Glauci chorus Inousque Palaemon
Tritonesque citi Phorcique exercitus omnis;
laeua tenent Thetis et Melite Panopeaque uirgo (Verg. Aen. 5. 823-5).
{b) And hir yonge son lulo
And eek Ascamus also {HF, 177-8).
lulus was the other name of Ascanius ; one of the essential points about
Vergils story of Aeneas was that, through this boy Ascanius-lulus,
Aeneas was the ancestor of the Julian family, to which Octavian Augustus
belonged.
{c) And Marcia that lost her skin {HF, 1229).
Marcia is the Roman name of a woman ; Marsyas, who was flayed, was a
male Greek satyr.
{d) And on hir feet wexen saugh I
Partriches winges redely {HF, 139 1-2).
Chaucer apparently xmstodk pernicihus alis in Verg. Aen. 4. 180 iotperdid-
bus, partridges; but he got it right later, in Troilus and Criseyde: see
E. Nitchie, Vergil and the English Poets (New York, 1919), 57.
51. See H. M. Ayres, Chaucer and Seneca, in The Romanic Review,
1919 ; B. L. Jefferson, Chaucer and the Consolation ofPhilosophy ofBoethius
(Princeton, 1917); J. Koch, Chaucers Belesenheit in den romischen
Klassikem, in Englische Studien, 1923, 8-84; T. R. Lounsbury, Studies
in Chaucer (New York, 1892), 2. 250 f.; E. Nitchie, cited in n. sod;
S. G. Owen, Ovid and Romance, in English Literature and the Classics
(ed. G. S. Gordon, Oxford, 1912); R. K. Root, The Poetry of Chaucer
(Boston, 1906); H. Schinnerl, Die Belesenheit Chaucers in der Btbel und
der antiken Literatur (Munich, 1 923), ofwhich I have seen only a summary
;
E. F. Shannon, Chaucer and Lucans Pharsalid {Modern Philology, 16
(1919), 12. 113-18), and Chaucer and the Roman Poets (Harvard Studies
in Comparative Literature, 7, Cambridge, Mass, 1929); W. W. Skeats
large edition of Chaucer (Oxford, 1894-1900); and B. A. Wise, the
Influence of Statius upon Chaucer (Baltimore, 1911). I owe much to all
these scholars.
592 NOTES ON 5 . TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE
52. Dryden, Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern.
53. Introduction to the Man of Lavis Prologue, 47 f. The Manciple's
Tale of the crow is from Ovid, Met. 2. 531 f. Koch (cited in n. 51) gives
many examples of Chaucers borrowings from the Metamorphoses, book
by book, which make it clear that Chaucer knew all books 1-8 and ii,
something of books 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, and apparently nothing of book
15 (if he did know it, he never used it). His favourite books were 4, 6, 8,
and II (Koch, 68).
54. The House of Fame, 379 f. The Heroides summarized are, in order,
Ep. 2, 3, 5, 6, 12, 9, 10, and 7.
55. So Shannon (cited in n. 51).
56. LGW, 1680 f. = Ov. Fast. 2. 685 f.
57. The Wife of BatKs Prologue, 680; The Book of the Duchess, 568.
58. His favourite books were i, 2, and 4. There is little proof that he
read books 7--12 except the brief summary in HF, 45i~67 (Koch (cited in
n. 51), 44-52). It does not appear that he read the Bucolics and the
Georgies. The Prioresss motto Amor vincit omnia (ProL 162) is not from
Buc. 10. 69, but from St. Augustine, quoted by Vincent of Beauvais (n. 73).
59. In Vergil {Aen. 4. 328-9), Dido says sadly that she has no little
Aeneas. Ovid {Her. 7. 133 f.) alters this, and makes her say that she may
be pregnant. This is in line with his general attack on the Vergilian
characterization of Aeneas, who, for Ovid, is a traitour.
60. B. L. Jefferson has shown this in his book cited in n. 51 ; see also
H. R. Patch, The Tradition of Boethius (New York, 1935), 66-72.
61. Troilus and Criseyde, 4. 958-1078 and The Nun's Priest's Tale,
B. 4420-40.
62. Plato, Rep. 6. 496.
63. Chaucer mentions Boethius in The Nun's Priest's Tale, B. 4484, as
one that can singe, which might be a reference to his De musica\ and the
line in The House of Fame, 765,
Soun is noght but air y-broken
probably comes from the same book through a Readers Digest.
64. Troilus and Criseyde, 2. 100-8. His episcopal Grace is the seer
Amphiaraus.
65. Troilus and Criseyde, 5. 1480 f. Wise (op. cit. in n. 51) points out
that all the patent references of Chaucer to the Theban saga in Troilus,
except 5. 932-7, are in parts of the poem not adapted from II Filostrato, so
that Chaucer used the Latin original.
66. M. A. Pratt, Chaucers Claudian, in Speculum, 22 (1947), 419 f.,
suggests that Chaucer found Claudians De raptu Proserpinae, Laus
Serenae, and the prologue to De VI cons. Honorii (mistakenly set before
De rapt. Pros.) in one of the medieval Latin anthologies used as schoolbooks
and called Libri Catoniani. On these see M. Boas, De librorum
Catonianorum historia atque compositione, in Mnemosyne, n.s. 42
(1914), 17-46, who conjectures they were built up in the ninth century (as
part of the Carolingian Renaissance?). Named after the dicta Catonis
with which they began, they contained several short second-rate poems
NOTES ON S. TOWARDS THE RENAISSANCE 59^
such as the Ilias Latina (dropped in the twelfth century) and Statius
Achtlleid. For Chaucers references to Claudian, see The House of Fame,
1507 f. and The Merchants Tale, E. 2.zz*7 i. Petrarch, however, knew
Claudian well.
67. The Dream is mentioned again in TheNun^s Priests Tale, 64313-14.
68. The Tale of the Wife of Bath, 1184: the sentiment is quoted from
Seneca, Ep, 2. 5, who got it ultimately from Epicurus.
69. See the discussion by Professor H. M. Ayres (op. cit. in n. 51).
Pandarus arguments in Troilus and Criseyde, i, are largely taken from
Senecas epistles, the authorship being concealed under phrases like as
writen clerkes wyse : for instance,
I. 687 = Sen. Ep, 3.4; I. 891 == Sen. Ep. 2. i
;
I. 704 = Sen. Ep. 99. 26; I. 960 = Sen. Ep. 2. 2.
The Pardoner's Tale, too, is full of Seneca (especially Epp. 83, 95, and 1 14
:
see lines 513-16 and 534-*48) ; and the discussion of slavery in The Parson's
Tale, I. 761 f. comes from Sen. Ep. 47.
70. On Valerius Flaccus see Shannon (cited in n. 51), 340-55.
71. Poggio found the manuscript on his famous expedition to St.
Gallen: see J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge,
1908), 2. 27 and notes. Petrarch did not know Valerius Flaccus (P. de
Nolhac, Petrarque et Vhumanisme, Paris, 1907, i. 193).
72. Troilus and Criseyde, 4. 197-201 == Juv. 10. 2-4, with a direct
quotation (cloud of errour == erroris nebula). The Tale of the Wife of
Bath, 1 192-4 = Juv. 10. 22.
73. For instance, Boccaccio, 2. 2, gives the name of Hypermnestras
husband (Lynceus) as Linus (dat.); and so Chaucer in LGIF, 2569, calls
him Lino. Adriane (in HE, 407) comes from Adriana in Boccaccio,
10. 49. Chaucer mentions Vincentius Bellovacensis Speculum historiale
in LGW, 307
:
What Vincent, in his Storial Mirour ?
On these two books and others which Chaucer used less, see Koch (op. cit.
in n. 51), 70-8.
Notes on 6. the renaissance: translation
Introductory note. Among the authorities used for this chapter are
:
A. Bartels, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (Leipzig, 1905^).
A. H, Becker, Loys Le Roy de Coutances (Paris, 1896).
R. Bunker, A Bibliographical Study of the Greek Works and Translations
published in France during the Renaissance: the Decade 1^40-iy^o
(New York, 1939).
C. H. Conley, The First English Translators of the Classics (New Haven,
1927).
L. Cooper and A. Gudeman, A Bibliography of the Poetics of Aristotle
(Cornell Studies in English, ii. New Haven and London, 1928).
W. J. Entwistle, The Spanish Language (London, 1936).
J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, A History of Spanish Literature (New York,
1920).
594 NOTES ON 6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
F. M. K. Foster, English Translationsfrom the Greek (New York, 1918).
K. Goedeke, Grundriss zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung (Dresden,
1884-6^).
E. Hemdndez Garcia, Gramdtica historica de la lengua espafiola (Orense,
1938).
R. Huchon, Histoire de la langue anglaise (Paris, 1923-30).
A. Hulubei, Virgile en France au xvi siecle {Revue du seizieme siecle,
18 (i 93 i) i"77)^
B. L. Jefferson, Chaucer and the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius
(Princeton, 1917).
0. Jespersen, Growth and Structure of the English Language (Oxford,
I 93 S)-
H. B. Lathrop, Translations from the Classics into English from Caxton
to Chapman {i4yy-i62o) (University of Wisconsin Studies in
Language and Literature, 35, Madison, Wis., 1933).
H. R. Palmer, List of English Editions and Translations of Greek and
Latin Classics printed before 1641 (London, 1911).
J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1903-8).
R. K, Spaulding, How Spanish grew (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1943).
L. S. Thompson, German Translations of the Classics between 1450
and 1550' {Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 42 (1943),
343-63).
A. A. Tilley, The Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge,
1904).
F. Vogt and M. Koch, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (Leipzig,
1926^).
G. Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums (Berlin, 1880-
i2).
K. von Reinhardstoettner, Plautus, Spdtere Bearbeitungen plautinischer
Lustspiele (Leipzig, 1886).
L. M. Watt, Douglases Aeneid (Cambridge, 1920).
C. Whibley, Translators, in The Cambridge History of English Literature
(Cambridge, 1919), 4. i.
B. Wiese and E. Percopo, Geschichte der italienischen Litteratur
1899).
A. M. Woodward, Greek History at the Renaissance {The Journal of
Hellenic Studies, 63 (1943), 1-14)
and the contributors to volumes 2 and 3 of L. Petit de Jullevilles Histoire
de la langue et de la litterature frangaise (Paris, 1896-9).
1. The story is given in great detail in the Letter of Aristeas. There
were 72 rabbisapparently 6 from each tribeand they completed the
work in 72 days, under the auspices of Ptolemy Philadelphus. But it is now
believed that the translations of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek were
made piecemeal and gradually put together, and that the letter is a propagandistic
forgery constructed long after the translations were finished.
Probably it was written between 145 and 100 b.c. in order to give authority
to a new, revised, official version of the Jewish law in Greek. However,
NOTES ON 6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION 595
the story was long accepted, and has given us the name Septuagint
(= seventy) for the Greek version of the Old Testament. On the
Septuagint and the Letter of Aristeas see Christ-Schmid-Stahlins
Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur (Munich, 1920^), 2. i. 542 f. and
619 f., and P. E. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza (The Schweich Lectures of the
British Academy, 1941, London, 1947), 132-79.
2. For instance, it was Livius who established the now well-known
correspondences between Greek and Roman deities : Venus = Aphrodite,
Jupiter = Zeus, and so on. When Homer called on the Muses, Livius
substituted the native Italian spirits of song, the Camenae; but their
personality was too faint to survive.
3. See p. 5. Thus, Cicero practised public speaking in Greek;
Horace began his career as a poet by writing in Greek; Ciceros friend
Atticus actually gave up Rome and went to live in Athens, whence his
nickname.
4. Quoted by F. Brunot in L. Petit de Julleville (cited in introductory
note), 2. 542.
5. This interesting man was one of the first important French translators,
and turned the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle into French in
1370-1, from the Latin versions made about 1280 by William of Moerbeke
and others. He was also one of the earliest scientific economists : he began
his career with a treatise on the theory of money {De origine, natura, jure,
et mutationihus monetarum). Apparently it was he who introduced, among
many other words, poete and poeme into French. On his work and that of
his contemporaries in France, see Voigt (cited in introductory note),
2. 341
6. Quoted by F. Brunot in L. Petit de Julleville (cited in introductory
note), 2. 541.
7. Rabelais, 2. 6, translated by F. Urquhart. The students bad French
is good enough Latin. For instance, by vele and rames {par mles et
rames) is Ciceros uelis remisque with sails and oars = at full speed.
To this same kind of pedantry no less a man than Milton fell victim : see
pp. 160-1, 609-11.
8. This point is stressed by B. L. Jefferson (cited in introductory note).
9. So W. J. Sedgefield, in the preface to his translation of Alfreds
Boethius (Oxford, 1900).
10. So O. Immisch, Das Nachleben der Antike (Das Erbe der Alten,
n.s. I, Leipzig, 1919), 26.
11. For details see L. S. Thompson (cited in introductory note).
Mr. Thompson points out that most of the translations published in
German were done by second-rate men like Boner, who knew no Greek.
Goedeke (cited in introductory note), 2. 317, agrees, but emphasizes the
valuable influence of the German translations of Greek and Roman
history made during the Renaissance in bringing Germany closer to the
traditions of western Europe. On the limitations of Spanish humanism,
there is a valuable article by O. H. Green, A Critical Survey of Scholarship
in the Field of Spanish Renaissance Literature 1914-44 {Studies in
Philology, 44 (1947), 2), which points out that the main force of the new
596 NOTES ON 6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
scholarship in Spain flowed into religion, rather than scholarship or
literature.
12. Juan de Mena's version was published in 1519, but of course
written much earlier. Shortly after it was completed, in 1440, a prose
translation of Iliad, i, 2, 3, 4, and 10 was made from the Latin of Pietro
Candido for the Marquis of Santillana. See K. Vollmoller, Eine unbekannte
altspanische tJbersetzung der Ilias', in Studien zur LitteratuT-
geschichte Michael Bernays gewidmet (Hamburg, 1893), 333-49, who gives
specimens.
13. The Imtheachta JEniasa has been edited by the Rev. G. Calder
(London, 1907): E. Nitchie, Vergil and the English Poets (New York,
1919), 80, n. 8.
14. See H. J. Molinier, Octovien de Saint-Gelays (Rodez, 1910), for
details of his work and his too short life. His translation of the Aeneid is
described and discussed by A. Hulubei (cited in introductory note) who
dates it to 1509.
15. There is a useful analysis of Douglas's work in L. M. Watt's book,
cited in the introductory note to this chapter. How slowly and with what
difEculty it attained its real poetic reputation has been shown by J. A. W.
Bennett, The Early Fame of Gavin Douglas's Eneados' {Modern Lan--
giiage Notes, 61 (1946), 83-8). It is important to notice that Douglas
savagely attacked Caxton for perpetuating the false traditions put about
by Dares', and thus showed himself, in spite of the crudities of his translation,
to be completely in touch with Renaissance thought,
16. On Lucan as a historian see p. 577.
17. For this point see C. Schlayer, Spuren Lukans in der spanischen
Dichtung (Heidelberg, 1937), 68 f. It is a curious example of the power of
classical influence, for although Jauregui himself preferred the pellucid
sweetness of Tassos Amyntas (of which he had produced a fine translation),
he was mastered, against his own will, by the burning intensity of
Lucans style.
18. See p. 62.
19. See p. 205.
20. For Montaignes tribute, see his Essays, 2. 10. Other references to
Plutarchs tremendous influence on French thought will be found on
pp. 191, 393-5, and 402.
21. Details on p. 210 f.
22. The story, with references, will be found in Sandys' A History of
Classical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1908), 2. 180.
23. Jean-Antoine de Baifs Antigone was written well before 1573. On
these two versions, see M. Delcourt, jStude sur les traductions des tragiques
grecs et latins en France depuis la Renaissance (Memoires de IAcademie
Royale de Belgique, Classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques,
19. 4, Brussels, 1925), 26-33 and 71-81.
24. The French Hecuba, published anonymously, was long believed
to be by Lazare de Baif, because it bore the motto Rerum vices, held by
a branch of his family ; but it has been shown that it was Bochetels, and
NOTES ON 6 . THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION 597
indeed it is in a completely different style from Baif^s Electra. See
M. Delcourt (cited in n. 23), 34-6, and the authors there quoted.
25. Only a fragment of Ronsards Plutus translation remains. The
tradition that he made a complete one has been doubted, on the ground
that (in view of the contemporary interest in the play) the whole thing
would have been preserved. See M. Delcourt, La Tradition des comiques
anciens en France avant Moliere (Bibliotheque de la Faculte de Philosophie
et Lettres de IUniversite de Liege, 59, 1934), 75 f. But in her earlier
work (cited in n. 23) she accepts the story, and in fact confirms it by
observing that such translations (e.g. Dorats Prometheus Bound) were
often made for a small group and not printed. On this subject she cites
R. Sturels Essai sur les traductions du theatre grec en fran^ais avant
1550^ iP^'Oue d'histoire litteraire de la France^ 20 (1913), 269-96 and 637-
66), which discusses the manuscript translations still extant.
26. On the relation between this translation and The Comedy of Errors
see p. 624 .
27. On these, see W. Creizenach^s Geschichte des neueren Dramas
(Halle, 1918^), 2. I. 201 f. and 560 f.
28. See H. J. Molinier (cited in n. 14), 241 f., on this translation.
29. On the aims and methods of these translators, and the changes they
introduced, see H. B. Charlton, The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance
Tragedy (Manchester, reissued 1946), pp. cliii-clviii ; and there are some
remarks of interest in F. R. Amos, Early Theories of Translation (New
York, 1920), III f.
30. On Dolces versions and the stage translations in Italian, see
Creizenach (cited in n. 27), 2. i. 353 f. and 381 f. On the French translations
see M. Delcourt (cited in n. 23), 85-115. Jean de la Perusers Medee
(before 1555) was apparently an adaptation rather than a translation.
31. Tfhe parallel between Philip of Spain and the empire-building
Philip of Macedon was close. Centuries later we shall see the same
orators speeches being used as warning propaganda against the imperialistic
aggression of Napoleon: see p. 328.
32. H. B. Lathrop (cited in introductory note) says on p. 41 that this
translation by Elyot was the first made in English directly from the Greek
original. The educational importance of the speeches Nicocles and To
Nicocles is discussed by W. Jaeger in Paideia, 3 (New York, 1944), c. 4.
33. For details see L. S. Thompson, cited in the introductory note to
this chapter.
34. On Ovide moralise see p. 62. Guillaumes exposition of the sacred
significance of the miracle of the bees, in Georgies, 4, must seem either
comic or blasphemous to anyone who does not understand something of
medieval thought: it is given in A. Hulubeis article, cited in the introductory
note,
35. See p. 245. The influence of Horace in Spain has been magnificently
treated by M. Men6ndez y Pelayo, Horacio en Espafia (Madrid,
1885=^).
36. On the lyrics of Horace see c. 12, p. 225 f. Some of themanymodem
versions are described by E. Stemplinger, Das Fortleben der horazischen
598 NOTES ON 6. THE RENAISSANCE: TRANSLATION
Lyrik seit der Renaissance (Leipzig, 1906); by the same author in his
Horaz im Urteil der Jahrhunderte (Das Erbe der Alten, n.s. 5, Leipzig,
19Z1); and by G. Showerman, Horace and His Influence (Boston, 1922).
37. For this suggestion see H. B. Lathrop (cited in introductory note),
219-20.
Notes on 7. the renaissance: drama
1. Seepp. 71, 97, I34~5-
2. Hamlet^ 2. 2. 424 f.
3. That was the greatest contribution of classical drama to modern
drama. It has been interesting to watch the gradual self-education of the
films (largely through experiment, but to a considerable extent also by
tutelage from the stage and by criticism) from the early crudity when they
produced nothing but farces, serial melodramas, and spectacles, towards
something like a real understanding of the power of drama.
4. See E. Rigal in L. Petit de Jullevilles Histoire de la langue et de la
litterature franpaise, 3. 264.
5. R. Garnett and E. Gosse (English Literature^ an Illustrated Record,
New York, 1935^, i. 168) sum up the situation: Instead of bringing the
theatre to the audience, it had become necessary to bring the audience to
the theatre. The first public theatre in Britain was The Theatre, built
in London in 1576.
6. For a reproduction of De Witts sketch, and his comments, see
Allardyce Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre (London, 1927), 121 f.
7. Allardyce Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre (London, 1927),
88 f. See also K. Borinski, Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheorie (Das
Erbe der Alten, 10, Leipzig, 1924, 2. 65 f.), who shows how the theatredesigners
of the Renaissance adopted plans from Vitruvius in order to
achieve the full resonance for which the Greek and Roman theatres were
famous. The end-product of this is the modem opera-house.
8. Such were Politians Orfeo, in ottava and other lyric metres;
Correggios Cefalo in ottava, Boiardos Timone in terzini.
9. T. S. Eliot, Seneca in Elizabethan Translation (in Selected Essays,
New York, 1932), 69 f., suggests that English blank verse was designed as
the closest attainable equivalent to the metre of Seneca; but it was
probably inspired in the first instance by Italian experiments.
10. For instance, B. Marti, Senecas Tragedies, a New Interpretation,
in Transactions of the American Philological Association, 1945, suggests
that they were dramatized moral lessons, intended not for acting but for
reading. My own belief is that most of them were written to be performed
in Neros private theatre (domestica scaena, Tac. Ann, 15. 39), sometimes
with the stage-stmck young emperor playing the lead. I hope to develop
this view in a forthcoming paper.
11. Hamlet, 2. 2. 424 f., quoted on p. 128.
12. Horace did not think of it as an art of poetry, but as a letter to the
younger Roman writers, represented by the addressees, the brothers Piso
:
he meant it to have a restraining, educative effect on amateur poets.
NOTES ON 7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA 599
13. See p. 120 f. J. W. CunlifFe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan
Tragedy (London and New York, 1893), 9 f., points out, what should
never be forgotten, that in England the knowledge of Greek tragedy
was confined to a very small circle*, and that only Seneca was widely
known.
14. J. Plattard, UCEuvre de Rabelais (Paris, 1910), 175. Rabelais preferred
Lucian ; but Lucian took some of his ideas from Aristophanes, so
that there was an indirect contact between the two kindred geniuses.
15. It was Nicolaus Cusanus who discovered them for Poggio, and they
are now in the Vatican Library: see Sandys, A History of Classical
Scholgrship^ 2 (Cambridge, 1908), 34.
16. The tyrant was also known in medieval drama : he was King Herod.
Some of Herods ruthlessness passed into the tyrants of the Renaissance
stage, who were made still more diabolical by reminiscences of the teachings
of Machiavelli.
17. Lodge, Wits Miserie and the Worlds Madness (1596).
18. Marlowe, Tamhurlaine the Greats 2. 2. 4. 103 f.
19. On La Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse see p. 231 f.
Jodelle, who produced the first modem French tragedy and comedy, was
a member of the Pleiade with Du Bellay.
20. See Moores comparison of Eccerinis and The Comedy in his Studies
in Dante, Third Series (Oxford, 1903), 363 f. The text is in L. A. Muratori,
Rerum Italicarum scriptores, 10 (Milan, 1727), 785-800. There is a sensational
first act in which Ezzelinos mother reveals (to his delight) that he
was begotten on her by the Devil; but the rest is mostly messengers
speeches.
21. In an examination of the Latin dramas written by Jesuit teachers
and produced in the Ordensschule at Posen between 1599 and 1627, their
strong debt to Seneca is emphasized : this is Tragoediae sacrae: Materialien
und Beitrdge zur Geschichte der polnisch-lateinischen Jesuitendramatik der
Fruhzeit, by Adolf Stender-Petersen (Acta et commentationes Universitatis
Tartuensis, Tartu, 1931, 25. i).
22. J. S. Kennard, The Italian Theatre QAqsv York, 1932), i. 6. 129, n. 2.
23. Politian, who became professor of Greek and Latin in Florence,
was only 17 when he wrote Orfeo, and he completed it in two days. There
is a useful translation of it and of Tassos Aminta, with an introductory
essay on the pastoral (Oxford, 1931) by L. E. Lord.
24. J. S. Kennard, The Italian Theatre (New York, 1932), i. 105 f.,
explains the debt of Renaissance Italian comedy to Plautus and Terence
in some detail; see also W. Creizenach, Geschichte des neueren Dramas, 2
(Halle, 1918^), I. 250!
25. A recent analysis of the dramatic weaknesses of Sofonisha appeared
in The South Atlantic Quarterly, 26. i (1947), 93-108: The Genesis of
Neo-Classical Tragedy, by E. Roditi. He points out that Trissino, knowing
that tragedy ought to inspire pity and terror, apparently thought this
meant his characters ought to display these emotions in order to make the
audience feel them. On Trissinos equally dull epic, see p. 146.
26. See the admirable description of Cinthios work and reputation by
6oo NOTES ON 7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA
H. B. Charlton, The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy (Manchester,
reissued 1946), p. Ixxii f. ; see also W. Creizenach (cited in n. 24),
3. I. 367 f.
27. Fran^aisement chanter la grecque tragedie, said Ronsard. There
is a good criticism of Cleopdtre captive in A. Tilleys Literature of the
French Renaissance (Cambridge, 1904), 2. 72 f.
28. On the legendary connexion between Troy and modern European
countries see p. 54.
29. The name Thersites means Audacious : it is from the same root as
thrasonical (As You Like Ity 5. 2. 35). He is the only common soldier
mentioned by name in the lliady and his attempt to present the views of
the other ranks is shown as a ridiculous and disgusting piece of effrontery,
rightly punished by the wise prince Odysseus (11, 3. 21 1 f.). Shakespeares
Thersites isexcept for his railingbarely recognizable. In the farce
of Thersites the hero is a braggart soldier who gets the god Mulciber
( == Vulcan) to make him a suit of divine armour : evidently a reminiscence
of the arms of Achilles in Iliad 18 and those of Aeneas in Aeneid 8; but
he is not invulnerable, being beaten and disgraced like Thersites in the
Iliad. This is a very early example of the degrading parody of epic
themes.
30. The parasite, who attached himself to the rich, and bought his
dinners by his wit, mendacity, and flattery, was a Greek, not a Roman
type, and was foreign even to the audiences of Plautus. Much of the plot
and dialogue in Ralph Roister Doister is original; but Merrygreeks
flattery of Ralph, comparing him to great heroes, telling of his mighty
deeds, and making him believe all the women love him, comes from
Plautus Miles gloriosus. Compare, for instance, Ralph Roister Doister
^
I. 2. ii4f., With Miles gloriosusy 1. i. 58 f. and 4. 2; Ralph Roister Doister
I. 4. 66 f. (the Deed of the Elephant), with Miles gloriosus
^
i. i. 25 f.
31. Spanish influence on French baroque drama, however, was considerable
as the very title of Le Cid would show. On Lopes classical
knowledge see R. Schevill, The Dramatic Art of Lope de Vega (Berkeley,
Cal., 1918), 67 f.: he had the elements of Greek, much Latin, fluent
Italian, and some French. What he chiefly took from the classics was
(a) mythology, and (h) philosophical ideas, some from Plutarchs Moralia
and some from Neoplatonism.
32. Allardyce Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre (London, 1927),
c, 7, section vi.
33. Milton, ComuSy 494 f.
34. Milton, ComuSy 463-75. = Plato, Phaedo, 8ibi-d4 (see H. Agar,
Milton and Plato, Princeton, 1928, 39-41).
35. There is a well-written survey in W. W. Gregs Pastoral Poetry and
Pastoral Drama (London, 1906).
36. See p. 163 f. on Vergils Arcadia.
37. Bucolica eo successu edidit ut in scaena quoque per cantores crebro
pronuntiarentur (Donatus life, ed. Bnirnmer, 90). There is a vaguer
reference to this in Tac. Dial. 13, and a very strange one, involving
Cytheris (the Lycoris of Buc. 10) as diseuse, in Serv. Comm, ad Buc. 6. ii.
NOTES ON 7. THE RENAISSANCE: DRAMA 6oi
38. This is the legend Vergil uses in Georg. 4. 453 f. Ovid deliberately
altered it in Met. 10. 8 f. K. Vossler, Die Antike in der Buhnendichtung
der Romanen (Vortrdge der Bihliothek Warburg, 1927-8, Leipzig, 1930),
225 f., suggests that Orfeo was a synthesis of bucolic poetry on the classical
model with the religious pageants known as sacre rappresentazioni, but his
arguments are not very convincing. He does, however, bring out the
connexion between the early pastoral drama and the pastoral scenes in
religious plays of the late Middle Ages, and the relevance of the French
lyrical love-episodes with a pastoral setting, called pastourelles. (On these
see W. P. Jones, The Pastourelle (Cambridge, Mass., 1931).)
39. For a summary see Greg (cited in n. 35), 174-5.
40. The comparison to music is Symondss, and the other I owe to Greg
(cited in n. 35), who develops them both in a finely written paragraph on
his p. 192.
41. For this theory see W. Creizenach, Geschichte des neueren Dramas, 1
(Halle, 1911^), 380 f.; Allardyce Nicoll, Masks, Mimes, and Miracles
(London, 1931); and K. Vossler (cited in n. 38), 241 and note 2.
42. Ovid, Met. i. 438-567. Summaries of both Dafne and Euridice,
with musical analyses and quotations, are given by D. J. Grout, in A Short
History of Opera (New York, 1947), i, c. 5. Mr. Grout says that Dafne,
written in 1594, was first performed with Marco da Gaglianos music in
1608. Wiese and Percopo {Geschichte der italienischen Litteratur, Leipzig,
1899, 438) give 1594 as the date for the earlier performance of Dafne,
with music by Peri and Caccini.
43. This was the voiios HvOlkos, composed by Sacadas, who flourished
in 580 B.c. It was still being played by virtuosi 600 years after his
death.
44. Quoted from E. J. Dent, The Baroque Opera, in The Musical
Antiquary for January 1910; a valuable article.
45. The book referred to is J. E. Spingams A History of Literary
Criticism in the Renaissance (New York, 1899), and the reference to Aristotle
is Poet. 1451^ 32. See also K. Borinski, Die Antike in Poetik und
Kunsttheorie (Das Erbe der Alten, 9, Leipzig, 1914), i. 215 f. and 219 f.,
who shows that Aristotles influence on the stage began, very tenuously,
about 1492, and emphasizes the paradox that, as Aristotles authority as
a moralist and philosopher fell, his prestige as a literary critic rose. But
in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance the Poetics was too hard for
most critics to read.
46. Ar. Poet. 1449^ 12 f.
Notes on 8. the renaissance: epic
I. Ronsard wrote that his inspiration was destroyed by the death of
Charles IX^who had urged him to undertake the poem, and even chosen
the disastrous metre. But in fact he was relieved from an intolerable compulsion.
He intended twenty-four books, sketched fourteen, but left only
four (some 6,000 lines). It is interesting to watch him trying to be Greek,
and being Roman in spite of himselfJust as in his Odes, where he wishes
6o2 NOTES ON 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC
to be Pindar and returns towards Horace (see p. 247 .) Itt his preface to
La Franciade he wrote
:
Jay patronn6 mon ceuvre plustost sur la naive facility dHomere que sur la
curieuse diligence de Virgiie
(was he thinking of curiosa felicitas^ the phrase Petronius used of Horace,
in Sat. 1 18. 5 ?)and yet he took relatively little from Homer, and a great
deal, down to single words, from Vergil. Cf. P. Lange, Ronsards Franciade
und ihr Verhdltnis :su Vergils Aeneide (Wiirzen, 1887), who gives pages of
verbal correspondences. Lange points out that the chief device Ronsard
did borrow from Homer was the wide-eyed step-by-step account of a
single operation, such as a chariot loading or a fleet putting to sea: this
makes the description sound incomparably natural and vivid. The actual
subject of La Franciade, the legend of the survival of the Trojan prince
Francus as ancestor of the French, was a product of the decaying Roman
empire and of the contact between the barbarians and classical mythology,
like Theodoric^s Trojan ancestry (see p. 54) ; it first appeared in Fredegar
during the seventh century. Ronsard got it out of the Illustrations des
Gaules et Singularitez de Troye^ by Jean Lemaire de Beiges (1509-13),
and had already used it in his Odes (i. i and 3. i). For other aspects of
the myth see H. Gillot, La Querelle des anciens et des modernes en France
(Paris, I9i4)> f*
2. Os Lusiadas is in ten cantos, and uses the stanza made famous by
Ariosto: eight ii -syllable lines rhyming ABABABCCcalled ottava
rima. Lusus was the mythical ancestor of the Portuguese, whose land the
Romans knew as Lusitania.
3. The metre of La Araucana also is Ariostos (n. 2). The subject of
the poem is extremely interesting, and some of the episodes are very
moving ; but Ercillas narrative style sometimes becomes painfully prosaic.
Here is a stanza from canto 9, as translated (not unworthily) by C. M.
Lancaster and P. T. Manchester {The Araucaniad, Nashville, Tenn.,
^
* Lord, I gleaned this information
From the lips of many authors.
On the 23rd of April,
Eight days hence, four years exactly
It will be, since in that army
Such a miracle they pondered.
Fourteen hundred men well counted
In the year of 1550.
As for the structure of the poem, Ercilla tried to make it a well-built whole,
blit failed because he wanted to get everything in. It should really end
with the death of the formidable Indian chief Caupolicdn, but it tails of[
into Ercillas own autobiography and a discourse on the Spanish attempt
to conquer Portugal. The strongest classical influence on it is that of
Lucan, whom Spanish epic poets of the Renaissance admired because he
was himself a Spaniard and had a certain proud violence in his style which
they found sympathetic. Some of the adaptations Ercilla made from
Lucan have been pointed out by C. Schlayer, Spuren Lukans in der
NOTES ON 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC 603
spanischen Dichtung (Heidelberg, igzy), W. Strohmeyer, Studie Uher die
Araukana (Bonn, 1929), and G. Highet, Classical Echoes in La Araucana*
(Modern Language Notes, 62 (1947), 329-3 1).
4. Cervantes, Don Quixote, i. 6.
5. Orlando Furioso has forty-six cantos, arranged in stanzas of hendecasyllabic
lines rhyming ABABABCC (n. 2). Roland was actually on the
staff of Charlemagne, but that emperor with his wars against the pagans
is often confused with his grandfather Charles Martel, who turned the
tide of Islamic aggression with his victory at Tours in a.d. 732.
6. Orlando Furioso, 34. 83 :
E fu da Taltre conosciuta, quando
Avea scritto di fuor: Senno d Orlando.
7. The Faerie Queene is in a more complex stanza than Ariostos : eight
decasyllabic lines with a closing alexandrine, rhyming ABABBCBCC.
Spenser, in his introductory letter to Raleigh, told him it was meant to
embody the best of Homer, Vergil, Ariosto, and Tasso. There is a useful
list of the classical authors whom Spenser knew in W. Riedner, Spensers
Belesenheit (Miinchener Beitrage, 38, Leipzig, 1908), but it should be
balanced by the indications given in H. G. Lotspeich, Classical Mythology
in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Princeton Studies in English, 9, Princeton,
1932), who points out that Spenser depended heavily on two manuals
of mythology, Boccaccios Genealogia deorum and the Mythologiae of
Natalis Comes, using their comments and quotations freely. Still, considering
his age and occupations, he was a considerable scholar. He knew
Homer well, and Plato (ApoL, Gorg., Phaedo, Phaedrus, Rep., Symp.,
Tim.), and Aristotle, and some Plutarch; he knew Hesiods Theogony and
a little Herodotus, but (despite his friend E. K.s boasts) only one or two
works each of Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, and Lucian. (On the pastoral
poets see M. Y. Hughes, Spenser and the Greek Pastoral Triad, Studies
in Philology, 20 (1923), 184-215.) He was more widely read in Latin: he
knew Vergil very well (Riedner, 68-90, gives a remarkable list of his debts
to the Aeneid) and Ovids Metamorphoses equally well ; Horaces letters,
odes, and epodes; Caesar; Ciceros Tusculan Discussions and On the
Orator; Lucretius (the opening invocation is adapted in FQ, 4. 10. 44 f.)
;
Plinys Natural History
;
and, less certainly, Persius, Lucan, and Juvenal.
8. Gerusalemme Liberata uses the same metre as Ariosto, and runs to
twenty cantos. The version Tasso issued after alteration was called
Gerusalemme Conquistata: it was heavily corrected so as to place more
emphasis on the Christian elements in the poem and to make it less
romantic, rhore classical.
9. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, c. 58.
10. This was the attack which Boethius was suspected of inviting: see
p. 41. The title of the poem varies slightly; I take the version which
appears in the Verona edition of Trissinos works, published in 1729.
iL See p. 136, and n. 25 on p. 599.
12. A remarkable didactic poem of an earlier period should not be
overlooked: La Sepmaine, or La Creation du Monde, by the Gascon
6o4 notes on 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC
Guillaume de Salluste, Sieur du Bartas (1544-90), which was published
in 1578 and had a great success. It tells, in seven books of alexandrine
couplets, the story of the creation, in language which is occasionally
affected but often sublime. The theme is taken from Genesis i-ii, but is
vastly expanded by the use of Greco-Roman poetry, science, and philosophy,
and of contemporary scientific knowledge. Du Bartas and Tasso
are Miltons two most important predecessors.
13. In his letter to Raleigh, Spenser said he planned The Faerie Queene
in twelve books because, according to Aristotle, there were twelve moral
virtues, each of which he intended to exemplify in his poem. But Aristotle
offered no such cut-and-dried scheme of the virtues. This is a typical
example of the Renaissance and baroque habit of considering as laws
what the Greeks meant as suggestions, and of forcing symmetry even
on material which should be left flexible. See J. Jusserand, A Literary
History of the English People (New York, 19263), 2. 479 n., who traces the
error through Spensers friend Bryskett to the Italian humanists Piccolomini
and Cinthio. From another point of view this schematism was
Spensers attempt to introduce classical design into a typically loose
episodic story like Ariostos: see M. Y. Hughes, Virgil and Spenser
(University of California Publications in English, 2. 3, Berkeley, Cal.,
1929), 322-32. The schematism was helped by the fact that twelve
was a mystical number, embodied in the disciples of Jesus, and that the
Aeneid was in twelve books. Paradise Lost was originally in ten books,
but was rearranged into twelve in 1674.
14. The myth has been revived in our own day by the South African
poet Roy Campbell, who has published a book of poems containing something
of the same rebellious violence that appears in Camoenss conception
of the giant made mountain, and has entitled it Adamastor, (It was
issued in London in 1930: see in particular the poem Rounding the Cape,)
The reference is Os Lusiadas, 5.
15. Ercilla, La Araucana, 23.
16. For many of these things there are parallels in Greek legend: the
winged horse Pegasus is like the hippogriff, the ring of Gyges made him
invisible, &c. But none of the great classical epics makes such supernatural
properties essential in its plot.
17. In The Faerie Queene, i, i. 37f., the wicked hermit Archimago
invokes Hecate and Gorgon, and sends a sprite to Morpheus for a false
dream. The sprite leaves through the ivory door, which appears in Vergil
{Aeneid, 6. 894-9). There are some valuable remarks on Spensers
descriptions of hell and their debt to Vergil, in M. Y. Hughess Virgil and
Spender (University of California Publications in English, 2. 3, Berkeley,
19^9), 371
18. Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, 8. 60. The image is suggested by the
terrible vision of Bertran de Bom in Dante, Inf. 28. 118 f. Cf. Ariosto,
Orlando Furioso, 18. 26 f. ; and Vergil, Aen. 7. 323 f.
19. Circe is in Homer, Od, 10; Acrasia in Spenser, The Faerie Queene,
2. 12; Armida in Tasso, Gerusaiemme Liberata, 10. 65 f. It is a favourite
trick of Ovids, and a very effective one, to describe a metamorphosis step
NOTES ON 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC 605
by step, making it not an abrupt Arabian Nights transformation, but a
comprehensible, easily visualized, and therefore credible development.
20. Milton, Paradise Lost, ii. 244.
21. Milton, Paradise Lost, 5. 285, a reminiscence of Mercury landing
on Mount Atlas (Verg. Aen, 4. 252):
hie primum paribus nitens Cyllenius alis
constitit.
Shakespeare was thinking of the same fine picture when he wrote
A station like the herald Mercury
New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill {Hamlet, 3. 4. 58-9).
There is an even more complete fusion of pagan deities and Christian
spirits in Trissinos La Italia liberata da Gotti, which contains angels
called Gradivo {= Gradivus = Mars, book 12:
FAngel Gradivo, che dal cielo
Scese per ajutar la genta Gotta),
Palladio (a derivative of Pallas Athene, book 2 and passim), Nemesio
(a derivative of Nemesis, book 20), and Erminio (a derivative of Hermes,
book 23 and passim). The ubiquitous Onerio (book i and passim)
appears to be an angelic form of the dream, *'Ovipos, sent by Zeus to
Agamemnon in Iliad, 2 init.
22. Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, 7. 92. So also the guardian angel
heals Godfreys wound not only by giving it the same treatment as Venus
gave her son Aeneas, but actually by exhibiting the same herb {Gerusalemme
Liberata, 11. 72 f. = Aeneid, 12. 41 1 f.).
23. Milton, Paradise Lost, i. 732 f. (Mulciber = Vulcan) and Paradise
Regained, 2. 149 f. (on which see p. 521). There is an admirable discussion
of Miltons double attitude to classical mythology in C. G. Osgoods The
Classical Mythology of Milton^s Poems (Yale Studies in English, 8, New
York, 1900), pp. xlvi-li.
24. See O. H. Moore, The Infernal Council {Modern Philology, 16
(1918), 169-93), and M. Hammond, 'Concilia deorum from Homer
through Milton (Studies in Philology, 30 (1933), 1-16). It is impossible
to imagine the fiends portrayed by Hieronimus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel
as holding a stately council in the halls of Pandemonium, but it is easy
enough to think of Miltons devils as Olympians overthrown.
25. Milton, Paradise Lost, 6, especially 637 f. The devils fall for nine
daysthe figure suggested by Hesiod, Theog. 722.
26. Milton, Paradise Lost, 4. 990 f. = Horn. IL 8. 69-77 and 22.
209-13 = Verg. Aen. 12. 725-7.
27. Genesis i. 26-7.
28. Milton, Paradise Lost, 2. 351 . == Verg. Aen. 10. 115, with a fine
sound-effect of thunder
:
totum nutu tremefecit Olympum.
The idea recurs also in Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, 13. 74 observed
6o6 NOTES ON 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC
by C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton^ London, 1945, 148-9). There are
several Homeric models.
29. Ariosto, Orlando FuriosOy 46. 80-96. Similarly, the net of the giant
Aligoran in 15. 56 f. was the identical net made by Vulcan to entrap Mars
and Venus, then stolen by Mercury to catch Chloris the flower-goddess,
then kept in the temple of Anubis at Canopus, and finally stolen by
Aligoran, who lived near Cairo. And in The Faerie Queene^ 3. 2. 25,
Arthegall is seen wearing a splendid suit of armour inscribed
Achilles arms, which Arthegall did win
a notion adopted from Ariostos Orlando Furioso, 30, where Ruggiero
wins the arms of Hector.
30. Camoens, Os Lusiadasy 2. 45 f.
31. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 3. 9. 33-51.
32. Milton, Paradise Losty i. 196 f.
33. Ercilla, La Araucanay 3 and 7.
34. Ariosto, Orlando FuriosOy 18. 64, and 18. 65. 6:
Orazio sol contra Toscana tutta.
35. Ercilla, La Araucanay 2.
36. Camoens, Os LusiadaSy 9.
37. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, i. i. 6.
38. Milton, Paradise Lost, 4. 266 f.; for discussions, see D. Bush,
Mythology and the Renaissa7tce Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis
and London, 1932), 278-86, and W. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral
(London, 1935), 172 f.
39. Milton, Paradise Losty i, 713 f. It is possible, however, that Milton
was thinking of St. Peters in Rome!
40. Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberatay 16. 2-7, inspired by Verg. Aen,
I. 455 f. and 6. i4~33*
41. Spenser, The Faerie Queeney 1. 2. 30 = Tasso, Gerusalemme
LiheratUy 13. 40 f. = Ariosto, Orlando Furiosoy 6. 28-9 == Dante, Infernoy
13. 28 f. = Vergil, Aen. 3. 22-48. The incident also occurs in different
forms in Boccaccios Filocolo, but Ariosto probably took it from Dante
:
see P. Rajna, Lefonti delV Orlando Furioso (Florence, 1900^), 169-70.
42. Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberatay 17. 66 f. = Verg. Aen. 8. 626-731
(inspired by Homer, 11. 18); and Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, 18. 92-6,
inspired by Homer, II. 5 and 21, and by the tremendous climax of the fall
of Troy in Vergil, Aen. 2. 589-623
:
apparent dirae facies, inimicaque Troiae
numina magna deum.
43. Ercilla, La Araucanay 23, and Camoens, Os LusiadaSy 10: inspired
by Verg. Aen. 6. 756-887.
44. Ariosto, Orlando FuriosOy 3. 16-59 which see P. Rajna, cited in
n. 41, 133 f.); Spenser, The Faerie QueenCy 3. 3, 21-49; Milton, Paradise
Losty $. 563-7. 640, II. 423-12. 551*
45. Ariosto, Orlando FuriosOy 17. 45 f. == Horn. Od. 9. 413 f.
46. Ariosto, Orlando FuriosOy 10. 92 f, == Ov. Met. 4. 663-752.
NOTES ON 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC 6o7
47. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 46. loi f. = Verg. Aen. 12. 681 f.
48. Verg. Aen. 12. 951-2:
Ast illi soluontur frigore membra
uitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras.
49. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 46- 140
:
Alle squalhde ripe dAcheronte,
Sciolta dal corpo piii freddo che giaccio,
Bestemmiando fuggi Talma sdegnosa,
Che fu si altiera al mondo e si orgogliosa.
Notice that the pagan is not sent to hell, where Dante and the author of
La Chanson de Roland would certainly have put him, but to the classical
underworld.
50. Rolandy 1015:
Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit.
51. Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberatay 2. 89 f. = Livy, 21. 18.
52. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso
y
17. ii = Verg. Aen. 2. 47i~S* Tasso,
Gerusalemme Liberatay 7. 55 = Verg. Georg. 3. 229! (the angry bull);
Tasso, Gerusalemme LiberatUy 9. 75, the escaped stallion = Horn. II.
6. 506 f. R. E. N. Dodge, Spensers Imitations from Ariosto, in PMLA,
1897, 151-204, shows how Spenser will take quite small images from
Ariosto and reproduce them, usually more vividly.
53. Ercilla, La Araucana, 3.
54. Milton, Paradise Lost, 2. 636 f. The mountain simile is in Paradise
Losty 4. 987:
Like Teneriffe or Atlas, unremoved
and probably comes from Vergil, Aen. 12. 701-3, where Aeneas (also
ready to fight) is said to be
quantus Athos, aut quantus Eryx, aut ipse coruscis
cum fremit ilicibus quantus gaudetque niuali
uertice se attollens pater Appennmus ad auras.
It is also like Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberatay 9. 31*
55. Penthesilea is mentioned in Verg. Aen. 1. 491, and appeared in
many minor epics. Camilla appears in Aen. 7* 803 f. and ii. 53^^*
Ariostos predecessor Boiardo had introduced another beautiful virago in
his Orlando Innamorato
:
Marfisa, who plays some part in Ariostos poem
too. Something of Hippolytas tough independence was retained by
Shakespeare in A Midsummer^-Nighfs Dreamy 4. i . 1 1 8 f., where she sounds
like a fox-hunting English girl from the Shiresalthough her discord is
more musical, her thunder sweeter.
56. Tasso, Gerusalemme Liheratay 12. 23-37. HdiodoxuSy Aethiopica (on
which see pp. 164-5) : the queen there looked at Apollos statue ; in Tasso
she looked at a picture of St. George : the children of both were white, and
Clorinda aspired towards Christianity. On the river, Vergil, Aen. ii.
547-66. Camilla was vowed to Diana by her father, as Clorinda was vowed
6o8 NOTES ON 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC
to St. George by her mother. On the type, see Pio Rajna, Le fonti delV
Orlando Furioso (Florence, 1900^), 45 f.
57. Dante, Inf. z. 7 f., 32. 10 f. ; Purg. i. 7 f., 29. 37 f. (where Helicon
is a spring instead of a mountain) ; Par. i . 1 3 f. (where Apollo is invoked
with an appeal to his own exploits), 2. 8, 18. 82 f.
58. Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberatay i. 2:
O Musa, tu che di caduchi allori
Non circondi la fronte in Elicona,
Ma su nel Cielo infra i beati con
Hai di stelle immortali aurea corona. . . .
It has been suggested that Tasso here means the Virgin Mary. For a less
formal invocation see, 6. 39.
59. Milton, Paradise Lost, 9. 13 f. ; cf. i. 1-16, 7. i39, and Paradise
Regamed, 1. 8-17. Ultimately Miltons inspiration is the Third Person
of the Trinity.
60. Milton, Paradise Lost, i . 84 f.
61. Vergil, Aen. 2. 274 f.:
El mihi, qualis erat, quantum mutatus ab illo
Hectore qui redxt exuuias indutus Achilli!
62. Eliot, The Waste Land, 2. 77 f. = Shaliespeare, Antony and Cleopatra,
2. 2. 199 f.
63. Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, 2. 86:
Noi morirem, ma non morremo inulti.
Verg. Aen. 4. 659-60:
moriemur inultae!
sed moriamur, ait.
Tasso has introduced other reminiscences of Dido, more appropriately
this time, in the parting of Armida and Rinaldo (G.L. 16. 36 f.). See, for
instance, 16. 57:
Nd te Sofia produsse, e non sei nato
De TAzio sangue tu: te Tonda insana
Dei mar produsse e il Caucaso gelato,
E le mamme allattar di tigre ircana.
^ And compare Verg. Aen. 4. 365 f.
:
Nec tibi diua parens, generis nec Dardanus auctor,
perfide, sed duris genuit te cautibus horrens ^
Caucasus Hyrcanaeque admorunt ubera tigres.
64. Aubrey Bell, Luis de Camoes (Hispanic Notes and Monographs:
Portuguese Series, 4, Oxford, 1923), 92.
65. Milton, Paradise Lost, 10. 312-13.
66. Milton, Paradise Lost, i, 266.
67. Milton, Paradise Lost, ii. 668-9 : the speaker was probably Enoch
(Gen, V. 24).
NOTES ON 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC 609
68. Milton, Paradise Lost, 6. 83-4 = Verg. Aen, 7. 789 f. (the shield of
Turnus)
:
At leuem chpeum sublatis comibus lo
auro insignibat, iam saetis obsita, iam bos,
argumentum ingens.
69. Milton, Paradise Lost, 12. 2-3.
70. Milton, Paradise Lost, 2. 15 1 f. Translate it into Latin, and it is
perfectly straightforward : sit hoc honum or licet hoc bonum sit = assuming
that this is goodh
Here are some further examples of Miltons grecisms and latinisms, for
many of which I am indebted to F. Buff, Miltons Paradise Lost in seinem
Verhdltnisse zur Aeneide, Ilias und Odyssee (Hof, 1904), and E. Des
Essarts, De ueterum poetarum turn Graeciae turn Romae apud Miltonem
imitatione (Paris, 1871). Ail quotations are from Paradise Lost unless
otherwise signalized.
(u) Words used with their Latin root-meaning rather than their current
English meaning:
Frighted the reign of Chaos and Old Night
(regna kingdom)
What remains him?
(manere both remain and await)
On the rough edge of battle
{acies = edge of a blade, and thence battle-line)
By tincture or reflection they augment
Their small peculiar
(pecultum ~ private property)
Obvious to dispute
(obuius exposed to)
Lest that too heavenly form, pretended
To hellish falsehood, snare them
(praetentus = placed in front of, screening)
And with our sighs the air
Frequenting
(frequentare = to crowd).
(b) Many such words and phrases are direct quotations of phrases from
the Greek and Latin poets, and the un-English use of a word is meant
to serve as an echo to recall the original
:
Where pain of unextinguishable fire
Must exercise us (2. 88-9)
ergo exercentur poenis (they are driven, or vexed, by punishments)
(Verg. Aen, 6. 739)
Him round
A globe of fiery Seraphim enclosed (2. 511-12)
globus ilk uirum densissimus urget (a thick crowd of men presses hard)
(Verg. Aem 10. 373)
Rr
(i* 543)
(2. 443)
(6. 108)
(7. 367-8)
(8. 158)
(10. 872-3)
(10. 1089-90)
S076
6io NOTES ON 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC
Or hearst thou rather pure Ethereal stream (3. 7)
seu lane libentius audis (or do you more gladly hear the name Janus?*an
affectation, and a reminiscence of another language, even in Latin)
(Hor. Serm. 2, 6. 20)
Reign for ever, and assume
Thy merits (3.318-19)
sume superbiamiquaesitam meritis (put on the pride earned by your merit)
(Hor. Carm. 3. 30. 14)
Perhaps asleep, secure of harm (4, 791)
(i.e. not safe, but careless, as in Verg. Aen. 1. 350)
Their flowing cups
With pleasant liquors crowned (5. 444-5)
crateras magnas statuunt et uina coronant (they set up great wine-bowls and
crown them with wmei.e. fill them brim-full, ultimately from Homer,
IL I. 470, 8. 232, See.)
Things not revealed, which the invisible King,
Only omniscient, hath suppressed in night (7. 122-3)
prudens futuri temporis exitumjeaUginosa noctepremit deus (God in his wisdom
covers future events in misty night) (Hor. Carm. 3. 29. 29-30)
No need that thou
Shouldst propagate, already infinite,
And through all numbers absolute, though One (8. 419-21)
omnibus numeris absolutus (perfect in every element)
(Pliny, Ep. 9. 38)
Something like this phrase occurs in Cicero, who calls the universe
perfectum expletumque ommbus suis numeris et partibus.
(De natura deorum 2. 13. 37)
Ultimately it comes from Greek philosophy, where rravres apiQyiot means
something like all the parts of a whole. By the time it has passed through
Latin and reached Milton it is practically unintelligible.
So glistered the dire Snake, and into fraud
Led Eve. (q. 6434)
Quis deus infraudemy quae durapotentia nostrilegit? (What god, what hard
power of ours, led him into harm? (Verg. Aen. 10. 72-3)
(c) Latinisms and grecisms in syntax
:
Never, since created Man
( = since the creation of Man)
Me miserable!
(from me miserum!)
Proud, art thou met?
( O superbe . , .)
A glimpse of light, conveyed so far
Down to this habitable
(a neuter adjective serving as a noun)
The lawless tyrant, who denies
To know their Ood, or message to regard
( tts refuses, denegat)^
(i 573)
(4. 73)
(6. 13 1)
(8. 156-7)
(12. 173-4)
NOTES ON 8. THE RENAISSANCE: EPIC 6ii
It should be noticed that one of the most striking of Miltons stylistic
devices, the adjective-noun-adjective phrase, as in
The Eternal King Omnipotent (6. 227),
is neither Latin nor Greek, but Italian: carofiglio adorato.
The Latin and Greek influences on Miltons style introduced an element
of distortion which belongs to the baroque age rather than to the Renaissance,
and links him with Gdngora in Spain, Marini in Italy. Juan de
Jauregui, who had begun by writing poetry as smooth as UAllegrOy found
that he was forced, when translating Lucan into Spanish, to write in a
Gongoristic style (see p. 116) for very much the same reasons. Thus,
when Milton speaks of the pure marble air {Paradise Lost, 3. 564) he
means gleaming as brightly as marble, and he is thinking of dXa (xapiiaperjv
in Iliad, 14. 273 and marmoreo sub aequore in Aeneid, 6. 729, but he has
gone beyond both Homer and Vergil into the realm of baroque conceits.
Notes on 9. the renaissance: pastoral and romance
1. Did Theocritus invent pastoral poetry as we know it? Apparently
he did. The evidence is re-examined by R. Reitzenstein, Epigramm und
Skolion (Giessen, 1893), and H. Wendel, Arkadien im Umkreis bukolischer
Dichtung in der Antike und in der franzdsischen Literatur (Giessener
Beitrage zur romanischen Philologie, Giessen 1933), together with many
others. There were Arcadian poetssuch as Anyte of Tegea (fl. 290 B.c.) and there were poets
who wrote of the pleasures of country life and
invoked Pan. But there is no sign that anyone before Theocritus produced
the characteristic blend of pastoral life with natural poetry and music,
seen as the utterance of singing herdsmen and rustic lovers.
2. Theocritus poems are called idylls: a word of obscure origin and
meaning. It is thought to be short for etSuAAiov JSovkoAckov, ctSvAAtov
being a diminutive of etSos, and meaning a little individual poem.
3. Vergil did not call them eclogues, which is a name invented (it
would seem) by the critics of the later empire ; they used ecloga, selection,
to mean one poem selected from the ten Bucolics,
4. See Pausanias, 7 and 8 ; and L. R. Famell, Cults of the Greek States
(Oxford, 1909), 5 -
5. B. Snells essay on this subject in Die Entdeckung des Geistes
(Hamburg, 1946) cites E. Kapps suggestion that Arcadia became the ideal
land of music because of a passage in the historian Polybius (4. 20-1).
Himself an Aftadian by origin, Polybius, after narrating an atrocity committed
in Arcadia, inserted a long apologia, explaining that the Arcadians
were really highly civilized and had national musical training and musical
competitionsexcept for the one community where the atrocity took
place. But this passage can scarcely be relevant to the creation of the ideal
Arcadia : because Polybius emphasized, not the wildness and rusticity of
the music of his country, but its highly developed culture. He wrote not
of shepherds warbling their native wood-notes wild, but of elaborate
6X2 NOTES ON 9. THE RENAISSANCE:
performances by trained choruses singing difficult modern music by
Philoxenus and Timotheus. He wanted to prove that Arcadia was not
natural but highly civilized. Also^ the probability that a young poet like
Vergil, writing about a lovelorn elegist, would base his fantasy on a
comparatively obscure passage in a comparatively dry author is much
less than that Vergil thought of Paw, deus Arcadiae (Buc. lo. 26). Bucolic
poetry was invented by Pan, with his pan-pipes : see Reitzenstein (cited
in n. i), 249"-53*
6. I owe much in this section to a well-written book about these strange
stories: S. L. Wolffs Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New
York, 1912). See also W. W. Gregs Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama
(London, 1906), E. H. Haights Essays on the Greek Romances (New York,
1943) and More Essays on Greek Romances (New York, 1945), and F. A.
Todds Some Ancient Novels (Oxford, 1940). The central book on the
subject is Erwin Rohdes Der griechische Roman und seine Vorldufer
(Leipzig, 19143). The word romance is used both for the stories of
cliivalrous adventure which became popular in the twelfth century (c. 3),
for these Greek tales, and for modern stories in which adventure is more
important than character-drawing. Strictly, this is loose and inaccurate,
but it can perhaps be excused by the general contemporary use of the
word romantic to cover nearly all the chief elements in all these three types
of fiction.
7. On Dares and Dictys see p. 51 f.
8. A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford, 1939), 6. 363, n. 7,
comments on the fact that when the angels announced the birth of Jesus
(Luke ii) and when the Greek Muses related the birth and descent of the
Hellenic gods (Hesiod, Theog. init.), the hearers they chose were shepherds
abiding in the fieldbecause, Mr. Toynbee suggests, shepherds
and not townspeople have guileless and simple hearts fit to receive such
a revelation.
9. On Robin et Marion see W. W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral
Drama (London, 1906), 63-5; on the pastourelles, W. P. Jones, The
Pastourelle (Cambridge, Mass., 1931).
10. Sannazaro, Arcadia (ed. M. Scherillo, Turin, 1888), prosa, ii. 308
Homer, IL 23. 724.
11. Le manuel le plus complet de pastoralisme quil soit possible
dimaginerH. Genouy, Arcadia^ de Sidney dans ses rapports avec
Arcadia!* de Sannazaro et la *Diana* de Montemayor (Montpellier,
1928), 53.
12. Cervantes, Don Quixote^ 2. 67; the book-burning is in i. 6.
13. See pp. 91-3.
14. Others of this type published about the same time are Greenes
MenaphoUy which, with its multiple disguises, kidnappings, and shipwrecks,
stems straight from the Greek romances ; and Lodges Rosalynde,
which gave Shakespeare much material for As You Like It^ and which was
ultimately based on the saga of the English pastoral hero Robin Hood.
15. See Genouy (cited in n. ii), 109 f,
16. See Genouy (cited in n. ii), 174 f., for details.
PASTORAL AND ROMANCE 613
17. For the linli between Sidneys book and the eighteenth-century
novel, see c. 18, p. 341.
18. Lovers Labour^s Lost, 4. 2. 96 f.
19. Ce ne sont pas bergers dune maison champestre
Qui menent pour salaire aux champs les brebis paistre,
Mais de haute famille et de race dayeux.
{Eclogue I, first speech.)
H. Wendel (cited in n. i) examines on p. 50 f. Ronsards debt to the
classical bucolic writers; and on the whole subject see A. Hulubei,
UjSglogue en France au xvi^ siecle (Paris, 1938).
20. See M. Y. Hughes, * Spenser and the Greek Pastoral Triad
{Studies in Philology, 20 (1923), 184-215), and the same scholars Virgil
and Spenser (University of California publications in English, 2. 3,
Berkeley, CaL, 1929). Mr. Plughes emphasizes the scholarship of Baif,
and holds him really responsible for creating French pastoral poetry on
a firm classical foundation.
21. These quotations are from The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,
which appeared in England's Helicon (1600), and is ascribed to Marlowe.
22. Gallus, Buc. 10
;
Varius, Buc, 9. 35 ; Bavius and Maevius, Buc. 3. 90.
23. Buc, I. 43 f.; cf. Buc, 9. 2 f.
24. For the echoes of Greek pastoral in these poems, see UAllegro,
81-90; II Penseroso, 131-8.
25. Lycidas 119 f.
26. Paradise Lost, 4. 192-3. The most extreme example of pastoralecclesiastical
satire in English is probably Quarless Shepherds' Oracles
(1646), on which see Gregs Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (London,
1906), 118-19,
27. On Adonais see also pp. 420-1. It is a touching example of the continuity
of poetic tradition that Keats should have had a vision of Lycidas
only a few years before his death, in the 'cathedral of the sea, Staffa. See
his poem written there during his tour of Scotland.
28. See p. 139.
29. See pp. 135-6.
30. On these pieces see Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama
(London, 1906), 170 f. and his Appendix i.
31. Details on II sacrifizio in Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama
(London, 1906), 174-5.
32. On Les Ombres see A. Tilley, The Literature of the French Renaissance
(Cambridge, 1904), 2. 115 f.
33. Their Italian names are Aminta and II pastor fido. Some of the
innumerable imitations are described by K. Olschki, Guarinis ^Pastorfido'
in Deutschland (Leipzig, 1908),
34. H. Smith, Pastoral Influence in the English Drama {PMLA, 12
(n.s. 5), 1897, 355-460), discusses the subject at length,
35. See As You Like It, 2. i. 21 f.
36. See p. 139. There is an admirable treatment of Comus in D. Bushs
Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis
and London, 1932), 264 f.
6i4 notes on 9. THE RENAISSANCE: PASTORAL ETC.
37. See p. 14 1, and P. H. Lang, Music in Western Civilization (New
York, 1941), 337 f.
38. P. H. Lang (cited in n. 37), 347.
39. H. Hauvette, Litterature italienne (Paris, 1924^), 322: un long
bSlement retentit des Alpes a la Sicile.
40. The history of the society was begun by 1 . Carini, UArcadia dal
16go al jSgo (v. i, Rome, 1891). There is a fine evocation of Arcadia in
c. I of Vernon Lees Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (London,
1907^), marred only by a little too much of the now it is all gone, but how
quaint it was attitude.
41. Uapres-midi d'unfaune is discussed on p. 507 f.
42. This is Die Bekehrte, no. 27 in Wolfs Goethe-Lieder.
Additional note
The famous phrase Et in Arcadia ego is often misquoted as Et ego in
Arcadia (e.g. by Goethe, Schiller, and Nietzsche) and mistranslated as
T too have lived in Arcady. It occurs first in a painting by Barbieri
(called Guercino) showing two Arcadian shepherds coming upon a
tomb, surmounted by a rat-gnawed skull. The theme was copied by
Poussin in a fine painting now at Chatsworth, and in a more famous one
in the Louvre. The phrase means Even in Arcadia I {Death) am found.
Its medieval ancestor is the meeting of the Three Dead Men and the Three
Living Men, which is connected with the Danse Macabre by J. Huizinga,
The Waning of the Middle Ages (London, 1937), 129 f. There is no trace
of the phrase in classical literature, and it was probably coined in the
Renaissance. Its meaning and background are discussed by E. Panofsky
in Philosophy and History: Essays presented to Ernst Cassirer (Oxford,
1936), 223 f. and Gazette des beaux artSy 1938 ; W. Weisbach in Die Antikey
6, and Gazette des beaux arts, 1937; and H. Wendel (cited in n. i), 72 f.
Notes on 10. rabelais and montaigne
Rabelais
For the study of Rabelais in relation to his sources and his milieu,
Jean Plattards UCEuvre de Rabelais (Paris, 1910) is of prime importance.
1. J. H. de Groot, The Shakespeares and "The Old Faith^ (New York,
1946), makes out a good case for the theory that John Shakespeare, the
father, remained a Roman Catholic in secret and that William gave more
sympathy to Catholicism than to Protestantism. Still, religion plays a
markedly small part in the thought of such men as Plamlet, Macbeth, and
Othello.
2. See Plattard, c. 5.
3. On the other hand, Rabelais is almost the only doctor who has ever
managed to make medical descriptions funny. See, for instance, the
wounds inflicted by Friar John (i. 44), the lecture of Rondibilis (3. 31),
and the anatomical description of Shrovetide (4. 30 f.), taken from a
NOTES ON 10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE 615
description of unnatural monsters, Gigantes, by the Italian humanist
Celio Calcagnini (Plattard, 162--S, 297 f.).
4. The devil appears and speaks in the mystery of Saint Louis, described
by L. Petit de Juileville, Histoire du theatre en France: les mysteres (Paris,
1906), 2. 527 f. For the spelling, see the critical edition of Rabelais by
A. Lefranc, J. Boulenger, H. Clouzot, P. Dorveaux, J. Plattard, and
L. Sainean (Paris, 1912-31), v. 3, pp. xv and xvii.
5. N. H. Clement, The Influence of the Arthurian Romances on the
Five Books of Rabelais (University of California Publications in Modern
Philology^ 12, Berkeley, CaL, 1925-6, 147-257), describes the book as
a burlesque imitation of the French medieval romances, but particularly
of the romances of the Round Tablei and 2 parodying the Arthurian
romances in general, and 3-5 the Grail quest. This is doubtless true, but
we must not forget the giant powers and giant appetites of Rabelaiss
heroes, which come from Pulci and from the medieval tales of marvels
like the Cronicques, For a very detailed and careful analysis of the relation
between Rabelais and the popular giant-stories which started him off, see
M. Fran^on, Sur lagenese de Pantagruel PMLA, 62 (1947), i. 45-61-
6. For Ponocrates see i. 23, Anagnostes i. 23, Gymnast i. 18 and i. 35,
Philotimus i. 18, Picrochole i. 26.
7. Thelema is in i. 52, its motto in i. 57.
8. The Dipsodes are in 2. 23, the Amaurots and Utopia in 2. 2,
Epistemon first in 2. 5, and Panurge first in 2. 9.
9. On Vittorino dei Ramboldini (1378-1446), called Vittorino da
Feltre, and his magnificent educational career, see J. E. Sandys, A History
of Classical Scholarship^ 2. 53 f.
10. Plattard, 54 f, and 300.
11. Bedier and Hazard, Histoire illustree de la littirature frangaise^ 164.
12. H. Schoenfeld, Rabelais and Erasmus (PMLA, n.s. i (1893)), has
pointed out that many of Erasmuss beliefs reappeared in those of hisjunior
Rabelais, who had something of the same kind of life. The Adages are full of
satirical remarks against women, monks, jurists, ceremonies, the temporal
power of the popes, vanity, and anti-humanist forces generally, very much
as the books of Rabelais are. Le Duchat has shown that Erasmuss Echo
was copied by Rabelais in Panurges discussion of marriage in 3. 9 f.
;
and Birch-Hirschfeid conjectured that a letter, expressing the deepest
indebtedness to an instructor, and written by Rabelais in 1532 while he
was working on Pantagruel^ wbs in fact addressed to Erasmus.
13. See 2. 8. In spite of his professed admiration for Plato, Rabelais
makes few direct quotations from the dialogues, and gets most of his
knowledge of Platonic doctrines from Erasmuss Adages and by osmosis
out of the surrounding humanist atmosphere (Plattard, 225).
14. I. 33: the debate comes from the interview between Cineas and
Pyrrhus given in Plutarchs life of Pyrrhus (c. 14), plus Lucians The Ship
(or Wishes) : Plattard, 207-8.
15. 2. 30, from Lucians Menippusi Plattard, 208 f.
16. Trouillogan is modelled on Pyrrho, as depicted in Lucians Sale
of Lives (itself modelled on a lost satire of Menippus): Plattard, 212 f.
6i6 NOTES ON 10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE
There are a few more incidents which Rabelais has taken directly from
Lucian, generally improving them and giving them more vigour.
17. Preface to Pantagruel, tr. Urquhart.
Montaigne
The essential book on Montaigne for our purposes is P. Villeys Les
Sources et revolution des essais de Montaigne (Paris, 1908). There is a good
modem translation with very useful notes, partly based on Villey, by
J. Zeitlin (New York, 1 934-6).
18. Essaysy i.zs' Of the institution and education of children: to the Lady
Diana of Foix
19. Essays, i. 25, Florios translation, adapted.
20. George Buchanan and Marc-Antoine Muret were among the
greatest teachers of the Renaissance. On Buchanan see J. E. Sandys, A
History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1908), 2. 243-6 ; on the even
more remarkable career of Muret, 2. 148-52.
21. The words are from one of the inscriptions Montaigne put up in
his study : servitii puhlici et munerum publicorum.
22. P. Villey, quoted in the introductory note above ; see also P. Hensel,
Montaigne und die Antike (Vortrdge der Bibliothek Warburg ig2S~~6
(Leipzig, 1928), 67-94). In La Biblioth^que de Montaigne {Revue
d^histoire littiraire de la France, 2 (1895), 313-71) P. Bonnefon gives a list
of the extant books known to have belonged to Montaigne (9 Greek,
35 Latin, 13 Italian, 2 Spanish, and 17 French), with a transcription of
the Greek and Latin sentences which he inscribed on the ceiling of his
tower-study. On the various editions of the Essays see J. Bedier and
P. Hazard, Histoire de la litterature frangaise illustree (Paris, 19234),
X. 204 : they say that the 1588 edition was a fifth edition (the fourth which
we know), and give a large photograph of a page from the Essays covered
with Montaignes own handwritten additions in a positively Proustian
intricacy.
23. Essays, 2. 10: Of Books,
24. For a discussion of the question whether Montaigne really knew
Greek or not, see Boije Knos, Les Citations grecques de Montaigne, in
Eranos, 44 (1946), 460-83. Montaigne, in Essays, i. 25 and 2. 4, said he
knew none ; and he liked using translations where possible. Nevertheless,
he quoted Greek, he understood what his quotations meant, and he had
Greek quotations inscribed on his ceiling. Mr. Knos concludes that
Montaigne knew some Greek (having come under the hellenizing influence
of Tumebus and Lambinus at Toulouse) but did not want to appear
scholarly to the point of pedantry.
25. A. D. Menut, Montaigne and the Nicomachean Ethics {Modern
Philology, $1, 3 (1934), ^25~42), gives a list of 27 references in Montaignes
Essays to the Nicomachean Ethics (a list more complete than Villeys), and
indicates a number of important areas of indirect contact, where Montaignes
thought coincides with that of Aristotle not only because he has
leamt Aristotelian principles from intermediary authors but because he
has arrived independently at the same point of view.
NOTES ON 10. RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE 617
26. C. H. Hay, in Montaigne lecteur et imitateur de Sineque (Poitiers,
1938), emphasizes the preference of Montaigne for Senecas style and
thought over those of Cicero. (On that point see also p. 323 f.) On
p. 167 f. Dr. Hay examines Montaignes essay De la solitude
^
finding that
it is largely built on Senecan ideas, and that its peroration is a pastiche
of sentences translated directly from Seneca.
27. Villey (quoted in introductory note), 215.
28. On Montaignes debt to Seneca and Plutarch, see his own assertions
in I. 25 and 2. 32. Shakespeare is known to have read the Essays with
interest and affection (see J. M. Robertson, Montaigne and Shakspere,
London, 1897), so that some of Montaignes classical learning certainly
reached him through these channels also, commended by the charm of
their style.
29. On this point see a good essay by G. S. Gordon, Theophrastus and
His Imitators, in English Literature and the Classics (ed. Gordon, Oxford,
1912).
30. Horace, Serm. 2. i. 32 f. : the votive picture of a shipwreck or some
other accident always showed every detail with naive clarity, as modem
offerings of the same kind still do.
31. Ramus, a slightly older contemporary of Montaigne, got his
doctorate in 1536 by maintaining the thesis that all Aristotles doctrines
were false : quaecumque ah Aristotele dicta essent commentitia esse, (On him,
see H. Giliot, La Querelle des anciens et des modernes en France^ Paris,
1914, 56 f., who compares Montaignes Que sgais-je? with the thesis of
Sanchez : Quod nihil scitur,)
Notes on 11, Shakespeares classics
There are many good books and articles on this subject. The following
will be found particularly helpful:
P. Alexander, Shakespeare^s Life and Art (London, 1939).
H. R. D. Anders, Shakespeare^s Books (Schriften der deutschen
Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, i, Berlin, 1904).
A. L. Attwater, Shakespeares Sources, in A Companion to Shakespeare
Studies, ed. H. Granville-Barker and G. B. Harrison (New York,
1934)-
T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere^s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke
(Urbana, 111 ., 1944),
D. Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry
(Minneapolis and London, 1932).
J. W. Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (London,
1893).
T. S. Eliot, Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca and Seneca in
Elizabethan Translation, in Selected Essays igxy-iq32 (New York,
1932)-
J. Engel, Die Spuren Senecas in Shaksperes Dramen {Preussische
Jahrhucher, 112 (1903), 6o~8i).
6i8 NOTES ON 11. SHAKESPEARE^S CLASSICS
E. I. Fripp, Shakespeares Use of Ovids Metamorphoses^ in his
Shakespeare Studies, Biographical and Literary (London,
E. I. Fripp, Shakespeare, Man and Artist (London, 1938).
S. Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare (New York, 1925"^).
F. L. Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, 1922).
M. W. MacCalium, Shakespeare^s Roman Plays and their Background
(London, 1910).
S. G. Owen, Ovid and Romance, in English Literature and the Classics
(ed. G. S. Gordon, Oxford, 1912).
L. Rick, Shakespeare und Ovid, inJahrhuch der deutschen Shakespeare-
Gesellschaft, 55 (1919), 35~S3-
R. K. Root, Classical Mythology in Shakespeare (New York, 1903).
W. W. Skeat, Shakespeare's Plutarch (London, 1875).
P. Stapfer, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (tr. E. J. Carey, London,
1880). Other works on the theme are mentioned in these notes.
1. Lucrece, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra
concern the republic; Cymheline the early empire, and Titus Andronicus
the later empire at some time after the barbarian invasions had well begun.
W. Dibelius, Zur Stoffgeschichte des Titus Andronikus' {Jahrhuch der
deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, 48 (1912), 1-12), suggests that the scene
is really Byzantium, that Titus Andronicus is the violent Byzantine
emperor who reigned from 1183 to 1185, and that Tamora is Thamar of
Georgia (1184-1220), the unidentifiable Demetrius being a Dmitri. See
also The Story of Isaac and Andronicus by E. H. McNeal, in Speculum,
9 (1934), 3Z4r-g. This tells how the emperor Andronicus was tortured to
death with frightful barbarity, and explains how the story could have
reached England via the army of Richard I : it appears in the chronicle
of Benedict of Peterborough. The setting of Cymheline is partly Roman,
partly vague early~British ; but the play really concerns Rome much less
than the subject which long haunted Shakespeares mind, the conflict
between English honesty and Italian treachery: see 3. 2. 4, 5. 5. 197 f.,
5. 5*
2. One of these, The Comedy of Errors, is an adaptation of two Roman
adaptations of Greek plays (see pp. 214, 624-5). One is from Athenian
history (Timon of Athens, c. 407 B.c.). Three are set in the prehistoric past
of myth (Venus and Adonis, Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer-Nighfs
Dream)
;
and one, Pericles, is a retelling of a late Greek romance. (On these
romances see p. 163 f.)
3. See p. 4.
4. Hamlet, 5. 2. 29
5. Hamlet, 2. 2. 350
6. Two of the Italian plays take place in Venice and the Venetian
empire (Othello and The Merchant) ; two in Verona (Romeo and Juliet and
The Two Gentlemen) ; one in Messina (Much Ado about Nothing) ; one in
Sicily (The Winter's Tale); and one in Padua (The Taming of the Shrew).
7. In Lodges Rosalynde, from which Shakespeare took the basis of
As Ym Like It, the setting was the forest of Ardenne in north-eastern
NOTES ON 11 . SHAKESPEARE^S CLASSICS 619
France, pasteralized and idyllized. By changing its name Shakespeare
moved it to England near his own home: his mothers name was Mary
Arden. H. Smith, Pastoral Influence in the English Drama (PMLA,
12 (n.s. 5), 1897, 378 f.), shows how greatly Shakespeare reduced the
conventional pastoral colouring in adapting Lodges story, and how much
more real and homely he made it.
8. Troilus and Cressida, 4. 2. 31.
9. Cymbeline, 2. 3. 21 f.
10. The Winter^s Tale^ 4. 3. 120 f.
11. Hamlet, 3. 4. 55 f. ; and see p. 605.
12. The Merchant of Venice, 5. i. 9 f
.
13. Henry V, 2, 3. 9.
14. 2 Henry IV, 3. 2. 300 f.
15. King Lear, 3. 4. 185; cf. Brownings Childe Roland to the Bark
Tower came,
16. See Stapfer, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (cited in introductory
note), 223, and Attwater (introductory note), 233-5. Ajax in
Troilus and Cressida is made not only stupid, but vaincovetous of
praise, self-affected. Homers Ajax is not at all like that. R. K. Root
(cited in introductory note) shows on p. 36 f. that this part of Ajaxs
character comes from Ovid (Met, 13), where Ajax competes with Ulysses
for the weapons of Achilles, and is presented, both in his own speech and
in that of his rival, as ridiculously conceited.
17. Troilus and Cressida, 2. 2. 166.
18. Troilus and Cressida, i. i. 81. The seven-day week did not exist
in Greece.
19. The Comedy of Errors, 5. i.
20. Nashe, preface to Greenes Menaphon,
21. C. Spurgeon, Shakespeare^s Imagery (New York, 1935). See
especially pp. 13, 19-20, 44-5, and Chart V.
22. As You Like It, 3. 3. 7 f
.
23. Romeo and Juliet, 3. 2. if. The myth of Phaethon is in Ovid,
Metamorphoses, i. 748-2. 332; waggoner is the Elizabethan translator
Goldings word for the young charioteer, and no doubt Shakespeare
remembered it. (See Rootcited in the introductory note97.)
24. The phrase comes from Jonsons commendatory verses in the
First Folio. J. E. Spingam, Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New
York, 1899), 89 n., suggests that Jonson was quoting a phrase from
Minturno, Arte poetica, 158 : poco del latino e pochissimo del greco. On the
entire subject of Shakespeares education see Mr. T. W. Baldwins
valuable book cited in the introductory note.
25. There are only a few striking nouns, like cacodemon (Richard III,
1, 3. 144), anthropophagi (Othello, also i. 3. 144), and misanthropes
(Timon of Athens, 4. 3. 53), which last comes from a footnote in Norths
Plutarch, is mispronounced, and is carefully explained.
26. The Welsh-spoken schoolmaster in The Merry Wives is apparently
modelled on Thomas Jenkins, Shakespeares own Latin master at Stratford
(see Baldwin and Fripp, cited in the introductory note). John Aubrey
620 NOTES ON 11 . SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS
reports a tradition from William Beestons mouth that Shakespeare himself
was in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country.
27. See Pantagruel, 2. 6, and p. 108.
28. LovPs Labour^s Lost, 4. 3, 342 f.
29. See p, 156 f.
30. The Tempest^ i. 2. 167.
31. The Merchant of Veniccy 5. i. 60 f. ; cf. Plato, Rep, 10. 617 6.
32. Baldwin (cited in introductory note), 2. 418 f. R. K. Root (introductory
note) has shown that the overwhelming majority of Shakespeares
mythological allusions come directly from Ovid, and the remainder, with
few exceptions, from Vergil. Tn other words, a man familiar with these
two authors, and with no others, would be able to make all the mythological
allusions contained in the undisputed works of Shakespeare,
barring some few exceptions. Mr. Root also points out that, as Shakespeare
matured, he almost gave up using mythology, and that he returned
to it in later life, giving it much deeper meanings.
33. Meres, Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury
^
280.
34. The first heir of my invention (Dedication to Venus and Adonis),
35. In Ovids tale of Venus and Adonis {Met, 10. 519-59 and 705-39),
Adonis is not cold and reluctant as Shakespeare makes him. Shakespeare
took his froward resistance to love from Ovids story of Hermaphroditus
and Salmacis in Met, 4. 285-388. The two stories coalesce completely in
The Passionate Pilgrinty 6, where Adonis bounces into a brook, and Venus
cries O Jove, why was not I a flood?^for Salmacis bounced in after her
beloved, the two joined, and both became a flood. See D. Bush (cited in
introductory note), 139 f., for a detailed analysis of the treatment of
Adonis; and R. K. Root (introductory note), 31-3, for the proof that
Shakespeares description of the raging boar {Venus and Adonis) comes
from a different passage of Ovid, Met, 8. 284-6, probably in Goldings
version.
36. Ov. Am, I. 15. 35-6.
37. The story of Lucretia is in Livy, i. 57-9, and Ovid, Fastiy 2. 721-
852. Since no English translation of the Fasti appeared until 1640, and
since Shakespeare adapts phrases from the poem, he apparently knew the
original. (See Owencited in the introductory noteFripp (ditto),
I. 363 , and Bush (ditto), 149 f.)
38. The Taming of the Shrew
y
3. i. 26 f. The quotation is from Ovid,
Heroidesy i. 33-4- Penelope writes to Ulysses that the other heroes have
all returned home, and are now telling their battles over again, sketching
the terrain on the table, and saying
Here flowed the Simois; here is Sigeum;
here was old Priams lofty citadel.
39. Titus Andronicusy 4. 3. 4 = Ov. Met. i. 150; 5 Henry VI
y
i. 3. 48 Ov. Her, 2. 66*
40. Ov. Met, I, 395 (Pyrrha), 3. 173 (Diana), 6. 346 (Latona), 14. 382
and 438 (Circe). Anders (see introductory note), 22, points out that the
name Titania is not in Goldings version of the Metamorphoses
y
so that
NOTES ON 11 . SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS 6zx
Shakespeare, with his delicate ear, must have remembered it from the
original Latin.
41. T. S. Eliot, The Classics and the Man of Letters (London and New
York, 1943). Mr. Eliots whole discussion of the classical tradition in
Shakespeares and Miltons education is well worth reading.
42. The original is Ov. Met. 15. 181 f.:
ut unda iinpellitur unda
urgeturque prior ueniente urgetque pnorem,
tempora sic fugiunt panter pariterque sequuntur
et noua sunt semper.
Shakespeares sequent may be a sign that he had looked at the original.
In Ovid the waves are the separate waves of a river, the Greek philosophers
image for permanence in change. Shakespeare makes them the waves of
the sea on the shore, because British rivers seldom have waves, and because
he is thinking of the sea-image in Sonnet 64. (See S. G. Owen,
cited in introductory note.)
43. Ov. Met. 15. 75 f., especially 165 f. : ultimately from Heraclitus.
44. Tranio, in The Taming of the Shrew
^
i. i. 29 f.
45. Romeo and Juliet, 2. 2. 92 f. = Ovid, A. A. i. 633; but see Root
(cited in introductory note), 82, for the suggestion that this idea may have
reached Shakespeare through Boiardos Orlando innamorato, 1. 22. 45.
46. The Taming of the Shrew, 4. 2. 8.
47. Shakespeares source here was Ovid, Her. 7, the letter of Dido:
there is at least one straight quotation
:
What says the married woman ? You may go ?
Would she had never given you leave to come!
(Antony and Cleopatra, 1,3. 20-1).
Sed iubet ire deus. Vellem uetuisset adire! (Her. 7. 139).
And in 4, 12. 53 Shakespeare makes Antony explicitly compare himself
and Cleopatra with Aeneas and Dido. For this and other interesting parallels
see T. Zielinski, Marginalien (Philologus, 64 (n.F. 18), 1905, x f.), who
points out that Cleopatra, like Dido in Her. 7. 133 f., hints at being pregnant:
see Antony and Cleopatra, i. 3. 89-95.
48. The Tempest, 5.1. 33-50. The tiny fairies of the seashore and the
glade, brothers to Pease-blossom, Cobweb, and Mustard-seed, are here
reminiscences of Ariels gentler kinsman Puck rather than assistants in
Prosperos prodigious magic. Doubtless they were suggested to Shakespeare,
not by the content of the invocation, but by Goldings word elves*
49. Macbeth, 4. i, 4 f.
50. Ov. Met. 7. 262 f.
51. Macbeth, 3. 5. 23-4.
52. Ov. Met. 3, 206 f.
53. M.N.D. 4. I. 118 f. See also The Merry IFzws, 2. i. 120:
Like Sir Actaeon he, with Ringwood at thy heels ^where Ringwood is the dog-name Golding
substituted for Ovids
Hylactor, Barker. (See Root, cited in introductory note, 30.) The following
passages also are worth comparing:
62a NOTES ON 11 . SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS
A Midsummer-NigMs Dreamy i. i. 170, and Ov. Met, i. 470, a parallel
which suggests that the dfficult line 172 in Hermias speech refers
to the arrow, and ought to be placed before 17 1
;
As You Like Ity 3. 3. 10 f., and Ov. Met. 8. 626-30;
The Winter's Tale, 4. 3. 116 f., and Ov. Met. 5. 391 f.
54. e.g. As You Like /i, 3 . 3 . 7 f. (quoted on p. 1 99), and L.L.L. 4. 2. 1 28,
both containing Latin puns.
55. e.g. Cymbeline, 2. 2. 44 f., and Titus AndronicuSy 4. i. 42!
$ 6. A Midsummer-Night's Dream, 5. i. 129 f.
57. The Winter's Tale, 5. 3. 21 f. Fripp, Shakespeare, Man and Artist
(London, 1938), i. 102-14, has a detailed and sensitive discussion of
Shakespeares love for Ovid. He also points out (i. 597, n. 4) that
Shakespeare, who sympathized with Montaigne in so much, resembled
him in his early admiration of the Metamorphoses. (See p. 186.)
58. Titus Andronicus, 2. i. 133 f. == Sen. Phaedra, 1180, garbled;
4. I. 81-2 == Sen. Phaedra, 671-2, with a textual variation that would
occur only to a latinist. The latter passage is directly imitated in Jonsons
Catiline, 3, 4. 1-2, and adapted in Tourneurs The Revenger's Tragedy,
4. 2.
59. This subject has been treated in detail by J. W. Cunliffe and F. L.
Lucas, whose books are cited in the introductory note.
60. Hamlet, 5. 4. 232 f.; Macbeth, 5. 5. 19 f.
61. Timon of Athens, 4. i, 4. 3.
62. King Lear, 4. i. 36 f.
63. See Cunliffe (quoted in introductory note), 25 f., who refers to
Seneca, Phaedra, 978 f.
:
Res humanas ordine nullo
Fortuna regit sparsitque manu
munera caeca, peiora fouens
;
uincit sanctos dira libido,
fraus sublimi regnat in aula.
64. e.g. in Websters The Duchess ofMalfi (5. 3 fin., 5. 5 fin.).
65. Hamlet, 5. i. 245 f,
66. I Henry IV, i. 3. 130 f,
67. Timon of Athens, 4. 3. 178 f.
68. See pp. 132-3.
69. So Cunliffe (cited in introductory note), 16-17, and T. S. Eliot, in
his essay Seneca in Elizabethan Translation {Selected Essays xgi>j-xg32.
New York, 1932).
70. See Richard III, i. 2. 68 f., 4. 4. 344 f., and compare Eliot (cited in
n. 69), 72 , and Lucas (introductory note), 119 f.
71. Cunliffe (cited in introductory note) gives details on 68 f.
72. Sen. Phaedra, 715 f., in the same scene which contains Hippolytus*
cry to heaven for vengeance, cited in note 58
:
Quis eluet me Tanais aut quae barbaris
Maeotis undis Pontico incumbens mari?
non ipse torn magnus Oceano pater
tantum expiarit scelus.
NOTES ON 11 . SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS 623
73. Sen. Here, Fur. 1323 f., ending
haerebit altum facinus.
74. Macbeth^ 2. 2. 61 f., 5. i. 56. Murder is constantly imaged as a
blood-stain in this play: see 2. 2. 47 f., 2. 3. 118-23, 5- ^ throughout, and
hints such as 4. i. 123 and 4. 3. 40-1.
75. Sen. Here. Fur, 1258-61.
76. Macbeth, 5. 3. 22 f.
77. Sen. Here. Fur. 1261-2.
78. Macbeth, 5. 3. 40.
79. Macbeth, i. 7. 7 f. = Sen. Here. Fur. 735-6:
quod quisque fecit patitur. auctorem scelus
repetit suoque prenutur exemplo nocens.
Macbeth, 4. 3. 209 f. = Sen. Phaedra, 607, a favourite line with the
Elizabethans
:
curae leues loquuntur, ingentes stupent.
A parallel between the invocations of Lady Macbeth {Macbeth, i. 5. 41 f.)
and Medea (Sen. Medea, 1-55, especially 9-15 and 40-50) has been
noticed, but is less convincing. But it seems clear that the long series of
phrases in praise of sleep {Macbeth, 2. 2. 37 f.) was suggested by Seneca,
Here. Fur. 1065 f. ; and still more reminiscences are given by Engel, whose
essay is quoted in the introductory note to this chapter.
80. See p. 393 f.
81. In the final scene of Timon of Athens (5. 4. 70 f.) Alcibiades reads
out what is supposed to be an epitaph written for Timon by himself and
engraved on his tomb
:
Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft:
Seek not my name; a plague consume you wicked caitiffs left!
Here lie I, Timon; who, alive, all living men did hate:
Pass by, and curse thy fill ; but pass, and stay not here thy gait.
Obviously this is not one poem but two. A glance at Plutarch shows that
he gives two different epitaphs written at different times (one by
Callimachus, one attributed to Timonhimself) and mutually incompatible.
But Shakespeare, careless of the incongruity, runs the two together.
82. Shakespeares father was a whittawer, who processed leather for
the manufacture of gloves, purses, parchment, &c. As trades went, this
was doubtless dignified and lucrative ; but in its social opportunities it was
far below the professions and the landed gentry. As for the school at
Stratford, it was efficient enough, but it was not St. Pauls, or Winchester,
or Eton,
83. Julius Caesar, 2. 1. 61-5.
84. Before this, Shakespeare knew Seneca, had copied him in Richard
III, and, if Titus Andronicus be his or partly his, had tried his prentice
hand at writing Senecan tragedy; but it was only after he married the
manner of Seneca to the matter of Plutarch that he created great tragedy.
85. Shakespeares use of Norths Plutarch has been treated eloquently
and in detail by M. W, MacCallum, whose book is cited in the introductory
624 NOTES ON 11 . SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS
note. See also Skeats reprint of the text, mentioned there. Skeat points
out that many of the names of secondary characters in Shakespeares
other dramas come from PlutarchMarcellus, Lysander, and perhaps
Demetrius (but see note i). W. Warde Fowler has a useful essay on
Julius Caesar in his Roman Essays and Interpretations (Oxford, 1920).
86. Julius Caesar^ 1. 2. 19 1 f.
87. Julius Caesar^ 2. 2. 37 f, H. M. Ayres, in Shakespeares Julius
Caesar in the Light of some other Versions (PMLAy n.s. 18 (1910),
183-227), points out that during the Renaissance the dramatic conception
of Caesars character had, in default of a model in classical tragedy, been
distorted to resemble that of the braggart Hercules in Seneca (e.g. in
Marc-Antoine Murets Latin tragedy on Caesar), and that the passages
in Shakespeares play where Caesar struts and brags are affected by the
hybristic heroes of Seneca and their copies in contemporary drama.
88. Antony and Cleopatra, 2. 2. 194 f. See also p. 157.
89. The question whether Shakespeare used a translation of Plautus
when writing The Comedy of Errors has been much vexed. It seems to
me to have been given more importance than it deserves : for if Shakespeare
could read Amphitruo in Latin, he could surely read Menaechmi,
and no one has undertaken to show that a translation of Amphitruo was
available. However, these are some of the main facts
:
{a) The Comedy of Errors was written and produced between 1589 and
1593, when France was making war against her heir, Henri IV (see
3. 2. 127-8). The joke would be obscure before August 1589 and out of
date after 1593.
{h) The only known Elizabethan translation of Plautus Menaechmi was
published by Creede in 1595 and attributed to W. W., who may have been
William Warner. The publisher in his foreword says that W. W. had
translated several plays of Plautus for the use and delight of his private
friends, who in Plautus owne words are not able to understand them, and
that he himself had prevailed on W. W. to publish this one. If this is
true, the translation had been circulating in manuscript. If Shakespeare
was one of W. W.s friends, he could have seen it. But it seems more
probable that (as has been suggested) the success of The Comedy of Errors
prompted W, W. to publish his version.
(c) A comparison of The Comedy of Errors with W. W.s translation
shows that the two do not coincide. Several important characters and
dramatic roles are different, and although people in similar situations say
similar things in both plays, Shakespeares characters do not echo W. W.s
words. The presumption is therefore heavily against Shakespeares use
of W. W. (See the detailed comparison by H. Isaac, Shakespeares
Comedy of Errors und die Menachmen des Plautus, Archiv fur das
Studium der neueren Sprachen und Litteraturen, 70 (1883), i-aS.)
(d) On New Years Day the children of Powles produced
something called The Historie of Error at Hampton Court. The boys of
St. Pauls School were good latinists (as they still are) and this could have
been an adaptation of Menaechmi, just as Ralph Roister Doister was an
adaptation of themes from Miles gloriosus. If it was, Shakespeare could
NOTES ON 11 . SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS 625
have seen and used it. But we do not know that it was, or that he ever
saw it.
(e) M. Labinski, Shakespeares Komodie der Irrungen (Breslau, 1934),
suggests that Shakespeare might have used an Italian adaptation of Plautus
:
for the names of Dromio and Adriana and Luciana, and the characters
of the goldsmith Angelo and the merchant Balthazar, are contemporary
Italian. But no adaptation very like his play has been found.
To the fact that Shakespeare read Amphitruo in the original should be
added the fact that he also knew a third comedy by Plautus, the MosteU
laria. In The Taming of the Shrew the names of the servants Tranio and
Grumio come from the Mostellaria; and so also do some incidents, and
the character of Tranio^who, as in Plautus, is made his young masters
guardian, but instead turns him into merry ways (see his speech in i. i.
29 f.).
90. Several studies of Shakespeares technique in The Comedy of Errors
have shown that, in taking over the stories of Plautus Menaechmi and
Amphitruo^ he was not hindered by any difficulty in understanding Latin,
but felt quite free to alter and transform, as one feels free only when one
has a firm grip on ones material. These articles emphasize, among others,
the fact that he purified and ennobled the play by making the courtesan
less prominent and the loving wife Adriana more real and human. See,
in particular, E. Gills A Comparison of the Characters in The Comedy of
Errors with those in the Menaechmi' {Texas University Studies in English^ 5
(1925), 79-95), the same authors very careful essay The Plot-structure
of The Comedy of Errors in Relation to its Sources {Texas University
Studies in English^ 10 (1930), 13-65), and M. Labinskis Shakespeares
Komodie der Irrungen (Breslau, 1934). There are some suggestive remarks
in V. G. Whitakers Shakespeares Use of his Sources {Philological
Quarterly^ 20 (1941), esp. 380 f.). G. B. Parks, in Shakespeares Map for
The Comedy of Errors {Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 39
(1940), 93-^), shows that, when Shakespeare wanted to find some other
locale than the relatively unknown Epidamnus (where Plautus put the
Menaechmi), he looked up the index of the great atlas of Ortelius of
Antwerp, and there, beside Epidamnus, found Ephesus. He then moved
the locale to Ephesus, which every modem reader knows from the sensational
episode in the Acts of the Apostles; and he rearranged the journey
of the chief characters very intelligently to fit the change. He also brought
in Epidaums, which appears in the index just after Epidamnus: see
I. I. 93. Only one verbal reminiscence of Plautus plays seems to have
been pointed out in The Comedy of Errorsa small one at that : The
Comedy of Errors, 3. i. 80 == Amphitruo, 1048.
91. I Henry IV, 2. i. 104; Much Ado about Nothing, 4. i. 21-2; and
especially The Merry Wives of Windsor, 4. i.
92. For instance, a servant in Terence {Eun, i. i, 29) tells his master
that, since he has been captured by love, his only resort is to ransom himself
as cheaply as possible:
quid agas ? nisi ut te redimas captum quam queas
minumo.
S076 S S
6z6 NOTES ON 11 . SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS
Colet and Lily abbreviated this into one line, no doubt to illustrate the
idiom of quam with the superlative (= as ... as possible); and in that
form Tranio quotes it to his master (The Taming of the Shrew
^
i. i. i66)
:
If love have touched you, nought remains but so
:
Redime te captum, quam queas minimo.
And although Titus Andronicus is shaky evidence for Shakespeares
practice, there is a most amusing illustration of this method of quotation
in it. The villains are sent certain weapons bearing the inscription
:
Integer vitae scelerisque purus
Non eget Mauri iaculis neque arcu (Horace, Carm. i. 22).
An innocent unstained with crime
will need no Moorish spears nor bow.
When Demetrius reads this out, Chiron observes:
0
1
tis a verse in Horace ; I know it well
;
I read it in the grammar long ago. (Titus Andronicus, 4. 2. 20).
93. L.L.L. 4. 2. 96 f.
94. Hamlet, 5. i. 260!.
95. Persius, i. 38-9:
Nunc non e tumulo fortunataque fauilla
nascentur uiolae?
96. Baldwin, William Shakspere^s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, i.
649.
97. The Comedy of Errors, i. i. 31 = Verg. Aen. z. 3
:
Infandum, regina, lubes renouare dolorem.
Other Vergilian reminiscences include:
The Tempest, 4, i. 101-2 == Verg. Aen. i. 46 blended with i. 405
;
the stage direction in The Tempest, 3. 3. 53 = Verg. Aen. 3. 219 f.:
claps his wings being a translation of magnis quatiunt clangorihus
alas, 3. 226;
the saffron wings of Iris in The Tempest, 4. i. 78 = Verg. Aen. 4.
700-2 (perhaps through Phaers translation: see Root, Classical
Mythology in Shakespeare, 77)
;
the herald Mercury in Hamlet, 3. 4. 58 = Verg. Aen. 4. 246-53
(Root, 8s)
;
and a neat pun in 2 Henry VI, 2. i. 24 = Verg. Aen. i. ii, where
caelestibus, heavenly, is taken as though it meant clerical.
98. 2 Hen. VI, 4. 7. 65 = Caesar, B. G. $. 14. 1: *
ex eis omnibus longe sunt humanissimi qui Cantium incolunt ; of these (the
southern British) the inhabitants of Kent are far the most civilized.
99. See E* L Fripp, Shakespeare, Man and Artist, 96 f.
100. Julms Caesar, 5. 3. 94 f.
1 01. Lucan, Bell. Cm. i. 2-3. The probability that Shakespeare is
echoing Lucan is strengthened by the oddity of the phrase turns our
NOTES ON 11 . SHAKESPEARES CLASSICS 627
swords in our own proper entrails, which looks like a remembered mistranslation
of the Latin:
populumque potentem
in sua uictrici conuersum uiscera dextra.
102. Hamlet
y
2. 2. 200 f.
103. Nevertheless, Shakespeares knowledge of Juvenals satire is
obviously very vague : if he had read it, he would certainly have remembered
it vividly. The brilliant detail thick amber and plum-tree gum is
not in Juvenal (who would have admired it), and the rest of Hamlets
speech is only a faint reflection of the poem. The satire is sometimes
called The Vanity of Human WisheSy and was adapted in English by
Johnson under that title. Theobald and others have detected a reminiscence
of its powerful opening lines in Menecrates warning to the
ambitious Pompey (Antony and Cleopatray 2. i. 5-8):
We, ignorant of ourselves,
Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers
Deny us for our good ; so find we profit
By losing of our prayers.
For a larger treatment of Shakespeares satirical purposes and methods,
see O. J. Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare^s ^Troilus and
Cressida* (San Marino, CaL, 1938), and his Shakespeare's Satire (New
York and London, 1943).
Notes on 12. lyric poetry
1. 2 Samuel vi. 14 f.
2. Lyric means music for the lyre. The Greeks usually spoke of
melic* poetry, from melos = song, the word we know from melody.
3. For a chronological account of his long and magnificent career,
traced through the poems produced at its various stages, see U. von
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Pindaros (Berlin, 1922), and G. Norwoods
beautifully written Pindar (Sather Classical Lectures, 1945, Berkeley,
CaL, 1946).
4. When the verses are longer than can be sung or danced in a single
sweep, they are divisible again into phrases (kolci} which correspond in
their turn.
5. Hor. Carm. 4. 2. s~8. It is a mistake, however, to believe that
Horace thought Pindars odes were written in free verse. The patternless
rhythms are strictly limited, by Horaces logical division, to the
dithyrambs:** see lines 10-24. E. Fraenkel, Das Pindargedicht des
Horaz (Sitzungsherichte der Heidelherger Akademie der WtssenschafteUy
1932-3), has a valuable discussion of the poem.
6. See pp, 271-2 for the story of a French lady who refused to believe
her husbands literal translation of Pindars first Olympian ode.
7. Quoted from Racans Vie de Malherbe by A. Croiset, La Poisie de
Pindare et les Ms du lyrisme grec (Paris, 1895 3
), 449.
8. Boileau, Art podtique, 2. 72.
628 NOTES ON 12. LYRIC POETRY
9. Norwood, Pindar (quoted in n. 3), 98 f. On p. 51 f. of his Pindar^
a Poet of Eternal Ideas (Baltimore, 1936), Prof. D. M. Robinson suggests
that Pindar was the first poet to develop one of the most famous images in
the world, the Wheel of Fortune (Ol. 2. 35 f.). The suggestion is taken
up by Prof. Norwood on p. 253 f.
10. Hor. Carm. 4. 2. He never attempted to copy Pindars astonishing
metres or his sumptuous vocabulary; but he did use a number of Pindars
themes: for instance, in Carm. i. 13 init., 3. 4, and the important
victory ode 4. 4. On the whole subject see E. Fraenkel, cited in n. 5,
P. Rummel, Horatius quid de Pindaro iudicauerit (Rawitsch, 1892), and
E. Harms, Horaz in seinen Beziehungen zu Pindar (Marburg, 1936).
11. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1946), s.v., our swan
is the Cygnus olor^ which can only hiss, and the legend that the swan sings
comes from the voice of the migrant whooper swan (Cygnus musicus)^
which has an American cousin, the trumpeter swan.
12. Gray, The Progress of Poesy; and not he alone.
13. Yet if Horace thought he was a bee in contrast to the swan-like
Pindar, he also thought that he himself was a swan in comparison with
ordinary men (Carm. 3. 20, 4. 3. 19 f.). I cannot follow L. P. Wilkinson
(Horace and his Lyric Poetry, Cambridge, 1945, 62) in believing that
Horace was overcome by the giggles in the middle of Carm. 2. 20, and
then became serious again to finish the poem. A poet like Horace does
not lose control in the middle of a lyric, nor publish a half-comical poem
in such an important place as the end of an entire book. The poem is a
failure, not because Horace could not restrain his sense of humour, but
because six brief tight Alcaic stanzas do not give him enough room to
make his metamorphosis imaginatively convincing. In a short poem you
can say that you have built a monument, but scarcely that you are turning
into a large bird.
14. See p. 418 f.
15. Along book could be written on the false antithesis classical)(romantic.
Other remarks on the subject will be found on pp. 355 , 375, 390 of
this work. There is an exuberant attack on the distinction in Victor Hugos
1824 preface to Odes et ballades i
[i.e. Hugo] r^pudie tous ces termes de convention que les partis se rejettent
r^ciproquement comme des ballons vides, signes sans signification, expressions
sans expression, mots vagues que chacun d^finit au besoin de ses haines ou de
ses pr<jug<Ss, et qui ne servent de raisons qu'^ ceux qui nen ont pas. Pour lui,
il ignore profond^ment ce que cest que le genre classique et que le genre romantique.
. . . Le beau dans Shakespeare est tout aussi classique (si classique signifie
digne detre tudi6) que le beau dans Racine; et It faux dans Voltaire est tout
aussi romantique (si romantique veut dire mauvais) que It faux dans Calderon.
See Henri Peyres valuable discussion of the idea of Classicism with his
extensive bibliography: Le Classidsme fran^ais (New York, 1942).
16. Bergk, Poeiae lyrici Graeci (Leipzig, iSyS-Sa'^), 3, p. 315, no. 31;
fieaovvKTLOLS TTod* Spais,
tivIk ^'ApKros rjBi]
Kara Bodbrov . . .
NOTES ON 12. LYRIC POETRY 629
Did Poe know this poem, and diabolize it in The Raven ? The theme is
the same: a supernatural being enters a lonely mans room at midnight,
and, refusing to leave, dominates his life.
17. Unfortunately the scope of this book will not permit a discussion
of the modem epigram, nor of the different influences exercised upon it
by Martial and by the Greek epigrammatists.
18. There are two admirably thorough studies of the subject by James
Hutton, The Greek Anthology in Italy
y
and The Greek Anthology in France
and in the Latin Writers of the Netherlands to the Year 1800 (Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1935 and 1946). See also Classical
Influence upon the Tribe of BeUy by K. A. McEuen (Cedar Rapids, Iowa,
1939), cc. 7 and 8.
19. Cat. 85
:
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
20. Cat. 2 and 3, two of the most famous poems on a favourite theme

the lovers identification of himself with a pet animal which his mistress
caresses. The colloquialism of the language in these hendecasyllabic
poems is very important, and is sometimes overlooked : it shows, among
other things, that they were posing as improvisations.
21. Details in Orazio nella letteratura mondiale (Istituto di studi romani,
Rome, 1936^xiv).
22. Carm. 4. 2: pp. 225-6 above.
23. Alamanni was then living in exile at the French court. Laumonier
believes, apparently with justice, that Ronsard did not study or imitate
Alamannis Pindarics in any important degree (see his Ronsard pohte
lyriqucy Paris, 1923^, 344 n. i and 704-6). It is sometimes said that the
chomses in Trissinos tragedy Sofonisba (on 'which see p. 136) are in
agreement with Pindaric practice (R. Shafer, The English Ode to 1660
y
Princeton, 1918, 60 f.); but they are not called odes, nor divided into
sections called strophe, antistrophe, and epode. Even if Trissino was
trying to write a Greek chorus in SofonishUy he is much more likely to have
been thinking of the tragic choruses, which were also triadic, than of
Pindar. The poems look to me just like Trissinos ordinary canzonL See
also P. de Nolhac, Ronsard et Vhumanisme (Paris, 1921), 45 f.
24. Le premier de France
Jay pindariz^ {Odes, 2. 2. 36-7; cf. i. 4 fin.).
25. See pp. 94, 145.
26. This friend has been identified by de Nolhac as Claudio Duchi (see
Laumonier, Ronsard poete lyrique (cited in n. 23), 5-6, and H. Chamard,
Histoire de la Pleiade, Paris, 1939-40, i. 72). Strange, and a little ungenerous,
that Ronsard never mentions him.
27. For testimonies to Dorats teaching, see Ronsards ode to him
{Odes, I. 13); H. Chamard (cited in n. 26), i, c. 2; P. de Nolhac (cited in
n. 23), cc. 6-7 ; J. E. Sandys, AHistory of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge,
1908), 2. 186-8. His name was sometimes spelt DAurat and latinized as
630 NOTES ON 12. LYRIC POETRY
Auratus, but more usually Dorat. (He had given up the family name
Dinemandi: Dorat was supposed to be the name of his ancestors.)
E. Gandar, Ronsard considere comme imitateur d^Homere et de Pindare
(Metz, 1854), 80 f., points out that there was no tradition of Pindaric
learning and no complete French edition of Pindar when Ronsard started
his reading in Greek, so that Dorat both explained the difficult language
and showed his pupils the beauties of the poetry in Pindars qides. On this
see also Chamard (cited in n. 26), i. 338 f.
28. There was a group of poets in Alexandria in the third century b.c.
who were called the Pleiad after the constellation. (Alexandrian critics
and those who admired them liked to group greatnesses in sevens.)
Ronsard knew a good deal about Alexandrian poetry (he copied Callimachus
in his Hymns), and he was probably thinking of this group when
he transferred the name to his own clique. Binet gives their names as:
Dorat, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Bai'f, Belleau, Jodelle, and Tyard (Chamard,
cited in n. 26, v. i, c. 5).
29. The title in the first edition is La Deffence, et Illustration de la
Langue Francoyse. The word illustration might simply mean explanation
i.e. an elucidation of the powers and the future of the language. But in
fact it means glorification or ennoblement. It contains two ideas:
{a) a method of making the French language noble and respected;
(6) a proof that the French language is genuinely noble. Du Bellay
was chiefly thinking of the former, as is shown by the synonyms he uses
for illustration, and by such sentences as this about the French language:
Je ne te puis mieux persuader dy ecrire, quen te montrant le moyen de
Venrichir et illustrer, qui est Timitation des Grecz et Romains* (2. 2. 191-2).
But the two meanings were connected. He believed that to enrich the
French language was the way to increase its prestige. On the book see
Chamard (cited in n. 26), i. 4.
30. 1552 old style = 1553. See p. 137, also Chamard (cited in n. 26),
2. II.
31. Cf. Ronsard, Odes, i. 22 (A sa lyre):
Je pillay Thebe, et saccageay la Pouille,
Tenrichissant de leur belle despouille.
There is a youthful boldness about this metaphor; but a sensitive Roman
might think there was also an unfortunate touch of atavistic barbarism.
Horace could have written an amusing epode on the young Gauls staggering
homewards with their shoulders bent beneath their lootsacks full
of sculptural heads and limbs, bales of pictures cut up into small neat
squares,
32. Sur toutes choses prens garde que ce genre de potoe soit eloingne
du vulgaire, enrichy et illustr6 de motz propres et epithetes non oysifz,
om6 de graves sentences, et vari6 de toutes manieres de couleurs et
ornementz poetiques, non comme un Laissez la verde couleur, Amour
avecques Psyches, O combien est heureuse, et autres telz ouvraiges, mieux
dignes destre nommez Chansons vulgaires quOdes ou Vers liriques,
NOTES ON 12. LYRIC POETRY 631
(Du Bellay, Deffence 3. 4, quoted and annotated by Laumonier (see n. 23),
introd. xxi.) The amusing thing is that the second of these pieces is itseif
on a classical theme, and comes from an anthology of poems entitled
Lament of Venus on the Death of Fair Adonis, But the objection to it was
that it was too folksy and not classical enough.
33. Du Bellay does not say this explicitly, nor could he, since Dorat
composed much Latin and Greek poetry; but it is a necessary implication.
34. See Laumonier (cited in n. 23), introd. xv, xx f., xxix, xxxi f., and
706 f.
35. I. Silver, Ronsard and Du Bellay on their Pindaric Collaboration
{Romanic Review
^
33 (1942), x-25), shows that Du Bellay tried his hand
quite as soon as Ronsard, if not before ; and, after finding himself unequal
to the task, relinquished priority to Ronsard. At some time their teacher
Dorat wTOte Pindaric odes in Latin, as an Italian humanist had done (see
Chamard, cited in n. 26, i. 339). It seems most probable that he wrote
these first, and that his pupils then set out to emulate them in French.
(Details in P. de Nolhac, cited in n. 23, 44-52.) In a preparatory article,
Did Du Bellay know Pindar? {PMLA, 56 (1941), 1007-19), Mr. Silver
showed with practical certainty that he did. Du Bellays Ode au Prince de
Melphe^ although Pindaric in its loftiness, criticizes Pindar as obscure and
rambling.
36. Ronsards tremendous ode to Michel de LHospital, i. 10, in 24
triads, was evidently designed to outdo the longest of Pindars odes,
Pyth. 4, with its 13 triads.
37. OdeSy 1 . 1-7 and 9-15 are in the Pindaric A-Z-P pattern. OdeSy i . 8
is often described as monostrophic and treated as an imitation of such
odes as Pindar, OL 11 (so Laumonier, cited in n. 23, 298). Its theme, its
metre, and its opening, however, show that it is not Pindaric but Horatian,
a development of the epilogue to Horaces third book, Carm. 3. 30, which
it exactly equals in length and shape.
38. Carm, 4. 2. 1-4 (p. 225 f.); cf. Ronsard, OdeSy i. ii, ep. 4:
Par line cheute subite
Encor je nay fait nommer
Du nom de Ronsard la mer,
Bien que Pindare jimite.
39. Laumonier (cited in n. 23), 399, quotes a particularly tough passage
from OdeSy 2. 13
:
AhI que maudite soit Iasnesse,
Laquelle pour trouver de Feau,
Au serpent donna la jeunesse,
Qui tous les ans change de peaul
Jeunesse que le populaire
De Jupiter avoit receu
Pour loyer de navoir sceu taire
Le secret larrecin du feu.
The myth is terribly obscure (it comes from Nicander, ThenacUy 343 f.)
;
but the wording is quite clear. Laumonier thinks that when Boileau reproached
Ronsard for talking Greek and Latin in French he was
632 NOTES ON 12. LYRIC POETRY
criticizing not his language but his use of mythical names and periphrases
(see his p. 407, and 316 f., 395 f.).
40. Pindar, Pyth. 9. 28 f.
41. See p. 144.
42. Horace harpeur Latin,
Estant fils dun libertm,
Basse et lente avoit Iaudace
;
Non pas moy de franche race,
Dont la Muse enfle les sons
De plus courageuse haleme {Odes i. ii, epod. 4).
43. On Ronsards Anacreontic poems see Chamard (cited in n. 26),
2. 56-70. It was on the model of Anacreonthough helped by the little
neo-Latin love-lyrics of Joannes Secundus and the likethat he created
the miniature ode, or odelette.
44. For Ronsard^s metrical innovations see Laumonier (cited in n. 23),
639 f. Chamard (n. 26), i. 373-4, emphasizes the fact that Ronsards
Pindaric odes had many admirers and imitators from 1551 until about
1660.
45. Thebanos modos fidibus Hetruscis/adaptare primus docuit:/
Cycnum Dircaeum/audacibus, sed non deciduis pennis sequutus/
Ligustico Mari/nomen aeternum dedit. (Epitaph in v. i of the Milan
edition of 1807, p. xxxv.)
46. For details, see F. Neri, II Chiabrera e la PUiade francese (Turin,
1920).
47. This is the pattern of the fifth of his poems on Tuscan naval
victories, no. 72 in the Canzoni eroiche. A few Pindaric poems also occur
in his Canzoni sacre.
48. L.L.L. 4. 3. 99.
49. As You Like It, 3, 2. 382-6.
50. Cf. notes 24, 31 above.
51. For the analysis of Southerns poems, for quotations from them,
and for much other information in this section, I am indebted to R.
Shafers The English Ode to 1660 (Princeton, 1918). In Ode i (epode 2)
Southern speaks of
the great Prophets,
Or Theban, or Calaborois,
and in strophe 2 he orders the Muses to stand up and sing
A newe dittie Calaborois,
To the Iban harpe Thebanois.
Calaborois is his stupid miscopying and misunderstanding of Ronsards
calahrms, Calabrian, applied to Horace, who came from south Italy.
52. On this poem see Shafer (n. 51), 92 , and G. N. Shuster, The
English Odefrom Milton to Keats (New York, 1940), 67. On Miltons copy
of Pindar see Robinson (cited in n, 9), 26 f.
53. See Shafer (n. 51), 96 f. Mr. Shafer also points to the invocation
of Pindar at the opening of Jonsons Ode to James Earl of Desmond,
NOTES ON 12. LYRIC POETRY 633
54. Pope, Imitations of Horace^ Bp. z. i. 75 f. The epic was a Davideis,
which, by a significant coincidence, Cowley abandoned at the very point
(after finishing four books) where Ronsard dropped The Franciad (see
p. 144).
55. Details in Shafer (n. 51), 128 f., who cites Miltons On Time and
At a Solemn Music, Vaughans Resurrection and Immortality, The Holy
Communion, and Affliction, and numerous poems by Crashaw, who was
a close friend of Cowley : for instance, Prayer, an Ode. See also Shuster
(cited in n. 52), c. 4. It has often been said (apparently on Gosses
authority) that Cowley did not imderstand the triadic form of Pindars
odes, and that Congreve attacked him for his ignorance. A. H. Nethercot,
*The Relation of Cowleys Pindarics to Pindars Odes {Modern
Philology, 19 (1921-2), 107 f.), explains that these are misapprehensions:
as early as 1675 Miltons nephew Phillips was pointing out that the
Pindaric ode as Cowley practised it was much freer than Pindars own
patterns. Congreves Discourse on the Pindarique Ode (1705) really
asserted that free verse in the manner of Cowley was improper, and that
even rhapsodical odes had their laws.
56. See p. 227.
57. Milton, At a Solemn Music.
58. See D. J. Grout, A Short History of Opera (New York, 1947), i. 1 1,
on English opera of this period. In i. 14 hlr. Grout gives a superb sketch
of the technical powers of the singing virtuosi of this period. For many
of the facts on this branch of the subject I am indebted to G. N. Shuster
(cited in n. 52), 132 f.
59. R, M. Myers, Neo-classical Criticism of the Ode for Music, in
PMLA, 62 (1947), 2. 399-421. Popes Ode on St. Cecilia^s Day, 1708 is
a good example of the kind of thing.
60. Quelle docte et sainte ivresse
Aujourdhui me fait la loi ?
Docte means poetically learned, wise in the secrets of the Muses. This
is the opening of Boileaus ode on the capture of Namura neat little
piece in stanzas of ten short lines each, which is as far from Pindar as the
Tuileries gardens from the forests and glens and mountains of Greece.
There is a brilliant parody of it by Prior, which is actually a better poem,
61. At most it might be conceded that the baroque Pindaric-writers
were genuinely moved by the idea of lofty rank. Unfortunately this is a
subject which fails to excite us now; and even at the time, these poets often
failed to communicate their emotion because they chose to do so by the
use of ridiculous exaggerations. For instance, at the beginning of the
Namur ode Boileau tells the winds to keep silent, because he is about to
speak of Louis XIV. Such stuff was being written all over Europe. Turn
to Portugal, and you find Antonio Dinys da Cruz e Silva combining light
metres arid grandiose hyperboles: he calls King Jos6 a more excellent
monarch than Cyrus, Alexander, and Trajan {Odes, 30. 7). During this
period real emotion is more often found in the poets who imitate Horace
:
see p. 249 f.
634 NOTES ON 12. LYRIC POETRY
62. From Youngs Imperium pelagi, quoted by D. B. Wyndham Lewis
and C. Lee, in The Stuffed Owl (London, 1930), 62: a lovable collection
of bad poetry.
63. So Shuster (cited in n. 52), 137. Mr. Shuster helps to account for
the disappointing character of this poem by emphasizing Drydens debt
to Cowiey in it.
64. Horaces more obviously moral works, the Satires and Letters
y
were
much preferred in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages. Dante, for instance,
knew him as a satirist (see p. 84). He was called ethicuSy and quoted
scores of times in Readers Digest collections. The eighth-century
Exempla diuersorwn auctorum cites him seventy-four times and Brunetto
Latinis Li livres dou tresor {c. 1260) sixty times. His lyrics were seldom
read. Hugo of Trimberg (d. 1313), a schoolmaster living near Bamberg,
is typical in that he knew them but distrusted them; in his Registrum
auctorum (2. 66) he says
:
Sequitur Horatius, prudens et discretus,
Vitiorum emulus, firmus et mansuetus,
Qui tres libros etiam fecit principales,
Duosque dictaverat minus usuales,
Epodon videlicet et libmm odarum,
Quos nostris temponbus credo valere parum.
For details, see E. Stemplinger, Horaz im Urteil der yahrkunderte (Das
Erbe der Alten, 2nd series, 5, Leipzig, 1921), and the articles by J. Marouzeau
and L. Pietrobono in Orazio nella letteratura mondiale (cited m
n. 21).
65. See L. Pietrobono, Orazio nella letteratura mondiale (cited in n. 21),
118 f. On Landino see J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship
(Cambridge, 1908), 2. 81 f. ; on Politian see pp. 135-6, 599 of this book.
66. Details in C. Ribas article on Spanish Horatians, in Orazio nella
letteratura mondiale (n. 21), 195 f. The most famous of Garcilasos poems
in this vein is Cancidn 5, La Flor de Gnidoy developed from Horace,
Carm, i. 8, with graceful luxuriance.
67. See A. Coster, Fernando de Herrera (Paris, 1908), 283 f., and
R. M. Beach, Was Fernando de Herrera a Greek Scholar? (Philadelphia,
1908).
68. This is Cancidn 3 in Costers edition, addressed to Don Juan after
the rising of the Moriscos in 1571 (not after Lepanto). Herreras lyrical
pattern is the cancion, made up of eleven-syllable lines mixed with shorter
lines at the poets own choice : all stanzas echoing the pattern set by the
first in each poem. The models are Horace, Carm. 3. 4 and 4. 4.
69- Se me cayeron como de entre las manos estas obrecillas, quoted
by C. Riba in Orazio nella letteratura mondiale (cited inn. 21), 198, n. 13,
70. Verg. Aen. 8. 31-67; Hor. Carm. i. 15.
71, Luis de Le6n, iQue descansada vidal and Garcilasos second
Eclogue come from Horace, Epod. 2:
Beatus ille qui procul negotiis
ut prisca gens mortahum ....
NOTES ON 12. LYRIC POETRY 635
The poem had already been echoed by the Marques de Santillana, and
was adapted later by Lope de Vega (see G. Showerman, Horace and His
Influence (Boston, 1922), 118).
72. P. Laumonier (cited in n. 23), 25, n. 2.
73. On Chiabrera see pp. 235-6.
74. For a more detailed account of this problem see L, P. Wilkinson
(cited in n. 13), 169 f.
75. The attempt was made in Italian by Claudio Tolomei in his Versi
e regole della nuova poesia toscana (1539). In English there are several
notorious letters on the subject by Gabriel Harvey, who says he is revising
English prosody and setting precedents for all future poets, as Ennius did
in Latin. (The letters are supposed to be addressed to Spenser; still,
J. W. Bennett, * Spenser and Gabriel Harvey's ^Letter Book" {Modern
Philology, 29 (193 1-2), 163-86), gives reasons for thinking them a literary
fiction.) In France the leader of the movement now best known was
J. A. de Baif, but Du Bellay, Ronsard, and dAubigne were all associated
with it in one way or another. There is a recent dissertation on the subject,
French Verse in Classical Metres, and the Music to which it was set, of the
Last Quarter of the Sixteenth Century, by D. P. Walker (Oxford, 1947),
of which I have seen only a summary. See also E. Egger, VHelUnisme
en France (Paris, 1869), Le9on 10, and H. Chamard (cited in n. 26),
4* 133
76. See p. 381.
77. On Carducci, see also p. 443.
78. Details in Laumonier (cited in n. 23), 662-3.
79. Odes, I. II, epode 4.
80. Laumonier (cited in n. 23), 5 f.
81.
Laumonier (cited in n. 23), 41 f., and Chamard (n. 26), i. 9, give
details.
82. Odes, I. 22, 2. I.
83. On this change in Ronsard's mind see Laumonier (cited in n. 23),
1 13 , 123, 137, 161 f., and particularly 170-4. J. Hutton, in The Greek
Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of the Netherlands to the Year
1800 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1946), 350 f., shows that there are no direct echoes in
Ronsard from the Anthology before 1553. Then the Folastries contain
seventeen translations from it. After that, he continues to allude to it,
translate it, and imitate it, working his way slowly but steadily through
the entire collection. A number of the sonnets in the 1578 edition of his
Works are deeply indebted to the Anthology. Ronsards interest in
Catullus was awakened in 1552 by Murets lectures; and his Folastries
contain a number of echoes. But I cannot feel that he understood
Catullus, and a piece like the Gayetd, Jaquet aime autant sa Robine , , .%
is merely vulgar when compared to its original, Catullus 45.
84. Je me rendi familier dHorace, contrefaisant sa naive douceur, d6s
le m6me tens que CL Marot (seule lumiere en ses ans de la vuigaire
poesie) se travailloit h. la poursuite de son Psautier.
85. Laumonier, 625-6. But see P. de Nolhac (cited in n. 23), 61 f., for
a charming account of a poetic and scholarly picnic at Arcueil where
636 NOTES ON 12. LYRIC POETRY
Dorat presided over his pupils, and recited to them a neat Horatian ode
in Latin, on the spring by which they had been drinking
:
O fons Arculii sidere purior ....
As many of Ronsards lighter odes show (5. 15, 5. 16), much of his
pleasure in drinking came from the company of poetic friends : see also
de Nolhacs pages 237-9.
86. e.g. the title of Sir Thomas Wyats charming lyric, Vixi puellis
nuper idoneus, comes from Horace, Carm, 3. 26; but the poem is little like
Horaces mellowing middle age, and rather recalls Ovid, Am. i. 5.
On the quotation in Titus Andronicus see p. 626. When Shaltespeare cried
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme
(Sonnet 55), he was echoing Horace (Carm. 3. 30). But had he seen the
poem at school, or heard it quoted by friends, or even glimpsed Ronsards
eighth ode:
Ne pilier, ne terme Dorique
d*histoires vieillies decor^ . . . ?
87. See K. A. McEuen (cited in n. 18) on the entire subject; also
R. Shafer (cited in n. 23), 99-103. On Herrick there are some notes by
M. J. Ruggles, ^Horace and Herrick (The Classical Journal^ 31 (1935-6),
223-34), and further remarks, with some excellent parallels, by G. W.
Regenos, The Influence of Horace upon Robert Herrick (The Philo^
logical Quarterlyy 26 (1947), 3. 268-84).
88. Hor. Carm. i. 5. Milton remembered this picture when, in
Paradise Lost, 4. 771 f., he described Adam and Eve in their bower:
These, lulled by nightingales, embracing slept,
And on their naked limbs the flowery roof
Showered roses.
89. See p. 159 f.
90. Hor. Carm. 1. 16 : O matrepulchrafiliapulchrior, echoed in Miltons
twentieth sonnet.
91. From Sonnet ii, inspired by Hor. Carm. i. 2. 18-20:
sinistra
labitur ripa loue non probante uxorius
amnis.
92. This subject is well developed in an essay by J. H. Finley, Jr.,
Milton and Horace (Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 48 (Cambridge,
Mass., 1937), 29-73)*
93. For England there is a handy treatise on the subject by C. Goad,
Horace in the English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Yale Studies
in English, 58, New Haven, 1918).
94. Later, Swinburnes Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic
begins with six consecutive strophes, then six antistrophes, followed by a
lonely epode. Used like this, the terms are almost meaningless.
NOTES ON 12. LYRIC POETRY 637
95. There is an interesting discussion of the subject in E. Maasss
Goethe und die Antike (Berlin, 1912), c. 10.
96. Among these are Mahomets Gesangy Wanderers Sturmlied (which
actually invokes Pindar), Prometheusy Das Gottliche, Ganymedy and
Grenzen der Menschheit, The resemblance between the free verse of such
poems as Grenzen der Menschheit and Arnolds lyrics in Empedocles on
Etna is very striking.
97. For a detailed analysis, see F. Beissner, Holderlins Dbersetzungen
aus dem griechischen (Stuttgart, 1933), E. Lachmann, Holderlins Hymnen
(Frankfurt a/M., 1937), and G. Zuntz, Uber Holderlins Pindar-tJhersetzung
(Marburg, 1928). Holderlins translations covered about half the
Olympians and nearly all the PythianSy but he often did not complete his
rendering of the ode on which he was working, whether from lassitude or
from the difhculty of the task. For more on Goethe and Holderlin see
PP- 379 f-. 377
98. OdeSy 5.12, however, is a handsome little Horatian lyric.
99. There is a detailed, but not very satisfactory, study of the subject
for England by M. R. Thayer, The Influence of Horace on the Chief
English Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Cornell Studies in English, 2,
Yale University Press, New Haven, 1916).
100. Grays Hymn to Adversity should also be mentioned. It was
inspired by Horaces ode to Fortune (Carm. i. 35), and helped to inspire
Wordsworths Ode to Duty (on which see p. 411); but it is comparatively
unsuccessful as a poem. Horace introduced far fewer Personifications,
and those he did introduce were made alive, by having solidly real actions
and appurtenances: albo Fides uelata pan7io; Necessity carrying heavy
nails, and wedges, and molten lead.
101. My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk. . . .
Mollis inertia cur tantam diffuderit imis
obliuionem sensibus,
pocula Lethaeos ut si ducentia somnos
arente fauce traxeiim . . . (Hor. Epod, 14. 1-4)
This unmistalvable transference was first spotted by Sir G. Greenwood,
in his Lee, Shakespeare, and a Tertium Quid (London, 1923), 139. It was
then beautifully elaborated by Mr. Edmund Blunden, who compares the
first words of Horaces next poem
:
Nox erat, et caelo fulgebat Luna sereno
* inter minora sidera
with the fourth stanza of the Nightingale ode
:
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays,
Finally, he points to the closing words:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music;^Do I wake or sleep?
638 NOTES ON 12. LYRIC POETRY
with the resemblance to Horace*s
Auditis, an me ludit amabilis
insania? (Carnt. 3. 4. 5-6)
These reminiscences, he says very convincingly, would justify us in
believing that Keats had his Horace in his hand when he sat down in the
garden on that evening, and presently began to write. (See his Keats and
his Predecessors, London Mercury, 20 (1929), 289 f.)
102. Quoted by D. S. Savage, The Americanism of Hart Crane
{Horizon, 5 (1942), May).
103. O damn anything thats low, 1 cannot bear it (Goldsmith, She
Stoops to Conquer, i, 2). The same feeling was neatly put by the French
surrealist Croniamental
:
Luth
Zut!
(Quoted in R. G. Cadous Testament Apollinaire (Paris, i945)> 168.)
Hatred of baroque pretentiosity and the feeling that the ode-writers
aspired too high produced many parodic odes in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Wolcot, for instance, wrote commonsensical but vulgar
poems on current affairs, called them odes, and took the pseudonym Peter
Pindar. But some of the parodies are delightful : for instance, Calverleys
Sapphic on tobacco
:
Sweet, when the morn is gray;
Sweet, when theyve cleared away
Lunch ; at the close of day
Possibly sweetest.
And doubtless it was the founding of the Royal Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals (1824) which inspired the great ode To an Expiring
Frog:
Can I view thee panting, lying
On thy stomach, without sighing;
Can I unmoved see thee dying
On a log,
Expiring frog!
This ode was repeated by Mrs. Leo Hunter, in character (in character!
said Mr. Pickwick) as Minerva.
Notes on 13. transition
I. One important cultural date which ought to be remembered along
with such things as the foundation of the Academic in France and the
Royal Society in Britain is the publication of the greatest Greek and Latin
classics in a single series of sixty-four uniform volumes, with renderings in
Latin prose, illustrations, and explanatory notes by the best living French
scholars. This is the famous Delphin edition, produced under the
patronage of Louis XIV ad mum serenhsimi Delphini, for the use of the
NOTES ON 13 . TRANSITION 639
dauphin. It was proposed in 1672 by the Comte de Montausier, majordomo
to the dauphin, and the dauphins tutors Bossuet and Huet, and
most of it was produced between 1674 and 1698. In fact, it assisted all
those who wished to study the classics, and there are still scholars alive
who are grateful to it for helping them through the tougher books of
Lucan or Persius.
2. The word for high school in French is lycee, named after Aristotles
college, the Lyceum, in the same way as American and British schools are
often named after Platos college, the Academy. The German word is
gymnasium, after the place where Socrates taught. The word school is the
Greek axoXij, through the Latin scholar it means leisure, as opposed to
the serious daily work which an adult does.
3. See p. 466 f,
4. Wordsworth, The Prelude, ii. 1089.
5. There are vivid, though brief, descriptions of this disaster, taken
from contemporary accoimts, in J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical
Scholarship (Cambridge, 1908), 2, and J. A. Symonds, The Renaissance in
Italy: the Revival of Learning, c. 7, The Roman Academy, founded m the
mid-fifteenth century by the distinguished teacher and humanist Pomponius
Laetus, was ruined : its head saw nearly all his fine collection of
manuscripts and antiquities looted and destroyed. Paolo Giovio lost his
only copy of part of the first ten books of his ambitious History of Rome,
and, at the end of his collection of biographies, lamented that the Germans
had robbed exhausted Greece and slumbering Italy of the ornaments of
peace, learning, and the arts. Scholars everywhere WTOte to each other
that the light of the world had perished.
6. Of the foremost scholars of France in the sixteenth century,
Tumebus died some years before the eventful date of St. Bartholomew;
Ramiis perished in the massacre, Lambinus died of fright, while Hotman
and Doneau fled to Geneva, never to return. Joseph Justus Scaliger
withdrew to the same city. . . . Isaac Casaubon was bom at Geneva of
Huguenot parents, who had fled from Gascony. At the age of nine he
could speak and write Latin. He was learning Greek from his father,
with Isocrates, Ad Demonicum, as a textbook, when the news of the
massacre of St. Bartholomews drove them to the hills, where the lessons
in Greek were continued in a cave in Dauphine. (Sandys, cited in n. 5,
2. 199 and 2. 204, quoting A. A. Tilley, The Literature of the French
Renaissance, Cambridge, 1904.) Casaubon was later pressed to become
a Catholic, so urgently that he left France for England, where he studied
in Oxford until his death.
7. The scholar and poet, Aonio Paleario (1504-70), denounced the
Index as a dagger drawn from the scabbard to assassinate literature, and
lamented that because of it the study of the liberal arts was deserted, the
young men wantoned in idleness and wandered about the public squares.
He died a martyrs death in Rome in 1570. (Sandys, cited in n. 5, 2. 155.)
8. See Allardyce Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre (London,
1927), c. 9*
640
Notes on 14. the battle of the books
1 . A number of good books and essays have been written on this subject.
I am particularly indebted to
:
F. Brunetiere, U^mlution des genres dans Vhistoire de la litterature
(Paris, 1924), Quatrieme le^on.
A. E. Burlingame, The Battle of the Books in its Historical Setting (New
York, 1920).
J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (London, 1920), cc. 4 and 5.
A. F. B. Clark, Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England
(Bibliothfeque de la Revue de litterature comparee, 19, Paris, 1925).
G. Finsler, Homer in der Neuzeit von Dante bis Goethe (Leipzig, 1912).
H. Gillot, La Querelle des anciens et des modernes en France (Paris, 1914).
R. F. Jones, The Background of the Battle of the Books^ {Washington
University Studies^ Humanistic Series, 7. 2, St. Louis, 1920, 99-162).
R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns (Washington University Studies,
New Series, Language and Literature, 6, St. Louis, 1936).
H. Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des anciens et des modernes, v. i of his
(Euvres completes (Paris, 1859).
A. A.Tilley, TheDeclineofthe Age ofLouisXIV{Cecodbxidge, 1929), c. 10.
C. H. C. Wright, French Classicism (Harvard Studies in Romance
Languages, 4, Cambridge, Mass., 1920).
2. Paradise Regained, 4. 331 f. This is a very ancient doctrine in the
Christian church, and appears as early as the second century. Justin
Martyr asserted that all pagan philosophy and poetry was really stolen
from the Hebrews ; and he was followed by Tatian, Theophilus ofAntioch,
Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, even St. Jerome.
3. See p. 608, and Chapters, p. 155 f. On the opposition to the use of
pagan machinery in Christian poems, see A. F. B. Clark (cited in n, i),
especially 308 f.
4. A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, 31.
5. The counter-argument about forgotten crafts appeared very early in
this dispute. There is an interesting account of a discussion held in 1637,
and reported (as part of a general cultural programme) by Renaudot, the
founder of the Gazette de France. The subject proposed was : SHI y a eu
de plus grands hommes en quelqu^vn des siecles precedens quHn cettui-ci?
Five speakers took part, and although the arguments were not always as
clearly cut as later debaters made them the four chief points were covered.
One of the speakers, however, went beyond the counter-argument mentioned
on p. 266, and attempted to show that the Romans equalled the
modems in science, because they had invented such things as malleable
glass (Pliny, N.H. 36. 195; Petron. Sat, 51). Sir William Temple overplayed
this particular argument, and made it absurd. For the discussion
m question, see L. IVI. Richardson, The Conferences* of Th^ophraste
Renaudot {Modern Language Notes, 48 (1933), 3x2-16).
6. A history of this phrase is given by F. E. Guyer, The Dwarf on the
Giants Shoulders {Modem Language Notes, 45 (1930), 398-402). It was
NOTES ON 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 641
apparently coined by Bernard of Chartres (although others have associated
it with Roger of Blois), and passed by his pupils William of Conches and
Richard Ifiv^que to John of Salisbury, who used it in his Metalogicus.
It was current through the Renaissance, and appears in such odd places
as Montaigne {Essays, 3. 13), dUrfes preface to Sylvanire, and Burtons
Anatomy of Melancholy^where it is attributed to Didacus Stella, an
author obscure enough to delight even Burton.
7. The scientists in particular liked this argument. Bacon uses it;
Descartess thought presupposes it ; and there is a fine statement of it in
Pascals Fragment (Fun traite du vide:
Les hommes sont aujourdhui en quelque sorte dans le m^me etat oil se
trouveraient les anciens philosophes, slls pouvaient avoir vieilli jusqu^ pr&ent,
en ajoutant aux connaissances quils avaient celles que leurs Etudes auraient pu
leur acquerir a la faveur de tant de slides. De la vient que, par une prerogative
particuhere, non seulement chacun des hommes savance de jour en jour dans
les sciences, mais que tous les hommes y font un continuel progres, a mesure
que Iunivers vieillit, parce que la meme chose arrive dans la succession des
hommes que dans les %es differents dlm particulier. De sorte que toute la
suite des hommes, pendant le cours de lant de siecles, doit dtre consid^r^e
comme un m^me homme qui subsiste toujours et qui apprend continuellement
doii Ton voit avec combien dmjustice nous respectons Iantiquite dans sa
philosophic : car, comme la vieillesse est ISge le plus distant de Ienfance, qui ne
voit que la vieillesse dans cet homme universel ne doit pas dtre cherch^e dans les
temps proches de sa naissance, mais dans ceux qui en sont les plus ^loign^s?
Ceux que nous appelons anciens ^taient v^ritablement nouveaux en toutes choses
et formaient Tenfance des hommes proprement; et comme nous avons joint k
leurs connaissances Iexp^rience des siecles qui les ont suivis, cest en nous que
Ton peut trouver cette antiquity que nous r^v^rons dans les autres.
8. Sometimes this argument was carried one stage farther, and the
conclusion was drawn that we are now in the old age of civilization, that
it is wise but enfeebled, and that it is approaching its death. This idea
became so popular in the early seventeenth century that it was set as the
subject for the philosophical disputation at Cambridge in 1628. The
respondent, whose duty it was to argue against it, called upon Milton for
help ; Milton answered with a vigorous attack on the belief in the senility
of the universe, his Latin poem Naturam non pati senium. (See R. F.
Jones, "The Background of the Battle of the Books\ cited in n. i, io4*-'i6.)
9. La nature est immuable (quoted by Rigault (cited in n. i), 192). This
point had already been made by Du Bellay in his Deffence, and supported
by Ronsard: see Gillot (cited in n. i), 45.
10. Plato, Rep. 2, 3776 f.
11. See J. L. Gerig and G. L. van Roosbroeck, Unpublished Letters
of Pierre Bayle (section 10), The Romanic Review, 24 (1933), 21 1.
12. Quoted by Brunetfee (cited in n. i), 123.
13. Horner, Od. 6. 71 Perrault, fourth dialogue, quoted by Rigault
(cited in n. i), 21 1 ; also in the preface to the parody Les Murs de Troye
ou Vorigine du burlesque, which he wrote with his brother Claude (Finsler,
cited in n. i, 179).
14. Chesterfield, Letters, 1734 (1750), iv, 1610, quoted by D- Bush,
S076 7* t
642 NOTES ON 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Harvard Studies
in English, i8, Cambridge, Mass., 1937), 6.
15. This revulsion from the use of the names of ordinary objects is one
of the central characteristics of the taste of the baroque age. Ladies and
gentlemen simply could not bear unladylike and ungentlemanly words

i.e. working-class words. They were low, not because they were obscene,
but because they carried the connotations of working with ones hands.
We shall meet this feeling again (see pp. 299 f., 318 f.); meanwhile, here
are three quotations to illustrate it
:
Ces mots de veaux et de vaches ne sont point choquants dans le grec, comme
ils le sont en notre langue, qui ne veut presque rien souffnr. (Racine, Remarques
sur rOdyssee d^Homere, 10. 410 f.)
Nous trouvons de la bizarrerie en des fagons de parler, qui seroient ridicules
en Fran9ois, si on les traduisoit mot a mot. Nous trouvons de grandes bassesses
dans les termes de chaudrons et de marmites, dans le sang, dans les graisses, dans
les intestins et autres parties des Animaux parce que tout cela nest plus que dans
nos cuisines et dans nos boucheries, et que ces choses nous font bondir le cceur.
(Le Bossu, Traite dupoeme epique, 6 8, quoted by Gillot (cited in n. i), 188--9.)
On est bien plus d^licat quon ne Iestoit meme du temps dAuguste. On veut
que tout soit remply de bon et de beau, et quil ny ait rien de bas. Pourroit-on
souffnr que je fisse certaines comparaisons comme Virgile qui compare Amatas
funeux a un sabot, ou k une toupie que les enfants font aller dans quelque
galerie ; ou quand il compare une fureur a une eau qui bout dans un chaudron ?
ou quand il -compare un esprit agite a une eau qui est aussi dans un chaudron,
dans laquelle la lumi^re du soleil semble trembler et est agit^e, et par repercussion
frappe de tous cdtes et les murailles et les planches dune salle ? Ces comparaisons
portent Iesprit k des choses basses. . . . Maintenant, on ne veut rien que de
fort noble et de fort beau. (Desmarets de Samt-Sorlins letter to his brother
Rolland, quoted in Gillot (cited in n. i), 505.)
The attacks on Homers bad taste began as early as 1561, when Julius
Caesar Scaiiger, who adored Vergil, published his Poetice, containing
dozens of bitter denunciations of the crude and silly behaviour of the
Homeric gods and heroes. Details and quotations will be found in
Finsler, 135 f., and Gillot, 70 f. (both cited in n. i). Some of the classical
poets were denounced at this period as being genuinely obscene, as indeed
they are. Bayle described Juvenals satires as egouts de salete^ and therefore
inferior to Boileaus ; he called Martial and Catullus des esprits grossiers
et rustiques, inferior to La Fontaine. (See Gerig and van Roosbroeck,
cited in n. ii.) This argument, however, was much less often used,
since it was relevant only to the minor genres of classical literature.
16. Horn. IL 1 1. 558 Racine, who knew more about Homer than any
man of his time, wrote a very judicious letter to Boileau oh this passage.
Boileau had thought of defending Homer by saying that donkey was
really a very noble expression in Greek. Racine says, Jai fait reflexion
aussi quau lieu de dire que le mot d^ne est en grec un mot tr^s-noble,
vous pourriez vous contenter de dire que cest un mot qui na rien de bas,
et qui est comme celui de cerf, de cheval, de brebis, etc. Ce trks-nohle me
paroit un peu trop fort* (letter 125, 1693).
17. Horn. Od. 17, 297
NOTES ON 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 643
18. Quella maniera di guerreggiare usata dagii antichi, i conviti, le
cerimonie, e Taltre usanze di quel remotissimo secolo pajono alcuna volta
a nostri uomini nojose, e rincrescevoli, anzi che no, come awiene ad
alcuni idioti, che leggono i divinissimi libn dOmero trasportati in altra
lingua. E di cio in buona parte e cagione iantichitk de costumi, la quale
da coloro, che hanno awezzo il gusto alia gentilezza, e al decoro da questa,
e schivata come cosa vieta, e rancida^ (Tasso, Discorsi del poema eroico
{Opere, ed. G. Rosini, Pisa, 1823, v. 13), 2, pp. 46-7).
19. Tacitus, Ann. i. 65 : amissa per quae egeritur humus aut exciditur
caespes. Nero^s deuerticula (which correspond to what Suetonius called
popinae in Nero 26. i) appear in Ann. 13. 25.
20. Quel ton! quel effroyable ton! ah, Madame, quel dommage que ie
Saint Esprit eut aussi peu de goiit!*quoted by Lytton Strachey in
Madame du DeEand (Books and Characters
^
New York, 1922). One
would rather translate ton by style*but that has come to mean literary
style, whereas the Marechale meant the entire social tone of the biblical
world.
21. On the feminine influence in seventeenth-century taste, see Giliot
(cited in n. i), 349 f.
22. Quoted by Lytton Strachey, in Racine* (Books and Characters^
New York, 1922). In this passage Strachey discusses Racine*s use of such
periphrases : for instance, where Roxane, calling for bowstrings to strangle
her lover, says
:
Qu*ils viennent preparer ces noeuds mfortunds
Par qui de ses pareils les jours sont terminus.
Strachey gives two reasons to justify this kind of thing. One is that the
things of sensephysical objects and details. . . must be kept out of the
picture at all hazards ... so that the entire attention may be fixed upon
the central and dominating features of the compositionthe spiritual states
of the characters ; and he then compares the periphrasis to the hastily
dashed-in column and curtain in the background of a portrait*. But the
comparison will not stand scrutiny, for it was actually more difficult for
Racine to devise such periphrases than to write down the simple words
which they replaced; nor will the reason, for the spiritual states of
characters are often most clearly and memorably shown, and the audiences
attention most closely fixed upon them, when they are made vivid by the
introduction of the things of sense. The last scene of Lear, the sleepwalking
scene in Macbeth, are examples. Stracheys other reason is that
sometimes Racine manages to make such a circumlocution convey the
confusion in he minds of his characters^which proves that he was a fine
artist, but not that the rule was aesthetically useful. It would have been
better to acknowledge that the rule was imposed, not by aesthetic purism,
but by social censorship ; to deplore it
; and to show how Racine contrived
to circumvent and overcome its limitations.
23. Les neuf Muses, seins nus, chantaient la Carmagnole.* (Hugo,
Les Contemplations, i. 7: Reponse h un acte d^accusation; on this subject
see p. 40s f.)
644 NOTES ON 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
24. Dante, De vulgari eloquio, mentioned on p. 71 f.
25 . See p. 23 1 f. on the Deffence et illustration de la languefrancoyse. The
French nationalist aspect of the modernist attack in the Battle of the Books
is brought out by Gillot (cited in n. i), 37 f. Many of the moderns felt
that it was a struggle between Latin, the international language, and
French, which, having ceased to be a dialect, was now asserting itself as
a culture-language ; and one of the hottest engagements was fought over
the question whether an inscription in memory of Louis XIII should be
written in Latin or French. (This was the occasion on which Desmarets
de Saint-Sorlin (p. 278 f.) published his Comparaison de la langue et de
la poesie franpaise avec la grecque et la latine (1670).) Another argument
sometimes put up by the modems* in France was that French was the
ideal speech, far superior in beauty and expressiveness to Latin or any
other language, just as France was the perfect country, endowed with
every variety of wealth and grace. This thesis, although scarcely worth
objective examination, has reappeared in other countries from time to
time ; we can still hear it to-day, and no doubt to-morrow also.
26. On this see Rigault (cited in n. i), 159 f.
27. Quoted from R. F. Jones, The Background of the Battle of the
Books^ (cited in n. i), 117; see the same essay, 102 f., on Bacons increasingly
aggressive attitude. The medieval reverence for Aristotles philosophy
was the chief target of this attack, so that many of the ancients*
joined the modernists in it. Boileau wrote an Arrit burlesque in 1671 to
deride the professors who had attempted to procure legislation forbidding
the dissemination of Descartess philosophy and supporting Aristotelian
scholasticism. F. Morrison, in A Note on The Battle of the Books*
{Philological Quarterly
^
13 (1934), 4. 16-20), points out that Swift might
have seen that parody before writing his own.
28. Moli^re, Le Misanthrope i, 2:
Alcestei Ce style figure, dont on fait vanity,
Sort du bon caract^re et de la v^rit^:
Ce nest que jeu de mots, quaffectation pure,
Et ce nest point ainsi que parle la nature.
Le m^chant gout du sifecle, en cela, me fait peur.
Nos pferes, tous grossiers, Iavoient beaucoup meilleur,
Et je prise bien moins tout ce que Ion admire,
Quune vieille chanson que je men vais vous dire:
Si le Roi mavoit donn6
Paris, sa grand* ville,
Et quil me fallht quitter
Lamour de ma mie,
Je dirois au roi Henri:
Reprenez votre Paris:
Jaime mieux ma naie, au gu6!
Jaime mieux ma mie.*
29. Mlimte: Lamour, pour Fordinaire, est peu fait k ces lois,
Et Fon voit les amants vanter toujours leur choix . . -
Lucretius, De rerum natura, 4. 1153
NOTES ON 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS 645
30. See Tilley (cited in n. i), 338 f. ; Rigault (n. i), c. 5 ; Finsler (n. i),
19 1 f.
31. Pensieri diversi: the ninth and tenth books contain the arguments
which are relevant to the battle. According to Finsler (cited in n. i), 85 f.,
it had already appeared in 1601 under the name of Quistioni filosofiche,
Finsler has a useful discussion of the book, and of another Italian work
which carried similar ideas, Paolo Benis Comparazione di Torquato Tasso
con Omero e Virgilio (1607). True, the connexion between Tassoni and
the French moderns is not very close; but Pierre Perrault published
a translation of La Secchia rapita in 1678, and used the preface to aim
modernist propaganda against Boileau.
32. Boileau, Art poetique^ 3. 193 f. Finsler (cited in n. i), 160 f., discusses
the epics of Desmarets.
33. This is the Delices de Vesprit (1658), which uses arguments i and 2,
with particular reference to progress in architecture.
34. Viens d^fendre, Perrault, la France qui tappelle
;
Viens combattre avec moi cette troupe rebelle
:
Ce ramas dennemis, qui, faibles et mutms,
Pr^ferent ^ nos chants les ouvrages latins.
(Quoted by Rigault (cited in n. i), who is the author of the comparison
with Hamilcar on p. 279.)
35. These appear as Epigrams 22-8 in Boileaus works. The savages
are the Hurons of North America and the Topinambous of Brazil.
36. De Calli^ress Histoire poetique de la guerre nouvellement diclaree
entre les Anciens et les Modernes (1688) is summarized by Finsler (cited
in n. i), 186-9, its model, a battle of pedants and philosophers by
Fureti^re, is described. See also Rigault (cited in n. i), c. 13.
37. On the modernist arguments in Bayles Dictionnaire philosophique
see Finsler (cited in n. i), 198 f., and Rigault (n. i), 250 f.
38. Rigault (cited in n. book 2, c. i : LAngleterre, selon son habitude
en toutes choses, nous a pris un peu plus quelle ne nous a donne.
A fuller analysis of St. fivremonds attitude to the dispute will be found
in Gillot (cited in n. i), 407-14.
^
39. On Dares and Dictys see p. 51 f.
40. So J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge,
1908), 2. 405. See his pp. 401-10 for a sympathetic account of Bentley;
there is also a good life by Sir Richard Jebb, and a finely written essay by
De Quincey.
41. Pope, The Dundad^ 4. 203-74.
42. So Hohsman, The Classical Review, 34 (1920), 1 10 : no doubt partly
in irony.
43. Paradise Lost, i. 63.
44. There is a charming essay on Milton and Bentley in Virginia
Woolfs The Common Reader (London andNewYork, 1925), andadazzling
analysis of Bentleys emendations of Milton in William Empsons Some
Versions of Pastoral (London, ig3S)> i499 i*
45. See Swifts Apology (in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed.
646 NOTES ON 14. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
H. Davis, Oxford, 1939), pp. 7-8, and the editors introduction, xxix, with
literature there cited.
46. Swift let the tone of epic parody run over into the fable : thus, the
spider lives in a terrible fortress, like a giant of romance; there is an
unmistakable allusion to the efforts of Homeric heroes in the description
of the struggles of the bee (Thrice he endeavoured to force his passage,
and thrice the centre shook) ; and the spider thought they meant that
nature was approaching to her final dissolution; or else, that Beelzebub
with all his legions was come. . .
.
47. On Horace and the bee, see p. 236, and n. 13 on p. 638.
48. On Swifts Pindaric odes, see H. Daviss introduction to the edition
cited in n. 45, pp. xi-xv.
49. The wit of Bentleys opponents is well described by C. J. Home,
The Phalaris Controversy {The Review of English Studies
^
1946, 389-
303).
50. Reference in n. 41.
5 1 . Nevertheless, there were some good ideas in Houdar de la Mottes
preliminary Discours sur Homhre: see Finsler (cited in n. i), 314 f.
Notes oni$. a note on baroque
I. The derivation of baroque given in the text is that which was long
accepted, and is found, for example, in the Oxford English Dictionary, It
was originated by Menage in his Dictionnaire etymologique in 1650, and
taken up in 1755 t>y Winckelmann in his Sendschreiben. But another
derivation has been proposed by K. Borinski, in Die Antike in Poetik
und KunsttheoriCy v. i, Mittelalter, Renaissance, Barock (Das Erbe der
Alten, 9, Leipzig, 1914)to whom I owe the references to Menage and
Winckelmannand Benedetto Croce, in St^ria delV eth harocca (Scritti
di storia letteraria e politica, 23, Bari, 1939). They derive the word from
harocoy the mnemonic label for a type of syllogism which was used to
support far-fetched arguments. Phrases like argomento in baroco were,
they point out, gradually extended until people spoke of discorsi harocchi,
extravagant discjuisitions, and the word came to mean extremely sharpwdtted,
weirdly elaborate. Borinski traces this meaning back to Baltasar
Gracidn, and connects it with the inteHectually extreme conceits, which
were fashionable in the Renaissance but became a rage in the age that succeeded
it. It would, therefore, be pretty close to the use of metaphysical*
in seventeenth-century literature.
This derivation, although its context is intellectual, rather than aesthetic
like that given in^e text, stiH carries much of the same*fundamental
meaning of strainfIt means that reason dominates, but has been pushed
to a remote extreme, almost out of balance. That meaning also harmonizes
with the description of baroque tension given in the text of this
chapter, for the idea of baroque is not single and monolithic, but dual
;
either beauty almost breaking outward from the sphere, or intelligence
pushed by fancy to a bizarre extreme.
The word at first had a pejorative sense very close to grotesque : on its
NOTES ON 15. A NOTE ON BAROQUE 647
German contexts see J. Mark, The Uses of the Term baroque'
{Modern Language Review, 33 (1938), 547-63). ^ It has only recently been
extended to include all the grand and formal art and thought of the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries. There is a good analysis of some
of its chief implications in W. Weisbach's Der Barock ah Kunst der Gegenreformation
(Berlin, 1921). No study of the subject would be complete
without the superb article on the history of the term and its rapid expansion
during the last thirty years by Rene Wellek, The Concept of
Baroque m Literary Scholarship' {The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 5 (1946), 2. 77-109). In the same issue there are useful articles
by W. Stechow, Definitions of the Baroque in the Visual Arts, and
R. Daniells, English Baroque and Deliberate Obscurity.
But the intellectual understanding of the term is useless without
aesthetic and emotional appreciation. This can be got only from listening
to the music, seeing the plays, walking round the noble and gracious
buildings, studying the paintings, and reading the prose of the period both
for its content and for its style. Sacheverell Sitwells exquisitely written
books will stir any readers imagination ; Southern Baroque Art (London,
1924), German Baroque Art (London, 1927), Spanish Baroque Art
(London, 1931). For other works on the subject, see Mr. Welleks rich
bibliography.
2. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II,
c. 7, init. Saint-Simons portrait of the Due de Bourgogne (on whom see
p. 336 f.) gives the same impression of forcible restraint exercised upon
violent passions
:
Mgr le due de Bourgogne ^toit n6 avec un nature! k faire trembler. II ^toit
fougueux jusqu^ vouloir bnser ses pendules, lorsquelles sonnoient Iheure qui
Tappeloit k ce quil ne vouloit pas, et jusqu^ semporter de la plus Strange
maniere contre la pluie, quand elle sopposoit k ce quil vouloit faire. . . . Dailleurs,
un gofit ardent le portoit k tout ce qui est d^fendu au corps et k Fesprit. . , ,
Tout ce qui est plaisir, il Iaimoit avec une passion violente, et tout cela avec plus
dorgueil et de hauteur quon ne peut expnmer. . . . Le prodige est quen
tres-peu de temps la devotion et la grce en firent im autre homme, et changferent
tant et de si redoutables d^fauts en vertus parfaitement contraires. ... La
violence quil s^toit faite sur tant de defauts et tous v^h<ment$, ce desir de
perfection . . . le faisoit exc^der dans le contre-pied de ses defauts, et lui
inspiroit une aust6rit6 quil outroit en tout.
In fact, one of the principal ideals of the baroque era was the Clement
Monarch, the man who, like Augustus, combined vast power with superhuman
kindness and self-restraint. He appears in many plays and
political treatises, and has been apotheosized by Mozart in La clemenza
di Tito and Die Entfuhrung aus dem SeraiL
3. The famous eunuch Farinelli, one of the greatest singers who ever
lived, could execute a cadenza on one syllable of a song, which covered
two octaves and ran to 155 notes ending with a long trill. There is a
transcription of such a masterpiece on p. 195 of voL i of D. J. Grouts
A Short History of Opera (New York, 1947).
4. See H. Peyres study of the concept, Le Classicisme frangah (New
648 NOTES ON 15 . A NOTE ON BAROQUE
York, 1942): he observes that English can, while French cannot, use
classicism* and classicizing to connote extreme formalism going beyond .
anything deducible from Greek and Roman literature.
Notes on 16. baroque tragedy
1. See C. Muller, Die Fhddra Racine" eine Quellenstudie (Leipzig,
1936)
.
2. On this book see p. 164. Shakespeare knew it too, through Underdowns
translation. His Duke, in Twelfth Night, $. i. 121 f., refers to one
of its exciting incidents:
Why should I not, had I the heart to do it,
Like to the Egyptian thief at point of death,
Kill that I love?
The close relation between Heliodoms romance and Phedre is demonstrated
by G. May, Contribution a Ietude des sources grecques de Phedre\
Modem Language Quarterly, 8 (1947), 228-34; there are echoes inAndro^
maque and other plays too.
3. On Milton and the Greeks there is a good monograph by W. R.
Parker, Milton"s Debt to Greek Tragedy in ^Samson Agonistes" (Baltimore,
1937)
. Mr. Parker points out that it is impossible to assess Miltons
precise debt to any one of the three tragedians, because he so completely
assimilated what he learned from them. According to Miltons daughter
Euripides was his favourite; certainly he often quotes Euripides in his
non-dramatic writings. Aeschylus, however, evidently supplied the model
for Samson, and also for the technique which keeps one actor alone on the
stage through nearly half the play. In other thingsthe role of the chorus,
the use of irony, the nature of the denouementMr. Parker believes
Milton chiefly followed Sophocles.
4. On the size of the theatre audience in seventeenth-century Paris
there is an estimate in H. C. Lancasters monumental History of French
Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore and Paris,
igzg-42), which has recently been criticized by J. Lough in French
Studies, I (April 1947)? 2. Mr, Lough quotes Voltaires remark in 1733
that there were less than 4,000 people in Paris who went constantly to the
theatre; and he estimates the regular public of the Comedie Fran9aise at
10,000 to 17,000.
5. Hamlet, 3. 4. 212.
6. Nay, but to live '
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed.
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty styI
O, speak to me no more. {Hamlet, 3. 4. 91 f.)
7. Macbeth, i. 5. 51 ; The Rambler, 26 Oct. 1751.
8. See p. 272, and note 15 on p. 642.
9. Aesch. Agamemnon, 109 .
NOTES ON 16. BAROQUE TRAGEDY 649
10. Et Paris, couronnant son insolente flamme,
Retiendra sans p^ril la sceur de votre femme ?
(Racine, Iphigeme^ i. 2.)
11. Racine, Iphigenie^ 2. 4.
12. For a sketch of the origin of these laws, see p. 142 f. ; and consult
C. H. C. Wright, French Classicism (Harvard Studies in Romance Languages,
4, Cambridge, Mass., 1920), cc. 8 and 9.
13. H. Peyre, Les Regies, in Le Classicisme franfais (New York, 1942),
9i"io3-
Notes on 17. satire
1. There has recently been an attempt to derive satura from the
Etruscan satir (= speech), but it is more probable that it comes from
satur, full, the derivation which is alluded to in Livys impletas modis
saturas (7. 2) and Juvenals nostri farrago lihelli (i. 86). Farce, which
comes from the Low Latin farsa^ stuffing, is a similar word.
2. On Horaces lyrics, see p. 225 f.
3. The manuscripts call this work the Ludus de morte Claudiy but it is
usually thought to be the same as the Apocolocyntosis which Dio says
Seneca wrote to amuse Neros court. Pumpkin in Greek also means
fool^like gourde and poire in French: the point of the title is that the
process of deification, instead of making a real god of Claudius, made a
fool of him. The British parallel is Byrons Vision of Judgment
y
which
satirizes Southeys apotheosis of George III.
4. The title is Satirica or Satyricay not Satiricony which is a genitive
plural depending on lihri. On the purpose of this work and its relation to
the character of its author, see G. Highet, Petronius the Moralist, in
Transactions of the American Philological Assodationy 72 (1941), 176-94.
5. For this point see p. 66 f.
6. Brief life is here our portion and For theCy O deary dear country also
come from Bernards poem, of which there is a fine edition by H. C.
Hoskier (London, 1929). See also T. Wrights The Anglo-Latin Satirical
Poets and Epigrammatists of the Twelfth Century (London, 1872) for other
works of this type, a particularly interesting one being the Architrenius of
John de Hauteville (fl. 1184).
7. Juvenal, 10. 81.
8. Juvenal, 6. 660-1,
9. Housman, A Shropshire Lady 48.
10. Juvenal, i. 79. Swifts epitaph: me uepositvm est corpvs Jonathan
SWIFT, S.T.P., VBI SAEVA INDIGNATIO VLTERIVS COR LACERARE NEQVIT.
11. Here is a specimen of Abrahams style, in the form of a brilliant
antiphonal parody of Psalm cx. He says that many when they are singing
vespers are thinking of the evenings gambling, like this
:
DIXIT DOMINUS DOMINO MEO hcut gehen wir zum Herm Leo
SEDE A DEXTRis MEis heut werde ich gewmnen, das ist gewiss
DONEC PONAM iNiMicos TTjos gestem hab ich verspilt drey Mass
SCABELLUM PEDUM TUORUM heut wird sich das Gliick kehren um
viRGAM viRTUTis TUAE was gilts ich werd haben figuri tre. . . *
{Judas der Erzschelm, 3. 103,)
650 NOTES ON 17. SATIRE
See Hugo Mareta, Ueber ^Judas der ErzschehrC von Abraham a Sancta
Clara (no date, no place, circa 1875); Theodor von Karajan, Abraham a
Sancta Clara (Vienna, 1867); K. Bertsche, Abraham a Sancta Clara
(Munich, 1922^). I could scarcely find any of Abraham's works in the
bookshops of ten German cities in 1945-6. The Vienna Alcademie der
Wissenschaften is issuing his works from the original manuscript:
volume 3 appeared in 1945; but they are very difBcult to come by.
12. Much of Casaubons invaluable commentary is now embodied in
Conington's commentary on Persius, and Dryden took over a great deal
of his essay on satire for the Discourse concerning Satire with which he
prefaced his translation of Juvenal.
13. There is a good verse translation, introduction, and commentary
(containing a useful bibliography, and illustrated with the original woodcuts)
by E. H. Zeydel (New York, 1944).
14. Brant's friend Locher made a Latin translation of the work as
Stultifera nauis (1497), and included (with Brant's help) a conspectus of
its sources, which has been worked over by modern scholars. Mr. Zeydel
(n. 13) gives Brants chief Latin sources as: the Vulgate, Ovid, the
Appendix Vergiliana, Juvenal, Terence, Seneca; he also knew something
of Catullus, Cicero, Persius, and Boethius; and he had read Plutarch's
essay On the Education of Childreuy Xenophon, and Homer, apparently in
Latin translations.
15. A. K. Foxwell, A Study of Sir Thomas Wyatts Poems (London,
1911), observes in c. ii that Very little classical influence' is to be traced
in these satires ; but the reminiscences of Juvenal and others are pretty
clear. The first, for instance, begins with a variation of Horace's fable of
the town mouse and the country mouse (Hor. Serm. 2. 6) ; the second has
a good adaptation of Juvenal's tremendous sneer:
quid Romae faciam? mentiri nescio ... (3. 41 f.).
Details will be found in R. M. Alden, The Rise ofFormal Satire in England
under Classical Influence (Philadelphia, 1899), 52 f,
16. See R. M. Alden (cited in n. 15), 67 f.
17. The story is in Alden (cited in n. 15), 98 f.
18. For an interesting development of the suggestion that the satiric
spirit, its direct outlet choked by this ban, flowed into drama, see O. J.
Campbell's Comicall Satyre and Shakespeares ^Troilus and Cressida (San
Marino, Cal., 1938).
19. See p. 183 f.
20. See F. Giroux, La Composition de la Satire Menippee (Laon, 1904),
21. As often with emulators of classical patterns during the Renaissance,
priority is difficult to decide. According to L. Petit de Julleviile, in his
Histoire de la langue et de la litterature frangaise, 4. 30 , Vauquelin de la
Fresnaye published his satires in 1605, but Regnier's had been circulating
in manuscript before that.
22. Or c'est un grand chemin jadis assez fraye
Qui des rimeurs fran^ois ne fut oncq essaye:
Suivant les pas d'Horace, entrant en la carriere,
Je trouve des humeurs de diverse maniere. {SaU 14.)
NOTES ON 17. SATIRE 651
23.
These five leading elements in R%nier*s work are distinguished by
L. Petit de Julleville in his chapter on Regnier, referred to in n. 21.
24. Je nentends point le cours du ciel ni des planetes,
Je ne sais deviner les affaires secretes. (Sat. 3.)
Compare Juvenal, 3. 42-7:
Motus
astrorum ignore ; funus promittere patris
nec uolo nec possum ; ranarum uiscera numquam
inspexi ; ferre ad nuptam quae mittit adulter,
quae mandat, norint alu: me nemo ministro
fur ent. . . .
Courtiers particularly liked this satire : Wyat had already used it ; see note
IS-
25.
Du si^cle les mignons, fils de la poule blanche (Sat. 3); cf.
Juvenal, 13. 141
:
gallinae filius albae.
(Were the white hens eggs the best in the fannyard, or was she simply a
favourite because of her colour?) Among Regniers satires 3 is inspired
by Juvenal, 3 ; 7 by Lucretius, 4. 1134 f. and Ovid, Am. 2. 4 ; 8 by Horace,
I. 9, with verbatim quotations; 12 more or less by Horace, i. 4; 13 by
Ovid, Am. i. 8 and Prop. 4. 5, with quotations from other poems; and
15 by Horace, 2. 3. Many other quotations are easily identifiable: for
instance, Petronius, Satirica, 127 f., turns up in Sat. 11,
26. 11 faut suivre un sentier qui soit moms rebatu,
Et, conduit dApollon, recognoistre la trace
Du fibre Juvenal ; trop discret est Horace
Pour un homme picqu^. . . - (Sat. 2, init.)
27. Devant moy justement on plante un grand potage
Dou les mousches a jeun se sauvoient a la nage. (Sat. 10.)
28. Ainsi dedans la t^te
Voyoit-on clairement au travers de ses os
Ce dont sa fantaisie animoit ses propos. (Sat. II.)
Probably either Regnier or his Italian model knew the coarser version of
this idea in Priapea, 32. s^> about the thin girl
cuius uiscera non aperta Tuscus
per pellem potent uidere hanispex.
29. Trois dents de mort pliez en du parchemin vierge. (Sat. ii.)
30. Satire 13, about the religious bawd, comes partly from contemporary
life, partly from Ovid (Am. 1. 8), partly from Propertius, 4. 5, and partly
from the Roman de la Rose^ which in its turn (see p. 66 f.) took something
from Juvenal, 6.
31. Dryden himself was responsible for satires i, 3, 6, 10, and 16.
32. This is Juvenals fourth satire. There is also a Greek mock-heroic
satire, a Battle of the Philosophers, called U'tAAot, Squints, by Timon of
Phlius (fl. 280 B.C.), of which considerable fragments remain; but it is
unlikely that Dryden knew them.
652 NOTES ON 17. SATIRE
33. A. F. B. Clark, in his Boileau and the French Classical Critics in
England (Biblioth^que de la Revue de Litterature Comparee, 19, Paris,
1925), 1535, suggests that La secchia rapita is not the ancestor of Boileaus
Lutrin and Pope^s Rape of the Lock, because (d) it is longer, and (Jb) it is
really quite a serious poem with burlesque exaggerations. Nevertheless,
the subject of all three poems is the same: a tremendous conflict over
nothing. The fact that in Tassoni^s poem the conflict is a real war, while
in Boileaus it is an ecclesiastical dispute and in Popes a social feud, is not
an essential difference, but a change in style from Renaissance to baroque
and rococo. (Even in La secchia rapita the war is not a serious, nearly
contemporary war, but a tussle between two little city-states hundreds of
years earlier, whose champions are fools.) And Boileau himself, in
Le Lutrin, 4, invokes the muse who inspired Tassoni; while Popes title
is an obvious allusion to Tassonis title as translated by Ozell. The real
difference between the poems is that La secchia rapita is a parody of
Renaissance chivalric epic, and in particular of The Liberation of Jerusalem
(Tassoni v. Tasso), while the other two are parodies of the purely classical
epic ; but that difference is not enough to make the satires belong to different
types. In The Rape of theLock some beautiful parodies of Popes own translation
of Homer have recently been pointed out by W. Frost. See ^The
Rape of rAeLoc/j and Popes Homer {Modern Language Quarterly, 8 (1947),
3. 342-54). Mr. Frost suggests that, although the translation appeared
later than The Rape, some of the most notable lines in it already existed
in Popes mind or in manuscript when he was writing his satire.
34. For some remarks on the relation of The Dunciad to classical satire,
see G. Highet, The Dunciad*, in The Modern Language Review, 36 (1941),
3. 320-43.
35. There is a good analysis of the relation between originals and
adaptations by J. W. Tupper, A Study of Popes Imitations of Horace*,
in PMLA, 15 (1900), 181-215. The real difference (as we should expect)
is that Pope adds far more of his own personal friendships and hatreds,
makes many passages more vividly real than their originals by introducing
much contemporary detail, and, on the whole, expands rather than contracts
his borrowings.
36. The debt of English baroque satire to Roman originals should
never be assessed without reference to its almost equally considerable debt
to Boileau. Thus, Juvenal begins satire 10 with a world-sweeping glance:
Omnibus in terris, quae sunt a Gadibus usque
Auroram et Gangen. . . .
Johnsons variation on this is justly famous
:
Let observation, with extensive view,
Survey mankind from China to Peru.
Yet the best thing in that comes from Boileau (Satire 8, init.)
:
De tons les animaux qui s^l^vent dans Fair,
Qui marchent sur la terre ou nagent dans la mer,
De Paris au P^rou, du Japon jusqu^ Rome,
Le plus sot animal, k mon avis, cest Fhomme.
NOTES ON 17. SATIRE 653
37. Juvenal, i. 127 f., gives the idea of describing the entire course of
the day:
Ipse dies pulchro distinguitur ordine remm. . . .
Persius, 3, begins with a spoilt and lazy young man waking up late in the
morning, and goes on with a long apostrophe to him, as Parinis poem
does. These reminiscences do not diminish the admirable originality of
Jl giorno.
38. Boileau, letter to Racine, 7 October 1692.
39. Pope, The Dunciad^ 4. 551-4.
40. Boileau, Satire 8. 29-39.
41. Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel^ i. 108-15.
42. Boileau, Art poetique, 2. 175-8.
43. D. Mornet, Nicolas Boileau (Paris, 1942), 10 1 f. On p. 57 Mr.
Momet points out that R6gniers satires were reissued several times after
his death, but that from 1641 onwards each successive edition was cleaned
up a little more.
44. See p. 272.
45. Boileau, Satire 6. 37-8 and 6. 94; Juvenal,. 3. 292-5.
46. Dryden, Absalom and Achitophely 2. 464-5.
47. Pope, Epistle to Dr, Arbuthnot, 309-10.
48. Persius, 3. 34; Dante, Inf, 7. 117 f., with a good sound-effect.
49. Boileau, Satire 10. 195-200.
50. Juvenal, 6. 461-4, 471-3:
Interea foeda aspectu ridendaque multo
pane tumet facies, aut pinguia Poppaeana
spirat, et hinc miseri uiscantur labra mariti.
Ad moechum ueniet lota cute. . . .
Sed quae mutatis inducitur atque fouetur
tot medicaminibus coctaeque siliginis offas
accipit et madidae, facies dicetur an ulcus ?
Swifts On a Young Nymph going to Bed is far worse than this.
51. Rdgnier, Satire 3. 82; Juvenal, 13, 105.
52. Boileau, Satire 12, UEquivoque.
53. A useful proof of this limitation of scope is to count the persons
actually mentioned in one of Boileaus satires, and to compare the number
with those mentioned in its Roman original or in a Roman satire of similar
size. For instance, in his eighth satire, which is 308 lines long, Boileau
mentions
seven living men
six recently dead
eight historical figures, from Aesop to Calvin.
In Juvenal, 8, approximately the same length, there are
twenty-three living people
twenty-five historical figures;
and in Horace, Serm, 2. 3, with 326 lines altogether, we find
thirty living people
twenty-four dead characters.
654 NOTES ON 17. SATIRE
Pope usually errs in the other direction, and puts in a bewildering assortment
of characters. In Boileau the tendency to turn the eyes away from real
life developed so far that in his last satire, UJSquivoquey on the important
subject of Jesuitry, there are no living men at all, only four who had died
within recent memory, and eight historical characters, or waxworks.
54. Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arhuthnot^ 203.
55. Boileau, ^pitre 10, ad fin.
Notes on 18. baroque prose
1. This was Scuderys Clelie.
2. In this section I am much indebted to the brilliant essays ofProfessor
M. W. Croll. See in particular his Attic Prose in the Seventeenth
Century, in Studies in Philology
,
18 (1921), 2. 79-128; Muret and the
History of Attic Prose, in PMLA, 39 (1924), 254-309; and The
Baroque Style in Prose, in Studies in English Philology ... in honour of
Frederick Klaeher (JS/iixme2.-golis, 1929), 427-56. Professor Croll prefers to
use the phrase baroque style for only one of the two rival schools of prose
which flourished in the late sixteenth, the seventeenth, and the eighteenth
centuries : the anti-Ciceronian school. That is, of course, his right ; but I
cannot help thinking that baroque architecture and music, highly decorated,
full of complex symmetries and counterbalancing variations on a fundamentally
simple design, have more in common with the elaborations of
Ciceronianism, and that either a style like Johnsons should be called pure
baroque or the term should be extended to cover both styles.
3. On Asianism and Atticism, see E. Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa
(Leipzig, 1898), I. 251-99; and Wilamowitzs remarkable essay Asianismus
und Atticismus in Hermes
^
35 (1900), 1-52. Ciceros Brutus and
Orator show his side of the controversy : true to his guiding principle, he
endeavoured to show that his own style embodied the essentials of both
schools.
4. The distinction is made by Professor M. W. Croll, The Baroque
Style in Prose (cited in n. 2), 43 1 f. It is important to grasp the difference
in the origins of the two styles. Th.^periode coupi^ the curt manner, was
consciously modelled on Seneca. The loose manner was not really
modelled closely on any classical author, but was built up from the double
wish (a) not to be formal like Cicero, and {h) to reflect the flexibility and
the occasional inconsequence and vagueness of the processes of thought.
5. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, partition i, section 2, member
2, subsection 6, med. (London edition, 1924, p. 161).
6. Donne, Sermon 34 (St. Pauls, Whitsunday 1623). ^
7. There is an able introduction to this subject, with a good bibliography,
The First Political Commentary on Tacitus, by A. Momigliano,
in The Journal of Roman Studies, 37 (1947), 91-101.
8. This incident is quoted by J. E. Sandys in his edition of the first
Philippic and the Olynthiacs (London, 1897), preface, p. ix
9. Demosthenic passages occur in Pitts speeches on the motion for
augmenting the national force in case of invasion (18 Oct. 1796), on the
NOTES ON 18 . BAROQUE PROSE 655
general defence bill (2 June 1801), and on the volunteer regulation bill
(27 Feb. 1804). These references, and the fact about Niebuhr, are given
by J. E. Sandys (quoted in n. 8). On a similar use of Demosthenes
speeches against Philip at an earlier date, see p. 122.
10. See T. Zielinski, Cicero im Wandel der Jahrhunderte (Leipzig,
19123), 247 and note. Speaking through Memmius, Voltaire heaps praises
on Ciceros book On Moral Duties. Memmius was the patron of the
philosopher-poet Lucretius.
11. Voltaire, Commentaire sur le livre 'Des Delits et des pemes^ (1766),
c. 22.
12. Juvenal, 8. 124: spoUatis arma supersunt; quoted from Burkes
speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, 22 March 1775.
13. On the use of classical citations in epic, see p. 156 f,
14. Browne, The Garden of Cyrus^ 5. 12.
15. Vergil, Georg. 1. 250-1:
Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens adflauit anhehs
illic sera rubens accendit lumma Vesper.
The account is taken from J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship
(Cambridge, 1908), 2. 433 f.
16. Faydit, quoted by A. Hurel, Les Orateurs sacres d la cour de Louis
XIV (Paris, 1872), i. 335 n. In an essay written to advise a young orator
Bossuet says that his aim was to combine St. John Chrysostom and St.
Augustine : ce que jai appris du style, je le tiens des livres latins et un peu
des grecs; de Platon, dIsocrate, et de Demosthene, dont jai lu aussi
quelque chose . . . de Ciceron, surtout de ses livres . . . mais aussi de ses
discours, avec choix . . . enfin Tite-Live, Salluste, Terence. He says it
is to them he owes his style tourne et figure, and advises learning ones
own language first, and then studying the literatures of other countries,
surtout la latine, dont le genie nest pas eloigne de celui de la ndtre, ou
plutdt est tout le meme, (Quoted by A. Rebelliau in Petit de Jullevilles
Histoire de la langue et de la litterature frangaise, 5. 5.)
17. Chair angelisie is quoted by F. Brunetiere, Bossuet (Paris, 1914^),
3 1 , from the sermon on the First Assumption, section 2. The other words
are given by F. Brunot in L. Petit de Jullevilies Histoire de la langue et de
la litterature frangaise, 5. 795 f.
18. There are long lists of Johnsons favourite words of Latin origin in
H. Schmidt, Der Prosastil SamuelJohnson"s (Marburg, 1905), 4 f. A study
of their nature, which shows that the heaviness of his style is due to the
fact that they are predominantly intellectual in content, has been made by
Z, E. Chandler, An Analysis of the Stylistic Technique of Addison^ Johnson^
Hazlittf and Pater (University of Iowa Humanistic Studies, 4. 3, Iowa
City, 1928).
19. Boswell, Life ofJohnson (Oxford ed., 1924), 2. 569.
20. See G. Guiilaumie, J. L. Guez de Balzac et la prosefrangaise (Paris,
1927), 132!. Balzac attacked the use of such words as onguent and
auspices (cest parler latin en fran^ais), and reproached even Richelieu
for calling someone a petulant exagerateur. He himself, nevertheless, used
656 NOTES ON 18. BAROQUE PROSE
words like vScordie, helluon, and remote (= retard)
:
which shows, not that
his standards were uneven, but that the plague of pedantic latinisms was
very widespread. His real name, by the way, was Guez ; Balzac was the
name of a property in his mothers dowry, and he added it in order to
appear noble.
31. Browne, Urn Burial^ c. 5.
32. Johnson, Life of Savage.
23. Browne, Letter to a Friend.
24. Bossuet, Sur Vhomieur du monde, 2.
25. Milton, Areopagitica.
26. Bossuet, Sur la justice^ 3.
27. Bacon, Of Studies.
28. Donne, Sermon 66 (29 Jan. 1625/6).
29. Pope, Letter to a Noble Lord.
30. Lincoln, Gettysburg Address.
31. Bourdaloue, La Misere de notre condition. (He went on, after this
heaping up of separate terms, to work out each separately. See F. Bruneti^
re, Lfiloquence de Bourdaloue, in Etudes critiques sur Vhistoire de la
litterature frangaise, huitieme serie (Paris, 1907), 151 f.)
32. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, c. 3 init. (London,
1928, p. 133 f.).
33. Bourdaloue, Sur le royaume de Dieu (14th Sunday after Pentecost).
See M. F. Hitz, Die Redekunst in Bourdaloues Predigt (Munich, 1936), 44.
34. Trouvez-moi, je vous en defie, dans quelque po^te et dans quelque
livre quil vous plaira, une belle chose qui ne soit pas une image ou une
antithese. (Voltaire, quoted by Guillaumie (cited in n. 20), 444.) Antithesis
ran mad in a comparatively early elaboration of English prose style Euphuism. The precise origin
of this curious set of mannerisms his not
yet been determined. However, in an article called *The Immediate
Source of Euphuism (PMLA, 53 (1938), 3. 678-86), W, Ringler gives
reason for believing that Lyly and the others got it from the brilliant and
celebrated Latin lectures of John Rainolds, of Corpus Christi College,
Oxford, whose effects they set out to reproduce in English. The next
question is, if this is true, where did Rainolds get it? Mr. Ringler thinks
he modelled his style on *St. Augustine and Gregory Nazianzen^which
seems rather hard to believeand on the teaching of the anti-Ciceronian
humanist Vives. Now Vives himself was at Corpus from 1523 to 1525,
and gave two remarkable courses of lectures (Sandys, A History of
Classical Scholarship, Cambridge, 1908, 2. 214-15): he was a friend of
Erasmus, another opponent of the imitation of Cicero, and was a superb
teacher. If we consider that Euphuism is (a) highly formal and artificial,
(b) carefully symmetrical, (c) highly alliterative, (d) excessively learned,
and (e) not Ciceronian, we might conjecture that it was an English reflection
of a newly created type of Latin style, worked out by a humanist like
Vives who wished to achieve as much intricacy and artistry as Cicero
without using Ciceros own patterns. (The speeches of Isocrates, whom
Vives would no doubt know, combine alliteration and assonance and
antithesis rather Hke Euphuism, although more moderately.)
NOTES ON 18. BAROQUE PROSE 657
35. Donne, Devotions
^
17.
36. Balzac, Socr. disc, ii, quoted by Guillaumie (cited in n. 20).
M. Guillaumie, on p. 461 f., shows how Balzac gave French prose a new
and smoother harmony, by cultivating symmetry of all kinds : antithesis,
grammatical parallelisms, balanced rhythms, blended sounds. Balzac
formed his style partly by his own excellent taste, partly by his admirable
training in Latin (received from a Jesuit teacher, Garasse), and partly by
the refining influence of the Italian orators and prose-writers, working
both in Italian and in Latin. Fusion harmonieuse du genie latin et du
goflt fran^ais, tel nous apparaitra Tart de Balzac*, says M. Guillaumie on
p. III. In view of this it is unfortunate that M. Guillaumie should have
written a long book on Balzac, dominated by the idea that it is a mistake
for talented students to learn Latin : he calls the education which Balzac
himself believed largely responsible for his talent ce prejuge si tenace
et . . . si funeste* (26), and says it gave him la fausse illusion d*avoir
penetre dans la pensee intime et Iame veritable des anciens* (77). Yet the
rest of the book is devoted to proving how much Balzac profited from this
injurious system.
37. Swift, A Voyage to Laputa^ c. 6.
38. Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot^ 201-2.
39. Pitt on the war with the American colonies (On the Motion for an
Address to the Throne^ 18 Nov. 1777).
40. Donne, Sermon 48 (25 Jan. 1628/9).
41. Browne, Urn Burial^ c. 5.
42. Bossuet, Oraisonfunebre d*Henriette d*Angleterre.
43. Johnson, Letter to Lord Chesterfield. From a later age there is a
famous and beautiful tricolon in LandoFs Aesop and Rhodope :
Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before.*
44. On jetait des louis d*or k la tete des libraires (Brunetiere, Histoire
de la litteraturefranpaise classique (Paris, 1904), 2. 4. 2). On the popularity
of the book abroad, see A. Eckhardt, Telemaque en Hongrie* (Revue des
etudes hongroises, 4 (1926), 166 f.); H. G. Martin, Feneloii en Hollande
(Amsterdam, 1928); and G. Maugain, Documenti bibliografici e critici per
la storia della fortuna del Finelon in Italia (Bibliotheque de FInstitut
fran9ais de Florence, i. i, Paris, 1910).
45. On Astree see p. 170.
46. Thus, book 12 contains a potted version of Sophocles* tragedies
Philoctetes and Trachiniae; and book 9, in which Mentor calms a group
of savages by the power of speech, takes up the opening theme of Cicero*s
De inuentioni. Zielinski, Cicero im Wandel der Jahrhunderte (Leipzig,
1912^), 321-2, says that this ideal continued to be potent in the days of
the French Revolution, apparently through Fenelon*s evocation of it: die
Schaufenster der Buchladen boten gem das Bild des beredten Greises,
der mit seinem Wort die aufgeregte Menge bezaubert.* There is a short
list of Fenelon*s borrowings from the classics in P. Janet, Fdnelon (Paris,
1892), 123 f., and fuller information in L. Boulve, De VhellSnisme chez
Fmelon (Pans, 1897).
5076 uu
658 NOTES ON 18. BAROQUE PROSE
47. On Arcadia see p. 167,
48. On the educational content of Homers epics see W. Jaeger,
Paideia, 1 (Oxford, 1939), c. 3.
49. For an expansion of this, see A. Tilley, The Decline of the Age of
Louis XIV (Cambridge, 1929), c. 8.
50. See Brunetiere (cited in n. 44).
51. Details in E. Poetzsche, Samuel Richardsons Belesenheit (Kieler
Studien zur englischen Philologie, n.F. 4, Kiel, 1908).
52. Richardson, Pamela (Oxford, 1929 edition), 3, letter 18, p. 93
53. Richardson, Pamela (Oxford, 1929 edition), 2, p. 55.
54. Richardson, Clarissa Harlowe (Oxford, 1930 edition), 3, letter 59,
p. 3 18. The next batch of lighter books consisted of Steeles, Rowes, and
Shaltespeares Plays.
55. On Sidneys Arcadia see pp. 169-70.
56. See M. Gassmeyer, Samuel Richardson^s 'Pamela', ihre Quellen und
ihr Einfluss auf die englische Literatur (Leipzig, 1890), ii f.
57. So S. L. Wolff, in Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New
York, 1912), 463 n. If there are references in Pamela to the content of
Arcadia, I have been unable to trace them.
58. Richardson got the pronunciation wrong. In Sidney it was
Pamela, as is shown by one of the lyrics where it appears as Philoclea and
Pamela sweet : probably meant to he UdjjifjLrjXa (cf. evfirjXog), rich in flocks
of sheep. Richardson made his heroine mispronounce her own name in
Verses on My Going Away (letter 31), where she scanned it Pamela, as
everyone does nowadays. Fielding sneered at this immediately in his
parody Joseph Andrews: they had a daughter of a very strange name,
Pamela, or Pamela; some pronounced it one way, and some the other
(4. 12). And in a fine couplet Mr. Pope both corrected the pronunciation
and reproved the morality
:
The gods, to curse Pamela with her prayers,
Gave the gilt coach and dappled Flanders mares.
{Epistle to Miss Blount, 49-50).
59* Tuscan and French are in my head,
Latm I write, and GreekI read.
(Fielding, Letter to Walpole, 1730).
60. See Tom Jones, bk. 8, c. i, on the marvellous; and the preface to
Joseph Andrews on the ridiculous in epic.
61. A. Dobson, Eighteenth-century Vignettes (London, 1896), 3. 163
62. On the Greek romances see p. 163
63. Thus the Telemachus of the Archbishop of Cambfay appears to
me of the epic kind, as well as the Odyssey of Homer; indeed it is much
fairer and more reasonable to give it a name common with that species
from which it differs only in a single instance, than to confound it with
those which it resembles in no othersuch as those voluminous works,
commonly called Romances, namely, Clelia, Cleopatra, Astraea, Cassandra,
the Grand Cyrus, and innumerable others, which contain, as I
apprehend, very little instruction or entertainmentFielding, Joseph
NOTES ON 18. BAROQUE PROSE 659
Andrews
y
preface, init. Fielding then confuses confusion, by going on in
the next sentence to talk of his own work as a comic romance, and defining
a comic romance as a comic epic poem in prose. This shows that he dimly
recognized the presence of both elements in his bookonly felt that epic
was more vigorous and manly, and disliked romances as artificial and
unreal.
64. On Gibbons Oxford days, see p. 494.
65. See A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford, 1939), 5. 506 n.
and 5. 643-5 on Gibbons choice of English as the vehicle of his great
work, which Mr. Toynbee attributes to the victory of Britain in the Seven
Years war. (He also has an interesting mention of the influence of Gibbons
style on the young Abraham Lincoln.)
66. Bossuet, Discours sur Vhistoire universelley 3. 8 init.: *Dieu tient du
plus haut des cieux les resnes de tous les royaumes ; il a tous les coeurs en
sa main : tantost il retient les passions, tantost il leur lasche la bride, et par
Ik il remue tout le genre humain. ... 11 connoist la sagesse humaine
totljours courte par quelque endroit; il Ieclaire, il etend ses vedes, et puis
il iabandonne k ses ignorances ; il Iaveugle, il la precipite, il la confond
par eiie-mesme. . . . Ne parlons plus de hazard ni de fortune, ou parlonsen
seulement comme dun nom dont nous couvrons nostre ignorance. Ce
qui est hazard k Iegard de nos conseils incertains est un dessein concerte
dans un conseil plus hauta remark which chimes with the teaching of
Boethius in his last book (p. 42).
67. See R. G. Collingwoods remarks in The Idea of History (Oxford,
1946), 117 f. on the general character of Christian historiography.
68. These quotations are from Black, The Art of History (New York
and London, 1926), 144 f., who refers to Bagehot, Literary Studies^ 1. 226
;
Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, 8. 456, and Harrison, The Centenary
of GilJbon, in Memories and Thoughts,
69. See p. 10.
70. Montesquieu also tailed off towards the end. See Gibbons explana"
tion of his change of plan (with an explicit quotation of Montesquieus
final phrase) at the beginning of his c. 48.
71. Puis, dune main encor plus fine et plus habile,
Pkse sans passion Chapelain et Virgile
;
Remarque en ce dernier beaucoup de pauvret^s,
Mais pourtant confessant quil a quelques beaut^s,
Ne trouve en Chapelain, quoi quait dit la satire,
Autre d^faut sinon qu"on ne le saurait lire.
(Boileau, Satire 10. 453-8).
72. Here is*a characteristic succession ofthese simple sentence-patterns,
from c. 55, p. 518 of the Everyman edition, vol. 5
;
But the saints were deaf or inexorable; and the torrent rolled forwards, till
it was stopped by the extreme land of Calabria. A composition was offered and
accepted for the head of each Italian subject; and ten bushels of silver were
poured forth in the Turkish camp. But falsehood is the natural antagonist of
violence ; and the robbers were defrauded both in the numbers of the assessment
and the standard of the metal. On the side of the East the Hungarians were
66o NOTES ON 18. BAROQUE PROSE
opposed in doubtful conflict by the equal arms of the Bulgarians, whose faith
forbade an alliance with the pagans, and whose situation formed the barrier of
the Byzantine empire. The barrier was overturned ; the emperor of Constantinople
beheld the waving banners of the Turks ; and one of their boldest warriors
presumed to strike a battle-axe into the golden gate. The arts and treasures of
the Greeks diverted the assault ; but the Hungarians might boast in their retreat
that they had imposed a tribute on the spirit of Bulgaria and the majesty of the
Caesars. The remote and rapid operations of the same campaign appear to
magnify the power and numbers of the Turks ; but their courage is most deserving
of praise, since a light troop of three or four hundred horse would often
attempt and execute the most daring inroads to the gates of Thessalonica and
Constantinople. At this disastrous era of the ninth and tenth centuries, Europe
was afflicted by a triple scourge from the North, the East, and the South: the
Norman, the Hungarian, and the Saracen sometimes trod the same ground of
desolation ; and these savage foes might have been compared by Homer to the
two lions growling over the carcase of a mangled stag.
73. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend^ c. 5.
74. J. B. Bury, in Encyclopaedia Britannica^ s.v. Roman Empire, Later.
75. Coleridge, Table Tolk^ 15 Aug. 1833.
76. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire^ c. 6 init.
(Everyman edition, i. 126). Yet contrast his remark at the beginning of
c. 9 (Everyman edition, i. 213): a state of ignorance and poverty, which
it has pleased some declaimers to dignify with the appellation of virtuous
simplicity.
77. Gibbon, c. 2 fin. (Everyman edition, i. 58). A variation of this
reason to which he often refers is that long peace made the Romans
degenerate and soft.
78. Gibbon, c. 5 init. (Everyman edition, i. loi). See also c. 7 fin. and
Burys appendix ii, in his edition.
79. Gibbon, c. 35 fin. (Everyman edition, 3. 406): this is one" of the
favourite modem explanations, particularly since the financial administration
of Roman Egypt has been revealed to us in great detail by recently
discovered papyri.
80. Gibbon, c. 38 fin. (Everyman edition, 4. 103 f.). The Tour principal
causes of the ruin of Rome set out in Gibbons last chapter (Everyman
edition, 6. 550 f.) concern only the destruction of the city, not that of the
empire and its civilization; but they take us back to the young man sitting
in the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter (see p. 352). J. W. Swain, Edward
Gibbon and the Decline of Rome (South Atlantic Quarterly
^
39 (1940),
I. 77^3% says the essay in c. 38 was written before 1772, and perhaps as
early as 1767. Professor Swain points out interesting parallels between
Gibbons changing attitude (altering from one volume to Another) to the
real cause and significance of Romes decline, and the changes in his own
political situation, and the changing fortunes of the British empire, with
particular reference to the loss of the American colonies.
81. Walter Moyle, Works (London, 1726), v. i. On Spengler see
pp. 267--8.
82. Gibbon, c. 10 init. (Everyman edition, i. 238).
83. Gibbon, c. 10 fin. (Everyman edition, i. 274).
NOTES ON 18. BAROQUE PROSE 66i
84. There is a fine survey by Professor N. H. Baynes, The Decline of
Roman Power in Western EuropeSome Modem Explanations^ in JRS,
33 (1943)-
85. The date was 15 Oct. 1764: see Gibbons autobiography, p. 167.
86. The arguments advanced by Gibbons opponents are usefully summarized
in S. T. McCloys book Gibbon*s Antagonism to Christianity and
the Discussions that it Provoked (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1933).
87. Gibbon, c. 28: see especially the last pages (Everyman edition, 3.
I45-7)-
88. Gibbon, c. 50 fin. (Everyman edition, 5. 290-2).
89. Gibbon, c. 71 (Everyman edition, 6. 553). See an interesting reinterpretation
by A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford, 1939), 4.
56-63.
90. Gibbon, c. 2 (Everyman edition, i. 28 f.).
91. Gibbon, c. 23 (Everyman edition, 2. 371).
92. See Gibbon, c. 37 (Everyman edition, 4. 16 f.).
Notes on i (). the time of revolution, i : introduction
1. The word romance means a work wntten in one of the vernacular
languages of Roman originand so a popular work in the ordinary speech
of the Mediterranean peoples (as opposed to a serious book in Latin, the
language of culture), and particularly a story of chivalrous adventure.
Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian, and Spanish are still
known as Romance languages. An even stranger relic of the Romans is
the word for modem colloquial Greek, which is called Romaic, the
speech of the (eastern) Roman empire.
2. See pp. 61, 514.
3. So also Wordsworths note on his return to classical symbols in the
Ode to Lycoris (1817):
No doubt the hacknied and lifeless use into which mythology fell towards the
close of the 17th century, and which continued through the i8th, disgusted the
general reader with all allusion to it m modem verse; and though, in deference to
this disgust, and also in a measure participating in it, I abstained in my earlier
writings from all introduction of pagan fable, surely, even in its humble form,
it may ally itself with real sentiment.
4. Byron, Don Juan, 2. 194. Probably the actual group of which Byron
was thinking was a Cupid and Psyche in the Uffizi Gallery. See J. A.
Larrabee, English Bards and Grecian Marbles (New York, 1943), 167 and
his note 16.
$. See C. Justi, Winckehnann und seine Zeitgenossen (Leipzig, 1898^)
I, 202 , for Winckeimanns radical views and the authors he read to
confirm them.
6. The whole of Hugos Les Orientates is an expression of the excited
hatred of Turkey and the passion for liberty which moved the more
generous spirits of the revolutionary age. To Greece! he shouts in 4,
En Grece, 6 mes amis! vengeance! liberty!
Ce turban sur mon front! ce sabre k mon c5t6!
AUons! ce cheval, quon le sellel
662 NOTES ON 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION:
G. Deschamps, in L. Petit de Jullevilles Histoire de la langue et de la
littdrature frangaise, 7. 275 , describes the assertion of Greek independence
by British, French, and Russian forces as a triumph of the enthusiasm
of poets and intellectuals over cautious officialdom. In France Chateaubriands
propaganda was really more efficient than the rhodomontades of
Hugo.
7. See p. 262 f.
8. On the conflict of the Olympians and the Nazarene, see Heines
Reuehilder: Die Stadt Lucca 6, quoted, translated, and discussed by
J. G. Robertson in The Gods of Greece in German Poetry {Essays and
Addresses on Literature^ London, 1935), 136 f., and in E. M. Butlers
brilliant and tendentious The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge
and New York, 1935), 256 f.
9. E. M. Butler (cited m n. 8), 118-19.
10. There is another striking expression of this hatred for Christianity
in Shelleys Ode to Libertyy which in stanza 8 says the fall of Greco-Roman
culture was caused by the Galilean serpent creeping forth from its sea
of death (an allusion to the Dead Sea), and in stanza 16 says that the
name of priest was an emanation of hell and the fiends.
11. Lessing, Wie die Alten den Tod gehildet.
12. For the word macabre and its associations, see J. Huizinga, The
Waning of the Middle Ages (London, 1937), 129-30.
13. Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than its own
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through its tall woods with high romances blent
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment
For skies Italian, and an inward groan r
To sit upon an Alp as on a throne,
And half forget what world or worldling meant.
Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters
Enough their simple loveliness for me.
Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging:
Yet do I often warmly bum to see
Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing,
And float with them about the summer waters.
Keats, Sonnet 17 {Poems published in 1817).
World and worldling* mean the modem commercial and industrial life
of Britain, as in Wordsworths The World is too much with Us (on which
see p. 436 ).
14. This is emphasized for the Germans by W. Rehm in Griechentum
und Goethezeit (Das Erbe der Alten, second series, 26, Leipzig, 1936), i f.
Winckelmann got as far as the temple at Paestum (Rehm, 34). Rehms
book is very learned, but seems to me to be vitiated by the German
nationalistic assumption that there wsis a special spiritual affinity (he calls
it a WahUVerwandtschaft on p. 18) between the Greeks and the Germans rather than between the
Greeks and all the thinkers and aesthetes of
the revolutionary-^ age in every land. Considering the opposition between
1 . INTRODUCTION 663
Greece and Germany which some of the most important German writers
have felt (p. 366), it is difficult even to make sense out of an assertion like
this: Der Glaube an Griechisches ist also im letzten nur ein Gleichnis
fur den Glauben an das Hoch- und Rein-Menschliche und darum auch fur
den Glauben an das Deutsche (1718).
15. Goethe, Diary 1786, quoted and translated by H. Trevelyan,
Goethe and the Greeks
^
Cambridge, 1942, 121.
16. Goethe, Vetiezianische Eptgramme, 76:
Was mit mir das Schicksal gewollt? Es ware verwegen.
Das zu fragen: denn meist will es mit vielen nicht viel.
Einen Dichter zu bilden, die Absicht war ihm gelungen,
Hatte die Sprache sich nicht uniiberwindlich gezeigt.
So, in the same book (29), after saying that he has tried painting and
drawing and so forth, he writes:
Only one single skill could I bring near to success
:
writing in German. And so, I am wasting (unfortunate poet)
on the vilest of stuff, wasting my life and my art.
Nur ein einzig Talent bracht ich der Meisterschaft nah:
Deutsch zu schreiben. Und so verderb ich ungliicklicher Dichter
In dem schlechtesten Stoff leider nun Leben und Kunst.
17. E. M. Butler (cited in n. 8), 203.
18. See Vernon Lee, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (London,
1927^), c. 2, The Musical Life, especially 139 f. and 153 f.
19. See L. Hautecoeur, Rome et la renaissance de Vantiquite a la jin du
XVIIP siecle (Bibliotheque des ecoles fran9aises dAthenes et de Rome,
105, Paris, 1912), I. I, on the increasing popularity of tours in Italy and
their*stimulating effect.
Notes on 19. the time of revolution, 2: Germany
I. Alle Volker haben eine Renaissance gehabt, diejenige, die wir fiir
gewohnlich so bezeichnen, mit einer einzigen Ausnahme, namlich
Deutschland. Deutschland hat zwei Renaissancen gehabt; die zweite
Renaissance liegt um die Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts und kniipft sich an
Namen wie Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Winckelmann. Da stehen
die Griechen ebenso im Vordergrund wie in der ersten die Lateiner,
die nationale Wesensverwandtschaft der Deutschen imd Griechen ist
entdeckt worden. Daher kommt es, dass die Deutschen ebenso stark
Griechen, wie die Englander, Franzosen und Italiener bis aufden heutigen
Tag Lateiner sein konnen. Fur uns steht in erster Linie Homer, nicht
Virgil, Thukydides, nicht Titus Livius, Plato, nicht Seneca, das ist ein
grundlegender Unterschied. Wir denken zunachst ganz instinktiv an das
Griechische, dann an das Romische, die Leute zur Zeit der ersten Renaissance
und die grossen Kultumationen des Westens machen es gerade
umgekehrt, und darin ist vielleicht ein gutes Teil des Grundes zu sehen,
weshalb die Deutschen so unbekannt und missverstanden in der Welt
664 NOTES ON 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION:
stehen.Paul Hensel, Montaigne und die Antike (Vortrage der Bihliothek
Warburg 1925-6, Leipzig, 1928), 69.
2. Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro are the results of the collaboration
of Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte. (Da Ponte, by the way, ended his
singular career as professor of Italian at Columbia College, New York.)
3. Storm and Stress* is the usual translation of Sturm und Drang, the
title of a drama by Klinger (1776), whose hero, glutted by impulse and
power*, was a Byron before Byron was bom.
4. Winckelmann read Greek until midnight, wrapped in his coat by the
fireside, slept in his chair until four, woke up and studied Greek again
until six, and then started his school-teaching. In summer he used to
sleep on a bench, with blocks of wood tied to his feet, so that when he
moved they would make a noise and wake him. See E. M. Butler, The
Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge and New York, 1935), 14.
5. Gedanken uber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei
und Bildhauerkunst, A good summary of Winckelmanns thought, with an
interesting account of the reactions (not all favourable) which it provoked
in Germany, will be found in H. C. Hatfields Winckelmann and his
German Critics ly^y-Si (New York, 1943).
6. Shaftesbury was one of Winckelmanns two favourite authors, and
many of his ideas reappear in Winckelmanns work: C. Justi, WinckeU
mann und seine Zeitgenossen (Leipzig, 1898^), i. 208, 21 1, 215-16.
7. The fine Greek buildings and streets of late-eighteenth-century and
early-nineteenth-century Britain are well known. Russia has many Greekstyie
buildings dating from the same period and created by the same
impulse. In Berlin the style appeared in the Brandenburg Gate which
Langhans built on the model of the Propylaea at Athens in 1789-94, in
SchinkeFs State Theatre (1819-21), and in Schinkels portico for the Old
Museum (1824-8). On Jefferson and classical architecture in revolutionary
America see p. 400 f. The Greek current ran strong in the minor
decorative arts too, as is shown by the work of Wedgwood the famous
potter, and by such portrait-busts as those of Goethe made, in the Greco-
Roman style, by A. Trippel (1787) and M. G. Klauer (1790).
8. See J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge,
1908), 2. 431-2.
9. On this work see also p. 383 ; Sandys (cited in n. 8), 2. 432-3, and
G. Finsler, Homer in der Neuzeit von Dante his Goethe (Leipzig, 1912),
258 and 368-72.
10. Chandlers description of Ionia was eagerly read by Goethe and
Hdiderlin (W. Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit (Das Erbe der Alten,
2nd series, 26, Leipzig, 1936), 3). Woods Essay and Blackwells Enquiry
into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735) were the books which opened
Goethes eyes to Homer (E. Maass, Goethe und die Antike (Berlin, 1912),
87). Wood v's privately printed in 1769, then published posthumously
in 1775, goihg into several editions and translations. On Blackwell, see
Finsler (cited in n. 9), 332-5.
11. Mine edle Einfalt und eine stille Grosse (Gedanken 21).
12. Geschiekte der Kunst des Alterthums, On the essays which Winckel2.
GERMANY 665
mann published in the Bibliothek der schonen Wissenschaften, see H. C.
Hatfield (cited in n. 5), 9 f.
13. The phrase is E. M. Butlers, in her book cited in n. 4, p. 26.
E. Fueter, Geschichte der neueren Historiographie (ed. D. Gerhard and
P. Sattler, Munich, 19362), 390 n., points out that Winckelmann invented
both the word Kunstgeschichte^ history of art, and the idea.
14. Monumenti antichi inediti: see J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical
Scholarship (Cambridge, 1908), 3. 23.
15. The legend is in Vergil, Aen. 2. 40 f.
16. For the date 25 b.c. see C. Blinkenberg, Zur Laokoongmppe, in
Mitteilungen des deutschen archdologischen Instituts, rbmische Abteilung, 42
(1927), 177-92. The group was carved by two brothers, Athanodorus and
Hagesandros, who were made priests of Athana Lindia as a reward from
the state of Rhodes. Blinkenberg thinks the group was not known to
Vergil, but was brought to Rome by Titus in a.d. 69. There is also a good
article by M. Pohlenz in Die Antike, 9 (1933), 54 f., suggesting that the
date is certainly within the decade 32-22 B.c. On the question whether
Laocoon is shrieking, Pohlenz points out that the later Stoics (whose most
prominent spokesman Panaetius came from Rhodes) held that a shriek
was quite impermissible in pain, but that a groan was allowable, as an
expression of the effort of will made to overcome pain. In view of the
extreme anguish in Laocoons face, I do not feel this is quite convincing.
He is not shrieking ; he is groaning, but it is scarcely a groan of Stoical
resistance. The group was rediscovered in January 1506, and at once
identified as that described in Pliny, Hist. Nat. 36. 37. On the history of
its reputation there is an interesting treatise by M. Bieber, Laocoon: the
Influence of the Group since its Rediscovery (New York, 1942).
17. Julius Caesar was exceedingly interested in the connexion between
Troy and Rome; Varro (d. 27) wrote a work Defamiliis Troianis, on the
Roman families which traced their descent back to Troy; Vergil began
the Aeneid in 29 b.c.
18. On Dares the Phrygian see p. 51 f.
19. De toutes les statues qui sont restees jusquk present, il ny en a
point qui egale celle de Laocoon : quoted by S. Rocheblave in L. Petit de
Jullevilles Histoire de la langue et de la litterature frangaise, v. 5, c. 12.
The works of art which the Academic Royale admired most were, for
compositions containing several figures, Poussins paintings; and, for
isolated figures, Greco-Roman sculpture, particularly Laocoon.
20. See c, 1$, particularly p. 290 f.
21. The German titles are Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend
(1759-65) anti Hamburgische Dramaturgie. There is a very full analysis of
the latter, and of Lessings other critical writings on theatrical subjects,
by J. G. Robertson : Dramatic Theory (ed. E. Purdie, Cambridge,
1939). The name Dramaturgie was taken from a catalogue of plays by the
Italian critic Allacci published in 1666 and called Drammaturgia : Lessing
intended it to mean something like dramatic activity in Plamburg. (See
Robertson, 120 f.) On Lessings imaginative but erratic criticisms of
Homer see Finsler (cited in n, 9), 420-6..
666 NOTES ON 19 . THE TIME OF REVOLUTION:
22. See p. 287.
23. This was in the early Beytmge zur Historic und Aufnahme des
Theaters : Lessing wrote it as a reply to criticism of his essay on Plautus
and his translation of the Captiui. See Robertson (cited in n. 21), 94 f.
24. Von den lateinischen Trauerspielen, welche unter dem Namen des
Seneca bekannt sind, in the Theatralische Bibliothek: a polemic against
Brumoy^s depreciation of Latin drama as compared with Greek. See
Robertson (n. 21), no f.
25. The attack was in Briefe, die neueste Litteratur hetreffend, 17 (Feb.
1759): Robertson (n. 21), 205 f,
26. It is often said that Lessings criticism in the Hamhurgische Drama^
turgie is based on his interpretation of Aristotles Poetics. Robertson
(cited in n. 21), 342 f., points out that this is not so. Lessing began to
work hard at the Poetics, using Daciers translation and commentary, as
late as March 1768. See also Robertsons summary, on p. 489 f.
27. See H. Trevelyan, Goethe and the Greeks (Cambridge, 1942), 50.
On Herders eulogies of Homer see Finsler (cited in n. 9), 429-36.
28. There is a useful thesis by W. J. Keller, Goethe's Estimate of the
Greek and Latin Writers (Madison, Wisconsin, 1916), which describes the
stages of Goethes developing interest in each of the classical authors, and
contains a chronological table showing what he was reading each year
from 1765 to 1832. See also E. Maass, Goethe und die Antike (Berlin,
1912), a standard work, supplemented by K, Bapp, Aus Goethesgriechischer
Gedankenwelt (Das Erbe der Alten, 2nd series, 6, Leipzig, 1921).
29. Schiller, An die Freude
:
Freude, schoner Gotterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium ....
30. Schiller, Die Goiter Griechenlands, stanza 9
:
Damals trat kein grassliches Gerippe
vor das Bett des Sterbenden. Ein Kuss
nahm das letzte Leben von der Lippe,
seine Fackel senkt ein Genius.
(Cf. p. 364 f-)
3 1 . On this poem see p. 437 f.
32. For details of these attacks see F. Strich, Die Mythologie in der
deutschen Literatur von Klopstock bis Wagner (Halle, 1910), i. 273 f.
33. After Holderlin went mad he changed his name so as to become a
different person. There is a sympathetic chapter on him by E. M. Butler
(cited in n, 4).
34. On Hdiderlins hymns see also p. 251.
35. There are some superficial remarks on this in G. Wenzels Holderlin
und Keats als geistesverwandte Dichter (Magdeburg, 1896).
36. Plato, Symposium, zox dt
37. Keats, When J have Fears (1817). Hdlderlin, An die Parzen:
Nur einen Sommer gSnnt, ihr GewaltigenI
Und einen Herbst zu reifem Gesange mir,
Dass wiiliger mem Hcrz, vom siissen
Spiele gesattiget, dann mir sterbe.
2. GERMANY 667
38. On this see Keller (cited in n. 28), 9-10, and pages 73 (Aeschylus),
96 (Aristophanes), iii (Aristotles Poetics)
^
125 (the Greek Anthology),
140 (Longinus), and 141 (Lucian).
39. See H. Trevelyan (cited in n. 27), c. i, and E. Maass (cited in
n. 28), c. 3. Goethe himself speaks of this in Dichtung und-Wahrheit
(Vienna edition), 161-2, and in Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert.
40. See Keller (cited in n. 28), 17; see his c. i generally.
41. Goethe, Romische Elegien, 5.
42. Goethe, Romische Elegien, i. 13-14:
Yes, Rome, you are a world indeed. And yet, without love, the
world would not be the world ; neither could Rome still be Rome.
Eine Welt zwar bist du, o Rom, doch ohne die Liebe
Ware die Welt nicht die Welt, ware denn Rom auch nicht Rom.
He is using mythology quite like Propertius and Ovid when, in Romische
Elegien, 3, he tells his mistress that she must not be ashamed of her quick
surrender to him, because the gods and goddesses of the heroic age took
their lovers swiftly and without hesitation. One of those sudden unions
produced the wolf-twins, who made Rome queen of the world.
43. See E. Maass (cited in n. 10), c. 7, and Rehm (cited in n. 10), 128 f.
44. E. Maass (n. 10) compares her on p. 341 to Cordelia and Imogen.
45. There is a careful analysis of the sources of the Romische Elegien
by F. Bronner, Goethes romische Elegien und ihre Quellen*, in Neue
Jahrhucherfur Philologie und Paedagogik, 148 (1893). Bronner points out,
among other things, that Goethe did not read Catullus and Propertius in
Rome, but started them later, when Knebel (who had translated Propertius
into prose) sent him a volume of the elegists. He cared little for
Tibullus; he got some material from Martial and the Priapea; and he
probably knew Ovid best of allthe motto for the Romische Elegien comes
from The Art of Love (i. 33).
46. This is Romische Elegien, 6, with an exquisite ending in the manner
of the Greek Anthology.
47. Take, for instance, the opening of Longfellows Evangeline:
I This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks
4 Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
//
Line i is all dactyls : stress light light, stress light light .... The next line
!fl!t
is supposed to begin with four spondees : stress stress, stress stress, stress
///
stress, stress stress
:
/ / / / ft t /
Stand like / harpers / hoar with / beards that ....
But in fact harpers and hoar with cannot be made into pairs of equally
stressed syllables, and it is difBcult to force beards that into the same
balance. They are really stressed syllables followed by unstressed
syllables: trochees. Therefore such hexameters always tend to become
alternations of dactyls and trochees, even feet against uneven feet, and so
668 NOTES ON 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION:
they acquire a limp. As for the efforts made by some classicists who were
more scholars than poets to create hexameters and pentameters based on
quantitythe metre satirized by Tennyson in
//.
////
Barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters

Goethe had too good taste to pay any attention to them.

48. J. H. Voss, the translator, had already produced some poetry of
this type in hexameters, but without so much plot as Goethe put into
Hertnann und Dotothea^ See V. Hehn, tybet Goethes Hermann und
Dorothea (Stuttgart, 1913^), 139 f., on Vosss Luise,
49. Goethe, Hermann und Dorothea^ i. 78 imd passim:
der edle verstandige Pfarrherr.
50. F. A. Wolf, Prolegomena ad Homerum, sive de operum homericorum
prisca et genuinaforma variisque mutationihus et prohdbili ratione emendandu
There is a good edition with notes by Bekker (Berlin, 1872); an old but
still useful survey of its influence by R. Volkmann, Geschichte und Kritik
der Wolfschen Prolegomena zu Homer (Leipzig, 1874); and a handy summary
in Sandys (cited in n. 8), 3. 51 L The treatment of Wolf in Finslers
book on Homeric criticism (see n. 9), 463 f., is definitely hostile. Finsler
says he got nearly all his ideas from others, starting with DAubignac,
the father of modem Homeric criticism, whose Conjectures academiques
ou Dissertation sur Vlliade appeared in 1715, and ranging through Wood,
Heyne, Macphersons Ossian, and others; and on p. 210 accuses him of
deliberately falsifying his debt to DAubignac.
51. See p. 270 f. Another instance of this is Voltaires attack on Homer
in his Essai sur la poesie epique, introductory to the second edition of his
own epic La Henriade (1726). See Finsler (cited in n. 9), 237-8.
52. On Wood see p. 370, and Finsler (cited in n. 9), 368-72. Almost
equally important in changing the direction of eighteenth-century thought
was the picture of Homer as an untutored but widely travelled and
experienced genius, building up his poems by improvisation, striking off
piece after piece at white heat and slowly moulding the whole into its
final form. This was found in Thomas BlackwelFs Enquiry into the Life
and Writings of Homer (1735): see Finsler, 332-5,
53. On Mabillon see Sandys (cited in n. 8), 2. 293 f. ; on Bentley see
p. 283 f. of this work. What actually started Wolf on his Prolegomena was
the publication by the French scholar Villoison, in 1788, of the Marcianus
A manuscript of Homer, with the attached scholia.
54. IL 6. 168-70, 7. 175 f. See Wolf, Prolegomena, c. 19: accurata
interpretatio facile vincet eos [locos] non magis de scriptura ^ccipiendos
esse quam celebrem ilium Ciceronis [N-D, 2. 37] de typographia nostra.
See also pp. 3-4 of this book on the runes.
55. Wolf, Prolegomena, c. xz.
56. Wolf, Prolegomena, c. 26: Videtur itaque ex illis sequi necessario,
tarn magnorum et perpetua serie deductomm operum foimam a nullo
poeta nec designari animo nec elaborari potuisse sine artificioso adminiculo
memoriae. He goes on, in this important chapter, to declare that the
2. GERMANY 669
feat is impossible to mortal man. This is an odd relic of medieval thinking.
Before making such an outright assertion it would have been safer to make
sure, by inquiry and experiment : for now it is known that the feat is not
only possible, but in certain stages of civilization customary.
57. Wolf quotes this, in his c. 26, n. 84, from Bentleys Remarks upon a
Late Discourse of Free-thinking (1713), c. 7,
58. It was largely because they looked like Tolk-poetry that Herder
admired them so greatly. But in his essay Homer ein Giinstling der Zeit
(1795) he attacked Wolf for missing the fimdamental point that the epics
are great poetry, and were therefore designed not by an editor but by a
great poet.
59. Wolf, Prolegomena, cc. 334.
60. Livys early books were thus dissolved by Niebuhr (see p. 472 f.),
and in the later nineteenth century the same solvent was applied to many
poets and philosophers who little needed it. Ribbeck, for example, having
grasped the obvious fact that Juvenals satires grew gentler and more
discursive as the poet grew older, wrote Der echte und der unechte Juvenal
to prove that the early satires were written by Juvenal and the later satires
by an imitator.
61. For discussions of the poems from the point of view of modern
scholarship see C, M. Bowra, Tradition and Design in the Iliad (Oxford,
1930); Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction, and Saga in the Homeric Epics
(Sather Classical Lectures, 20, Berkeley, Cal., 1946); G. Murray, The
Rise of the Greek Epic (Oxford, 19243), and W. J. Woodhouse, The Composition
of HomePs Odyssey (Oxford, 1930).
62. So in the elegiac poem introducing Hermann und Dorothea he calls
for a toast to Wolf the liberator:
' Erst die Gesundheit des Mannes, der, endlich vom Namen Homeros
Kiihn uns befreiend, uns auch ruft in die vollere Bahn.
Denn wer wagte mit Gottern den Kampf? und wer mit dem Einen?
Doch Homeride zu sein, auch nur als letzter, ist schon.
63. Goethe expressed his reconversion in a little poem, Homer wieder
Homer, as well as in various prose utterances. For an account of his varying
opinions on the Homeric question, see Bapp (cited in n. 28), c. 4.
64. See p. 251. The famous Wanderers Nachtlied is an adaptation of
a fragmentary lyric by Aleman.
65. See p. 72 f.
66. This suggestion was made, with good supporting evidence, by
E. Maass (cited in n. 28), 255 f. Goethe had another reason for introducing
a classicalwitches sabbath: he wished to compose a scene corresponding,
on the classical plane, to the Gothic* sabbath which in Part I
followed the seduction and despair of Gretchen, and thus to link the two
appearances of the woman physical and the woman aesthetically apprehended-
67. See p. 459.
68. See n. 14 on p. 662. Another fine example of this peculiar
nationalist asstimption appears in Mommsens Rdmische Geschichte (Berlin,
670 NOTES ON 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION:
1865^), I. 15. 233: Nur die Griechen und die Deutschen besitzen den
freiwillig hervorspmdelnden Liederquell; aus der goldenen Schale der
Musen sind auf Italiens grtinen Boden eben nur wenige Tropfen gefallen.
Notes on 19. the time of revolution, 3 : France and the
UNITED STATES
1 . Ces republicains etaient la plupart des jeunes gens qui, nourris de la
lecture de Ciceron dans les colleges, sy etaient passionnes pour la liberte.
On nous elevait dans les ecoles de Rome et dAthenes, etdanslafiertedela
Republique, pour vivre dans Fabjection de la monarchic, et sous le regne
des Claude et des VitelliusFCamille Desmoulins, Histoire des Brissotins
(Archives parlementaires de 1787 k i860, ist series, 3 Oct. 1793), 622,
n. I : quoted by J. Worthington, Wordsworth^s Readmg of Roman Prose
(Yale Studies in English, 102, New Haven, 1946), p. 5, n. 5.
2. See p. 399,
3. W. Rehm, Griechentum mid Goethezeit (Das Erbe der Alten, 2nd
series, 26, Leipzig, 1936), 61. On David's early triumphal success with
Les Horaces', and on the rapid spread of his influence to painters like
Tischbein, see L. Hautecoeur, Rome et la renaissance de Vantiquite a la fin
du XVIIF sihcle (Bibliotheque des ecoles fran9aises dAth^nes et de Rome,
105, Paris, 1912), 2. 2. 2 and 2. 2. 3. Hautecoeur points out that one of
the most pow^erful formative influences on David himself was Poussin.
4. See p. 141.
5. There is a good chapter on Gluck in D. J. Grout's A Short History
of Opera (New York, 1947), v. i, c. 15. Mr. Grout stresses the revolutionary
nature of Gluck's work by quoting Metastasio's remark that he
was a composer of surpassing fire, but . . . mad'. I believe, however, that
Mr. Grout underestimates Gluck's power as a teacher and model. His
pupils may have been few, but they were important. One was Cherubini,
favourite composer of the French Revolution; another was Berlioz;
perhaps Bellini was a third ; and the greatest was Mozart.
6. Gluck, preface to Alceste, quoted and translated by D. Tovey, s.v.
Gluck', Encyclopaedia Britannica.
7. He tried to learn Greek in 1749 {Correspondance gen&rale, i. 287,
27 Jan. I749) 6ut gave it up. In 1757, refusing the post of librarian at
Geneva, he wrote, Je ne sais point de grec, tr^s-peu de latin' (Corr. gen.
3. 14, 27 Feb. 1757) ; but this was a characteristic exaggeration. He read
a lot of Plato in a Latin version; he read Seneca, and even translated his
difEcult satire, the Apocolocyntosis, into French (Works, Hachette edn.,
12. 344-54). I owe these references to G. R. Havens's excellent critical
edition of Rousseau's Discours sur les sciences et les arts (PMLA, New
York and London, 1946).
8. Lists of the books Rousseau read will be found in M. Reichenburg's
Essai sur les lectures de Rousseau (Philadelphia, 1932).
9. J.-E. Morel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau lit Plutarque' (Revue d"histoire
modeme, i (1926), 81-102), has analysed this commonplace-book, which
3 . FRANCE AND U.S.A. 671
Rousseau started immediately afterpublishing the first Discourse, It contains
many anecdotes which fed the subterranean springs of Rousseaus mind.
10. See p. 188. Montaignes other favourite author was Seneca, also a
favourite of Jean-Jacques.
11. There is a lucid discussion of the Lycurgus legend and the real
Sparta in W. Jaegers Paideia^ 1 (Oxford, 1939), 78-84. On the idealization
of Sparta by the Greek philosophers, see F. Ollier, Le Mirage
spartiate^ part 2 (Annales de IUniversite de Lyon, 3rd series (Lettres),
fasc. 13, Paris, 1943).
12. For this idea see C. W. Hendel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau Moralist
(Oxford, 1934), 2. 320 f.
13. Similarly, Montesquieu held that the ideal form of government was
a democracy, and in describing democracy he drew his models from
Greco-Roman history and philosophy. See L. M. Levin, The Political
Doctrine of Montesquieu^s *Esprit des lois : its Classical Background (New
York, 1936), for a general account of Montesquieus wide classical learning;
and p. 67 f. for this particular point.
14. Quoted from Lord Russells discussion in A History of Western
Philosophy (New York, 1945), 694 f.
15. There is a useful analysis of his dependence on Plutarch, m respect
of these moral ideals, in his famous Discourse^ by A. C. Keller, Plutarch
and Rousseaus first Discours* (PMLA, 54 (1939), 212-22): see also
G. R. Havens (cited in n. 7), introduction, 63 f.
16. Nevertheless, Plutarch was on the whole in favour of the arts and
sciences. Rousseau altered his version of the Prometheus myth in order
to make civilization out to be a nuisance and a corruption (see G. R.
Havens, cited in n. 7, 209). A. Oltramare, Plutarque dans Rousseau, in
Melanges d*histoire et de philologie qfferts a M. Bernard Bouvier (Geneva,
1920), 185-96, asks the question so often asked before^where did
Rousseau get the paradox on which his first Discourse is based (that the
progress of art and science has injured humanity)?and replies, convincingly
enough, that he got it from Plutarch. The proof is that the first
words of the Discourse Rousseau wrote, the first jet of his inspiration set
down in pencil, under an oak on his way out to see Diderot at Vincennes,
was the apostrophe to Fabricius, the primitive Roman warrior (consul
282 B.c.) who, according to Plutarch, rejected the bribes of the condottiere
Pyrrhus, defended his country successfully, and died in virtuous poverty.
This apostrophe contains the entire paradox, that Rome was good while
it was simple, and, like all states, grew corrupt as it grew more highly
civilized.
17. On the conception of paideia, see W. Jaeger, Paideia (New York
and Oxford, 1939-44), and pp, 547-9, 552 of this book.
18. H. T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries
(Chicago, 1937), 28 f. and (quoting Mme Rolands letter) 96 f.
19. R. Hirzel, Plutarch (Das Erbe der Alten, 4, Leipzig, 1912), c. 19,
covers some aspects of the subject, but it deserves much more detailed
and thoughtful discussion.
20. Parker (cited in n. 18), 142 .
672 NOTES ON 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION:
21. Parker (n. i8), 178 f., shows that this fashion soon palled: the
reaction to it appeared in 1795.
22. Quoted by F. Beck, reviewing the second edition of Hosius
edition of Lucan in Gott. gel. Anz. 1907, 780, n. i. The line is Lucan,
Bell. ciu. 4. 579:
ignoratque dates, ne quisquam seruiat, enses.
The subject, as the text stands, is lihertas. Housman therefore read
ignorantque, to make the subject people in general, i.e. the enslaved
populace of Lucans time.
23. Cic. Pro Sex. Rose. Am. 56-7.
24. I owe these connexions to T. Zielinski, Cicero im Wandel der
Jahrhunderte (Leipzig, iqiz^), 264 f., where other instances will be found.
Livy and Tacitus also exercised their influence on the French revolutionaries,
although in a far less important degree than Cicero. Next to
Ciceros speeches, the greatest source of material and rhetorical patterns
for the revolutionary orators was a collection of the speeches in Livys
history, translated by Rousseau (Zielinski, 362). Tacitus was less often
used because his style was so difficult, but his sentiments were admired.
The third issue of the journal called Le Vieux Cordelier (dated quintidi
frimaire^ troisieme decade^ an //), edited and largely written by Desmoulins,
is a tissue of anti-monarchic extracts from Tacitus. (See L.
Delamarre, Tacite et la littirature frangaise^ Paris, 1907, 1 10-15, for
details.)
25. Parker (cited in n. 18), 80 f.
26. Parker (n. 18), 132 f. and 158 f.
27. See p. 391.
28. The title was also applied to Romulus, Camillus, Marius, and
Julius Caesar; and thereafter (in the form parens patriae) to Octsvian.
(See Mayor on Juvenal, 8. 244.) Mommsen, Romisches Staatsrecht, 2, 2
(Leipzig, 1877^), 755 n. i, attempted to make a fundamental distinction
between Ciceros honorific title and Julius Caesars honorific title, saying
that Ciceros w^as naturlich etwas ganz Anderes. The distinction existed
only in Mommsens mind, and was due to his hatred for Cicero and his
adoration of Caesar: see pp. 476-7. Those who applied the phrase to
Washington were certainly thinking of the title as borne by Cicero.
29. Epluribus unum apparently comes from the pastoral idyll attributed
to Vergil and called the Moretum, line 104. As the salad which the poor
farmer has mixed is mashed in the bowl, the herbs lose their distinctive
hues, and
color est e pluribus unus.
The three words had been used as a tag on title-pages as early as 1692.
$t. Augustine, Conf. 4. 8, also has ex pluribus unumfacer but he was not
much read by the Founding Fathers, and the hexameter rhythm suggests
that the real source of the phrase is the Moretum.
30. Vergil, Buc. 4. 5
:
magnus ah integro saeelorum nascitur ordo.
(Shelley, Hellas^ ro6o , on which see p. 422.)
3 . 673 FRANCE AND U.SA.
31. Vergil, Georg. 1. 40 (addressed to Octavianl):
da facilem cursum atque audacibus adnue coeptis.
Also, Aen. 9. 625:
luppiter omnipotens, audacibus adnue coeptis.
(See G. Hunt, The History of the Seal of the United States
^
published by the
Department of State, Washington, 1909, 13 33 f.)
32. I owe the facts in this paragraph to G. R. Stewart's fascinating
work. Names on the Land (New York, 1945), c. 21, pp. 181-8.
33. There is an excellent book on this aspect of his work by Karl
Lehmann, Thomas JeffersonAmerican Humanist (New York, 1947), to
which I am indebted for many of these facts. Jefferson kept a commonplace-
book in which he copied out quotations he thought worth preserving,
It has been reprinted and analysed by G. Chinard, The Literary
Bible of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore, 1928). The Greek quotations in
it come from Homer, Herodotus, Euripides, Anacreon, and Quintus
Smymaeus. In Latin Cicero predominateslargely the Tusculan Discussions.
There are twelve quotations from Horace, including that which
characterized both Horace and Jefferson:
O ms, quando ego te aspiciam? (Serm. 2. 6. 60.)
There are a few from Ovid, and fewer than we should expect from Vergil.
A. Koch, The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1943), c. i, also
explains how Jefferson's education was built on classical literature, and
gives illuminating details.
34. There is a fine biography of Chenier by Paul Din)off, La Vie et
roeuvre d^Andre Chmier jusqu^d la revolution frangaise iy62-iygo (2 w.,
Paris,, 1936). A survey of Chenier's knowledge of and adaptations from
the classics will be found in v. 2, bk. 3, cc. 6 and 7. The much shorter
Andre Chenier by fimile Faguet (Paris, 1902) is also good. On the late rise
of Chenier's reputation see R. Canat, La Renaissance de la Grace antique
{1820-1850) (Paris, 1911), 6 f
.
35. Des lois, et non du sang!
36. Details in A, J. Bingham, Marie-Joseph Chenier, Early Life and
Political Ideas Ij8g-g4 (New York, 1939), 56 f. and 167.
37. On both these large projects see P. Dimoff (cited in n. 34), i. 387 f.
38. As well as Theocritus, Chenier loved the melancholy epigrams of
the Greek Anthology, and echoed their elegiac minor chords in several
poemsnotably his famous La Jeune Tarentine. (On this point see
J. Hutton, The Greek Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of the
Netherlands to the Year 1800 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1946), 73 f.).
39. Chenier did something to relax the strict rules which had manacled
French metre. His idylls contain what the French used to think of as bold
enjambements : for instance

Ce n'est pas (le sais-tu? d^j^ dans le bocage

Quelque voile de nymphe est-il tomb6 pour toi ?)
Ce n'est pas cela seul qui difffere chez moi.
S076
{Lyd.)
674 NOTES ON 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION:
40. Autour du demi-dieu les princes immobiles
Aux accents de sa voix demeuraient suspendus,
Et r^coutaient encor quand il ne chantait plus. {Hermes
y
3. ii.)
41. Fielding, in writing his comic epic, Tom Jones
y
did exactly the
same, for the same reason: see p. 343.
42. We have already touched on this point in tracing the growth of the
novel out of epic and romance: see p. 344.
43. Chateaubriand, Le Gdnie du christianismey 12 init.
44. This point is well made by C. Lynes, Jr., in his Chateaubriand as
a Critic of French Literature (The Johns Hopkins Studies in Romance
Literatures and Languages, 46, Baltimore, 1946). However, Mr. Lynes
points out that, in spite of his praise of Christian literature, Chateaubriand
really preferred Vergil and Homer to Racine and Fenelonso that his
work might be called Le Genie du classicisme. Rene Canat (cited in n. 34)
deals in c. I with Chateaubriand as a Philhellenist, and speaks of Le
Genie de Vhellenisme. Chateaubriands knowledge of Homer and Vergil
was really very deep and sensitive. The reflections of it in his work have
been classified and analysed by B. U. Briod, VHomerisme de Chateaubriand
(Paris, 1928); C. R. Hart, Chateaubriand and Homer (The Johns
Hopkins Studies in Romance Literatures and Languages, ii, Baltimore
and Paris, 1928) ; and L. H. Naylor, Chateaubriand and Virgil (same series,
18, Baltimore, 1930).
45. Hugo, Les Orientates: see p. 661.
46. These examples, including ChSnedollds
Les mortels quont noircis les soleils de Guin^e,
are taken from an admirable chapter on the subject by F. Brunot, c. 13 of
V. 8 of L. Petit de Jullevilles Histoire de la langue et de la litUrature
franpaise. See also p. 274.
47. Delille, quoted by A. Guiard, Virgile et Victor Hugo (Paris, 1910).
48. Les Contemplations, i. 7: Riponse h un acte d*accusation:
Les neuf Muses, seins nus, chantaient la Carmagnole.
49. A. Guiard, Virgile et Victor Hugo (^ecdSy 1910). Hugos monsters

the blood-drinking Han of Iceland and the irresistible one-eyed solitary

Quasimodoare clearly children of Cacus and the Cyclops (Guiard, 51 f.).
Les Contemplations, 5. 17, is a short poem called Mugitusque bourn, 'which
begins
Mugissement des bceufs au temps du doux Virgile,
and recalls Georgies, 2. 470.
50. Voix interieureSy 7 : A Virile.
51. Les Contemplations, i. 13. The first outbreak ends:
Grimauds hideux qui nont, tant leur tSte est vid^e,
Jamais eu de maltresse et jamais eu did^el
52. See p. 413.
675
Notes on 19. the time of revolution, 4 : England
1. Shelley, preface to Hellas: We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature,
our religion, our arts have their roots in Greece. But for Greece

Rome, the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors,

would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still have
been savages and idolaters.
2. Wordsworth, On a Celebrated Event in Ancient History^ and Upon
the Same Events in Poems dedicated to National Independence and Liberty.
3. Wordsworth, The Excursion, 9. 210-
4. Keats in a letter to Shelley, 1820.
5. D. Bush, in Wordsworth and the Classics {University of Toronto
Quarterly, 2 (1932-3), 359-79), discusses the poets interest in classical
literature, and points out that he was a keen reader, having nearly 3,000
books in his library, many of them classics, although he could not afford
to buy books for show. In his note on the Ode to Lycoris he says Ovid and
Homer were his favourites when he was young. He wrote to Landor
(20 April 1822) My acquaintance with Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, and
Catullus is intimate ; and he had some idea of translating the Aeneid
there is a fragment of book i among his published works. In 1795 he was
planning with Wrangham to write a modem translation and adaptation
of Juvenals eighth satire on true and false nobility (as Johnson modernized
the third and tenth satires) : see U. V. Tuckerman, Wordsworths Plan
for his Imitation of Juvenal in Modern Language Notes, 45 (1930),
4. 209-15. But Horace, as he himself said, was his favourite. It seems
strange at first, but on reflection we can see the sympathy between the
twoboth lovers of nature, retirement, and tranquillity, both strong
moralists and patriots. For details see M. R. Thayer, The Influence of
Horace on the Chief English Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Cornell
Studies in English, 2, New Haven, 1916), 53-64.
6. The phrase is G. L. Bickersteths, in his lecture Leopardi and
Wordsworth (Proceedings of the British Academy, 1927), 13.
7. See W. Jaeger, Paideia, v. i (Oxford, 1939), preface, p. xxvii f. and
passim.
8. See W. Jaeger, Paideia, v. 3 (Oxford, 1944), c. 9.
9. Wordsworth, London, 1802.
10. Wordsworth, September, 1802. Near Dover.
11. Wordsworth, Lines composed a few miles above Tintem Abbey.
12. Wordsworth, lines from a MS. note-book, printed in De Selincourts
edition of The Prelude, p. 512.
13. Wordsworth, The Excursion, 4. 324 f, ; the Seneca reference is Nat.
Quaest. i, praef. 5. See J. Worthington, Wordsworths Reading of Roman
Prose (Yale Studies in English, 102, New Haven, 1946), 44.
14. Wordsworth, Ode to Duty, 47-8.
13. For further remarks on this ode see pp. 251-2. The ideas in it are
Platonic; but Wordsworth may have received them, either directly or
indirectly through Coleridge, from the Neoplatonists. Our birth is but
a sleep and a forgetting is almost a translation of a sentence in Proclus,
676 NOTES ON 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION:
Coleridge bought Ficinos Latin translation and edition of selections from
lambiichus, Proclus, Porphyry, and others, as early as 1796. It has been
suggested that he discussed its contents with Wordsworth during the
crisis of imagination from which they both felt themselves suffering in
the spring of 1802; that, as a result, Coleridge started Dejection: an Ode
and Wordsworth wrote the first four stanzas (the question) of his own
immortality ode ; and that both poems were in a Pindaric form because the
two poets had been discussing Ben Jonson (on whose odes see p. 238).
A few days after the discussion, on 23 March, Wordsworth read Jonsons
lyrics; and his composition of Intimations of Immortality began on
27 March. It has also been possible for us to see Coleridges little son
Hartley in the six years darling of a pigmy size in whom Wordsworth
here sees his own dead self; and even to trace the fine phrase trailing
clouds of glory back to a spring night when William and Dorothy Wordsworth
watched the moon coming out through a multitude of fleecy clouds.
For these reconstructions see J. D. Rea, Coleridges Intimations of
Immortality from Proclus {Modern Philology
^
26 (1928-9), 201-13), and
H. Hartman, The Intimations of Wordsworths Ode^ {Review of
English Studies, 6 (1930), 22. 129-48). Mr. Rea also suggests that in the
sonnet, The World is too much with Us, which is closely allied to the ode
in content and mspiration, Wordsworth intended Proclus by the Pagan
suckled in a creed outworn*, and identified the sea-god Glaucus, mentioned
by Proclus, with Proteus, rising from the sea. In spite of the
authority of Mr. Douglas Bush

Mythology and the Romantic Tradition

in English Poetry (Harvard Studies in English, 18, Cambridge, Mass.,
t937) 59this suggestion can scarcely be accepted, (i) Wordsworth is
saying that, rather than be like the matter-of-fact materialistic men of the
nineteenth century, he would be a pagan who would see nature-spirits
everywhere. Tiiis is the same thought as Schillers in Die Gotter Griechen--
lands (p. 376 f.), and it is another version of the thought in Intimations of
Immortality, where Wordsworth regrets that he is no longer a child, to see
ail external nature as miraculously alive. But Proclus was not a childlike
pagan. He neither saw nor believed in sea-gods and Tritons. He merely
followed Plato in using the appearance of the weed-grown and shellencrusted
merman as an image for the earthbound human soul {Rep,
61 ic f.), (2) Wordsworth knew too much mythology to confuse Proteus
(who rises from the sea in Odyssey, 4, and was well known to him from
that passage and allusions in English poetry) with Glaucus ; this sonnet
was not written on the strange level of consciousness where half-remembered
images fuse into one another, as described in The Road to Xanadu,
Mr. F. E. Pierce, Wordsworth and Thomas Taylor' {Philological
Quarterly, 7 (1928), 60-4), points to Vaughans Silex scintillans as another
source for the thought of the first four stanzas of the ode, and suggests that
Wordsworth got his Neoplatonic ideas, not from Coleridge, but from the
illustrative parallels in Taylors translated Works of Plato^which, however,
he does not show that Wordsworth ever possessed. But Vaughans
Resurrection and hnmortality and The Retreat are among the main channels
through which Platos thought flowed into this magnificent poem.
4. ENGLAND 677
16. Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads.
17. See p. 387 f.
18. An interesting and percipient book on this whole topic, S. A.
Larrabees English Bards and Grecian Marbles (New York, 1943), has a
good section on Byron and the Elgin Marbles (151-8). Byron attacked
Elgin not only in Childe Harold^s Pilgrimage (2. 1 1 f.) but in English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers, The Curse of Minerva, and one of his violent letters
(Larrabee, 157, n. ii).
19. A particularly striking example of this power to re-create the past is
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 4. 44-5, where Byron tells how he repeated
(in a Byronic pose, lying along the prow of his boat) the voyage which
Servius Sulpicius made among the ruins of the Greek cities, and which
the Roman friend of Romes least mortal mind made into the occasion
of a noble consolation to the heart-broken Cicero (Cic. Earn. 4. 5).
20. Pope is a Greek Temple, with a Gothic Cathedral on one hand,
and a Turkish Mosque and all sorts of fantastic pagodas and conventicles
about him. You may call Shakespeare and Milton pyramids if you please,
but I prefer the Temple of Theseus or the Parthenon to a mountain of
burnt brickworkByrons letter to Moore from Ravenna, 3 May 1821
{Works of Lord Byron, ed. R. E. Prothero, London, 1901, Letters and
Journals, 5. 273, letter 886).
21. Hor. Carm. i. 9.
22. Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 4. 75-6. In spite of his abhorrence,
what he learnt of Horace remained with him. For his many
reminiscences of Plorace, see M. R. Thayer (cited in n. 5), 69-84.
23. See p. 407.
24. Swinburne, Letters, ed. E. Gosse and T. J. Wise (New York and
London, 1919), 2. 196.
25. For a further discussion of this subject see p. 490 f.
26. So D. Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English
Poetry (Harvard Studies in English, 18, Cambridge, Mass., 1937), 75.
27. Byron wrote his own fine Prometheus in 1816, after Shelley had
translated Aeschylus tragedy, reading aloud to him. It was one of the
favourite myths of the revolutionary era, not only in literature, but in
music toowitness Beethovens overture (1810). The Medici Venus is
described with passionate worship in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 4, 49-53.
See Larrabee (cited in n. 18), 158 f.
28. Keats, Sonnet to Homer.
29. The collection, edited by Alexander Chalmers, was published in
1810: see O. P. Starick, Die Belesenheit von John Keats (Berlin, 1910), 5.
30. Keats* On seeing the Elgin Marblesfor the first time and To Haydon
{with the above). See S, A. Larrabee, English Bards and Grecian Marbles
(cited in n. 18), 210 f.
31. W. Sharp, in The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn, quoted by
Larrabee (n. 18), 212, n. 16.
32. For suggestions (the Townley Vase, the Holland House Vase, See,)
and literature, see Larrabee (n. 18), 222. The Ode on Indolence also
describes a dream of figures on a marble um.
678 NOTES ON 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION:
33. The passages Shelley chose were Buc. 10. 1-30 and Georg. 4. 360 f.
34. Ov. Met. 9. 715. There is also a naughty Latin epigram on a ladys
watch among Shelleys juvenilia, as well as a rather poor Horatian version
of the epitaph in Grays Elegy.
35. See A. S. Droop, Die Belesenheit Percy Bysshe Shelley^s nach den
direkten Zeugnissen und den hisherigen Forschungen (Weimar, igo6), to
which I am indebted in this section.
36. In The Wandering JeWy which Shelley and Medwin wrote when
they were boys, the epigraph to the fourth canto was Aeschylus, EumenideSy
48 f.
37. Shelley, letter to Gisborne, 22 Oct. 1821.
38. See N. 1. White, Portrait of Shelley (New York, 1945), 465.
39. See, for instance, H. Agar, Milton and Plato (Princeton, 1925).
On Shelley, there is L. Winstanleys Platonism in Shelley (Essays and
Studies by Members of the English Assodationy 4 (1913), 72-100).
40. See J. G, Frazer, The Golden Boughy for the interpretation of this
legend as a symbol of the annual death of the fertility of nature. (This
appears in cc. 29-33 of the one-volume abridged edition, New York,
1940.)
41. There is a list of the unexpectedly numerous parallels between
Adonais and its chief models, Theocritus lament for Daphnis, Bions
lament for Adonis, and the anonymous lament for Bion, by George
Norlin, in University of Colorado Studies
y
i (1902-3), 305-21.
42. Shelley, Adonais
y
stanza 9.
43. Shelley, Adonais: the dragon, stanza 27 == Bion, 6o~i ; the poison,
stanza 36 = Lament for Bion, 109-12.
44. This was in 1818 (N. I. White, cited in n. 38, 271). Swellfoot the
Tyrant was begun in August 1819.
45. See R. Ackermann, Lucans Pharsalia in den Dichtungen Shelley^
s
(Zweibriicken, 1896).
46. Shelley, letter to Hogg, Sept. 1815.
47. So Shelley, Adonais, stanza 38.
48. Lucan, Bell. ciu. 9. 700 f.
49. Milton, Paradise Losty 10. 521 f.
50. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam, 8. 21; Prometheus Unbound, 3. i. 40,
3. 4. 19, &c.
51. Demogorgon has a complex ancestry. His name is evidently a
blend of the monstrous terrifying Gorgons and the great Craftsman,
DemiourgoSy who Plato says made the universe. He is mentioned in Lucan,
6, 498, and invoked by the witch in Lucan, 6. 744 f. ; then in Statius,
Theh. 4. 513 f.; he appears as Daemogorgon in Boccslccio^s' Genealogia
deorum, and reaches English poetry in Spenser through Ariosto. Pointing
to the terror of the earth in Prometheus Unbound, 3. i. 19, Miss J. F. C.
Gutteling in Neophilologus 9 (1924), 283-5, suggests that Shelley may
have combined the simple elements demos (people) and Gorgoii to indicate
the element of religion which he himself hated most, its power to
terrorize the people.
52. Shelley, Adonais, stanza 45.
4 679
.
ENGLAND
53. See N. 1 . White (cited in n. 38), 22-
54. This is Vergil, Bucolics, 4 : see also pp. 72 L and 399.
55. These words are from Tennyson's fine ode To Virgil,
56. There is a description of Shelley's varied and active interest in
Greco-Roman sculpture in S. A. Larrabees English Bards and Grecian
Marbles (New York, 1943), c. 8.
57. Shelley, Epipsychidion, 149 fi
Notes on 19. the time of revolution, 5 : italy
1. Leopardi, Canti 3, Ad Angelo Mai, 69-70:
Ahi dal dolor comincia e nasce
L'italo canto.
2. Plato, Rep, 491^.
3. Air udire certi gran tratti di quei sommi uomini, spessissimo io
balzava in piedi agitatissimo e fuori di me, e lagrime di dolore e di rabbia
mi scaturivano del vedermi nato in Piemonte ed in tempi e govemi ove
niuna alta cosa non si poteva n^ fare n^ dire ed inutilmente appena forse
si poteva sentire e pensare.' {Vita di Alfieri, scritta da esso, ed. Linaker,
Florence, 1903, 95.)
4. At first he was enthusiastic over the Revolution. He went to the
ruins of the Bastille and gathered some of its stones as a memento : see
G. Megaro, Vittorio Alfieri, Forerunner of Italian Nationalism (New
York, 1930), no and notes. Wordsworth did the same thing {The
Prelude, 9. 67 f.).
5. Not all are strictly definable as tragedies. Abele he called a tramelogedia;
Alceste seconda is based on a straight translation of Euripides'
Alcestis; Merope and Timoleone do not end tragically (though their lastminute
deliverances ally them to some Euripidean plays).
6. The story is in Ovid, Met, 10, 298 f.
7. Alfieri's play makes Arnold's Merope (p. 451 f.) look even paler by
contrast.
8. For instance, he read Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes (in translation)
for his Polinice, and wrote Agamemnone and Oreste under the
inspiration of Seneca; Virginia came from Livy, Timoleone from Plutarch,
Ottavia from Tacitus and from the play attributed to Seneca; Antigone
was inspired by Statius' Thebaid. Alfieri was particularly devoted to the
Roman historians, Tacitus, Sallust, and Livy. In this, as in his passion
for Plutarch, he was very close to the men who made the French Revolution.
On his debt to the classics in general see G. Megaro (cited in n. 4),
c. 4.
9. Alfieri lays this dovm in his treatise Della tirannide, i. i. He also
wrote a comedy, 1 troppi, which is full of abnse of the common people.
10. On Chenier's career see p. 401 f. A reconstruction of his friendship
with Alfieri is given in P. Dimolf, La Vie et Iceuvre d^Andri Chenier
(Paris, 1936), I. 220 f.
11. Alfieri's Del principe e delle lettere is anal3rsed in Megaro (cited in
n. 4), c. 2.
68o NOTES ON 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION:
12. There is an analysis of the character of the tyrant as depicted by
Alfieri, Der Tyrann in Vittorio Alfieris Tragodien, by M. Schwehm (Bonn,
1917).
13. This is what Montesquieu calls commencer par faire un mauvais
citoyen pour faire un bon esclave (De Vesprit des lois^ 4. 3) ; according to
Helvetius, it is the beginning of the collapse of a despotic state.
14. Wordsworth, The Prelude, ii. 108-9.
15. He produced a translation of Catullus, 66 {The Hair of Berenice),
with a commentary. Homer and Plutarch were among his favourite
authors : see A. Cippico, The Poetry of Ugo Foscolo {Proceedings of the
British Academy, 1924-5). On his eminently successful but unfortunately
incomplete experiments in translating Homer {Iliad, i and 3) see G.
Finsler, Homer in der Neuzeit (Leipzig, 1912), 116-17.
16. The first words in Foscolos collected works, the opening of an
admirable sonnet

Non son chi fui; peri di noi gran parte

are Horaces
Non sum qualis eram {Carm. 4. i. 3)
with the mellow Horatian irony deepened by youthful gloom. There are
also two charming odes, which he calls Aeolian, but which are really more
Horatian in manner: A Luigia Pallamcini and AIV arnica risanata. Like
a real revolutionary, although he admired Horaces artistic skill, he
despised Horace personally as an apostate from the republic and a
flatterer of the tyrant (L. Pietrobono in Orazio nella letteratura mondiale,
Rome, 1936, XIV, 127).
17. On this idea see p. 364 f., on Lessings Wie die Alien den Todgebildet,
18. See p. 315 f. on Parinis II giorno.
19. Foscolo, Dei sepolcri, 293-5:
Ove fia santo e lagrimato il sangue
Per la patna versato, e finchd il sole
Risplenderi su le sciagure umane.
20. Foscolo spent many years on a didactic poem to be called Le Grazie,
of which the unfinished fragments are published as Inni: it was intended
to glorify the Greek divinities as the true inspirers of civilization, as the
creators of beauty, and as the patrons of philosophy and poetry, the two
methods of appreciating the world. In this positive paganism he appears
to me to be a direct ancestor of Carducci and Leconte de Lisle (on whom
see pp. 4SS, 456).
21. Details, with analyses of Ms separate works, are given in F. Moroncinis
Studio sui Leopardi fUologo (Naples, 1891). ^
22. These were Dio Chrysostom, Aeiius Aristides, Hermogenes, and
Fronto.
23. In Rome he found no one who knew Greek and Latinthe
Romans cared for nothing but antiquarianism; in Milan it was worse, he
could not find a single edition of a Greek or Latin classic published later
than the seventeenth century; in Bologna, philological studies were in
uno stato che fa pietk. anzi non esistono affatto ; in Florence, supreme
5 . ITALY 68i
disdain of classical literature ; in Naples, despite its pretence of admiring
antiquity, utter indifference. See Moroncini (cited in n. 21), 25 f., quoting
Leopardis own letters.
24. Towards the end of his life (1833- ) when he had abandoned the
ideals of patriotism and progress, he wrote a Supplement to the Battle of
Frogs and Mice (Paralipomeni della batracomiomachia), which, under
the inspiration of Castis Talking Animals, satirized the attempts of the
Italians to free themselves from the Austrians, and at the same time
poured scorn on Germanic culture.
25. See Moroncini (cited in n. 21), 169 f. In the same year Leopardi
translated book 2 of the Aeneid, the Moretum, and Hesiods description
of the battle of the gods and the Titans.
26. Leopardis Alla primavera (Canti 7), like Schillers Die Gotter
Griechenlands (on which see p. 376 f.), asks if it is really true that the spirits
which once made all nature alive have for ever disappeared.
27. AIV Italia and Sopra il monumento di Dante {Canti 1-2) were
written in 1818 and published together in early 1819 as Canzone sullo stato
presente deW Italia, The Mai poem {Canti 3) was composed in 1820. On
the career of the brilliant Jesuit scholar Mai (1782--1854), see J. E.
Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1908), 3. 241.
There were several unusual things about his discovery of Ciceros De re
publica. (i) The book had been entirely lost, and was known only through
excerpts. (2) Mai did not find it in an ordinary manuscript, but in a
palimpsest^i.e. in a manuscript which had been cleaned off in the Dark
Ages in order to receive the text of St. Augustines commentary on the
Psalms. He detected the faint traces of earlier writing beneath the later
text, and was able to read them and copy them. (3) The political doctrine
of the book, although not new to students of Greco-Roman political
theory, confirmed the aspirations of the revolutionary generation in its
recommendation of the division of powers within the state, and in its
assertion that abstract justice was superior to the will of the monarch.
28. Leopardi, Canti 3, Ad Angelo Mai, 61 to the end.
29. Leopardi, Canti i, All Italia, 61 f,
30. De Quincey, Levana.
31. Leopardi, Canti 27, Amore e morte, 27-31
:
Quando novellamente
Nasce nel cor profondo
Un amoroso affetto,
Languid e stanco insiem con esso in petto
Un desiderio di morir si sente. . . .
32. Leopgcrdi, Canti 9, Ultimo canto di Saffo.
33. His belief that crushing boredom {noia, tedio) was the central
condition of human life is clearly the same as Baudelaires view of ennui:
see, for instance, the four poems called Spleen in Les Fleurs du mal, 77-80.
34. Leopardi, Operette morali {1824-32). English is not well enough
supplied with diminutives to permit a good translation of operette.
35. He himself said that his poems were not to be regarded as imitations
of any one author {Scritti letterari, ed. Mastica (Florence, 1899),
6Sz NOTES ON 19. THE TIME OF REVOLUTION:
2. 283-5). I owe this quotation to J. Van Homes Studies on Leopardi
(Iowa University Humanistic Studies, i. 4, 1916)a useful introduction
to Leopardis Zihaldofie, slightly marred by the attempt to explain Leopardi
through the antithesis romantic)( classical, and by the idea that
Greek and Roman culture is an extinct phase of human life (p. 22).
36. Leopardi had the greatest admiration for the style of Greek and
Latin prose and poetry. The men of antiquity, he wrote, devoted to the
art of style an infinite^ greater amount of study than we give to it ; they
understood a thousand secrets whose existence we do not even suspect or
which we comprehend with difficulty when explained by Cicero or
Quintilian (Pensieri di varia filosofia e di bella letteraturUy 5. 407-8, quoted
and translated by J. Van Home (n. 35)).
37. Leopardi, Canti 30, Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale dove una
giovane morta e rappresentata in atto di partire accomiatandosi dai suoi^
27-8:
Mai non veder la luce
Era, credo, il miglior.
Cf. Sophocles, Oedipus Coloneus, 1224 f., and Theognis, 425-8. It is
interesting to compare this gloomy poem with another lyric on Greek
sculpture, Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn (which is full of life), and with
Lessings exposition of the calm and natural attitude to death expressed
by Greek gravestones (p. 364 f.). Here Leopardis thought is far less Greek
than Christian, and he was probably influenced by his devout mother.
See his next poem (Canti 31), which, like a medieval sermon, reflects that
the beautiful woman whose portrait appears on her tomb is now only
mud and bones beneath it.
38. Ovid, Heraides
15. Lines 65-8 are an adaptation of Vergil, Georg,
3. 66-8.
39. Leopardi, Canti 15, // sogno; Propertius, 4. 7; Petrarch, Trionfo
della Morte, 2,
40. It is strange to see Lucretius beginning a poem designed to prove,
among other things, that the gods know nothing of our world, by an
invocation to Venus.
41. See the fine comparison of a disturbed ant-hill to the emption of
Vesuvius, in Canti 34, La ginestra, 202 f. : an idea which reappears in the
work of the contemporary American pessimist, Hemingway, in the last
chapter of A Farewell to Arms, While the heros mistress is dying in
childbed, he remembers how once he had thrown a log full of ants on to
a camp-fire, and how little their agony and death meant to him.
Notes on 19. the time of revolution, 6: conclusion
I. Oswald Spongier ends his preface to Der Untergang des Abendlandes
by saying that he is proud to call it a German philosophy^ and (in a
sentence omitted in the English translation) hopes it will be worthy of the
achievements of the German armies:
Ich Babe nur den Wunsch beizuffigen, dass dies Buch neben den militarischen
Leistungen Deutschiands nicht ganz unwiirdig dastehen moge.
6.
CONCLUSION 683
2. Ovid, Tristia ex Ponto.
3. The minor poets of this period in EnglandLeigh Hunt, Peacock,
and othersare well expounded inD. Bushs Mythology and the Romantic
Tradition in English Poetry (Harvard Studies in English, 18, Cambridge,
Mass., i 937) c* 5-
4. Sebastien Mercier, who hated both the classics and the modems,
denounced both Horace and Boileau for killing originality
:
N^s tous onginaux, nous mourrons tous copies.
Eh bien, qui r^trecit la sphere des g^nies ?
Cest ce code vant6, si froid et si mesqum,
Que Boileau composa dapres Tauteur latin.
II defend tout essor ; abundance, vigueur,
Style mle, hardi, fiert^, tout lui fait peur.
(Quoted by J. Marouzeau, in Orazio nella letteratura mondiale^ Rome,
1936, XIV, 77.)
5. Blake, Prophetic Writings (ed. Sloss and Wallis, Oxford, 1926),
I. 640, quoted by D. Bush (n. 3), 131-2. On 'Barbarism and Religion
see p. 35Z f.
Notes on 20. Parnassus and antichrist
1. Wordsworth, The World is too much with Us. On this poem see also
pp. 377, 676.
2. Arnold, Consolation.
3. Wordsworth, The World is too much with Us.
4. Sainte-Beuve coined the phrase 'ivory tower in his poem A. M.
Villemain (Pensees d^aout^ CEuvres, Paris, 1879, vol. 2, p. 287).
5. Milton, Paradise Lost, i. 6-7.
6. What was the great Parnassus* self to Thee,
Mount Skiddaw?
asked Wordsworth in a sonnet (Pelion and Ossa flourish side by side:
Miscellaneous Sonnets 5) which he composed in 1801, but did not publish
until 1815.
7. For instance, Leconte de Lisle and Landor were spiritually brothers.
There is a good deal of useful literature on the French Parnassians and
their own interpretation of these ideals. See H. Peyre, Bibliographie
critique de VHellenisme en France de 1843 h i8yo ( Yale Romanic Studies 6,
New Haven, 1932); P. Martino, Pamasse et Symholisme (Paris, 1925);
and M. Souriau, Histoire du Parnasse (Paris, 1930).
8. Hugo, Motre^Dame; UHomme qui rit% Les Travaillmrs de la mer.
9. Keats, Ode to a Nightingale.
10. D. Nisard, Pohtes latins de la decadence (1834); see also his manifesto
Contre la Utterature facile.
11. Carducci, Classicismo e romanticismo {Jiime nuove, 69).
12. Les TropMes, published in 1893 after circulating in manuscript for
years. Heredia was the favourite pupil of Leconte de Lisle, and edited
Cheniers Bucoliques.
684 NOTES ON 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
13. Heredia, Antoine et Cleopdtre:
Et sur elle courbe, Tardent Imperator
Vit dans ses larges yeux 6toil^s de points dor
Toute une mer immense oil fuyaient des galores.
There is an echo which I have often admired in the sonnet Apres Cannes all the more admirable
because it has converted a satiric sneer into a
frowm of real grandeur. Juvenal derides the desire of great generals for
military glory, and cries (10. 157-8):
O qualis facies et quali digna tabella
cum Gaetula ducem portaret belua luscum!
Heredia describes the panic in Rome after Cannae, and pictures the mob
going out every evening to the aqueducts
:
Tons anxieux de voir surgir, au dos vermeil
Des monts Sabins oil luit Fceil sanglant du soleil,
Le Chef borgne mont6 sur F^l^phant G^tule.
Petronius would have called that curiosa felicitasthe image of the one
red Cyclops-eye of the sun glaring over the elephant-backed hills, like
HannibaPs.
14. Carducci, Odi harbare (1877). These poems, he said, were partly
inspired by Goethes Roman Elegies (on which see p. 380 f.).
15. The system is an adaptation of that invented by Chiabrera (on
whom see p. 235 f.), and is explained by G. L. Bickersteth in his introduction
to his excellent volume of selections from Carducci (Oxford 1923).
16. Hor. Carm. 3. i. i : Odi profanum uolgus et arceo.
17. Cf. also Carduccis hitermezzo^ 9: he says that he hopes, in life, to
sing the songs of Horaces master Archilochus of Paros, and, in death, to
be buried in a tomb of Parian marble, as pure and lasting as the poems
written in that tradition.
18. Gautier, UArt:
Point de contraintes fausses!
Mais que pour marcher droit
Tu chausses.
Muse, un cothume teoit.
19. Gautier,
Tout passe. Lart robuste
Seul a r^temit^,
Le buste
Survit k la cit6.
20. Leconte de Lisle: *Le Beau nest pas le serviteur du Vrai. After
abandoning socialism, he wrote, Les grandes oeuvres dart p^sent dans
la balance dun autre poids que cinq cents millions dalmanachs democratiques
et sociaux. L^oeuvre dHom^re comptera un peu plus dans la
somme des efforts moraux de Ihumanite que celle de Blanqui. (Quoted
by F. Martino, Pamasse et Syndbolisme, Paris, 1925, 52.)
NOTES ON 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 685
21. Hugo, William Shakespeare
,
6. i. On the whole question see
L. Rosenblatt, UIdee de Vart pour Vart dans la htterature anglaise pendant
la periode victorienne (Bibliotheque de la Revue de litterature comparee,
70, Paris, 1931), especially pp. 12-13 and 58-61. Miss Rosenblatt,
following R. F. Egan, The Genesis of the Theory of Art for Arts Sake
in Germany and in England {Smith College Studies in Modem Languages
^
2. 4, Northampton, Mass., 1921, and 5. 3, Northampton, Mass., 1924),
suggests that the intermediaries were Crabb Robinson (who knew many
German philosophers) and Benjamin Constant (to whom he passed the
idea).
22. Zweckmdssigkeit ohne Zweck (see Rosenblatt, cited in n. 21, 63).
23. Gautiers attacks on the type of criticism which insisted that all
literature should be fit for the Young Person were made in his prefaces to
Mademoiselle de Maupin and Albertus, and were echoed, almost word for
w^ord, by Swinburne in Notes on Poems and Reviews, (See Rosenblatt,
cited in n. 21, 146 f. and 159. For Paters dependence on Swinburne, see
Rosenblatt, 195 f.)
24. For an exhaustive discussion of the moral purpose of Greek literature,
see W. Jaeger, Paideia (Oxford, 1939-44).
25. This point is well made by Rosenblatt (cited in n. 21), 16-51, with
quotations from the periodicals (often highly influential) of the early
Victorian age.
26. Pater, The Renaissance: The School of Giorgione (London, 18882),
140.
27. J.-K. Huysmans, A rebours: the symphonies of perfume, c. 10; the
books, c. 12; the corruption of Langlois, c. 6.
28. The poisonous book* which influenced Dorian Gray more than any
other, and which he had bound in nine different colours, to suit his various
moo'ds and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemedj at
times, to have almost entirely lost control, was Huysmanss A rebours
(Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, c. 10 fin., c. ii). Details will be
found in A. J. Farmers Le Mouvement esthetique et ^decadent* en Angleterre
{iSys-xgoo) (Bibliotheque de la Revue de litterature comparee, 75, Paris,
1931), bk. 2, c. 2.
29. In Dover Beach Arnold compares himself, musing by the sea, with
Sophocles listening to the iEgean. Once, in a sonnet written during the
hard eighteen-forties, he says that his consolations in these bad days are
Homer, the Stoic Epictetus, and most of all Sophoclesnot for his
remoteness from the present, but because, in times of similar disaster, he
saw life steadily and saw it whole. On Swinburnes knowledge of Greek
see W. R. Rutlands Swinburne, a Nineteenth Century Hellene (Oxford,
1931)*
30. Quoted by E. de Selincourt, Classicism and Romanticism in the
Poetry of Walter Savage Landor, Vortrdge der Bibliothek Warburg
iggo-x (ed. F. Saxl, Leipzig, 1932), 230-50. In 1815 and 1820 Landor
published collections of heroic idyUs in Latin, which he only much later
translated into English verse. His Latine scribendi defensio (1795) is a
slight thing: it is now a bibliographical rarity, but can be read in the
686 NOTES ON 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
Modem Language Association rotograph 279. It is prefaced by a number
of Landors Latin poems, beginning with a set of hendecasyllables
addressed to Catullus.
31. There is an exhaustive discussion of Brownings changing and
developing interest in Greek and Latin literature by Robert Spindler,
Robert Browning und die Antike (Englische Bibliothek, 6, Leipzig, 1930).
Apparently Browning began Latin about 6 and Greek a year or two later
;
he got well on with them at school ; but he was badly taught at London
University, so that his interests turned away to medieval things. In later
life his wife rekindled his delight in Greek, which never died thereafter.
He himself has sketched the growth of his knowledge of Greek in a charming
poem called Development^ built round a fine tribute to his fathers gay
and clever teaching. Of his three large Hellenic works, Balaustion^s
Adventure has much charm (see p, 452 f.) ; but in The Last Adventure of
Balaustion^ and still more in his translation of Agamemnon^ he was overcome
by the innate vices of his own style : pedantic allusions, bewildering
crowds of proper names, and grotesquely strained rhythms which make
the poems difficult to study and impossible to act. It is strange to see him,
when plunging deep into Greek poetry and history, committing just the
same faults that spoiled his youthful exploration of the Italian Middle
Ages, Bordello. Those who wish to study the precise extent of Brownings
debt to the different Greek and Roman authors whom he read will find
the facts in Spindler, and also, in tabular form, in T. L. Hood, Brownings
Ancient Classical Sources (Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 33
(1922), 79-180).
32. On Leconte de Lisles knowledge of Greek, see H. Peyre, Louis
Minard (Yale Romanic Studies, 5, New Haven, 1932), 478 f. The effect
of Leconte de Lisles translations on Louys was like that of Chapmans
upon Keats.
33. Tennyson, The Lotos-eaters, expressing almost the same mood as
his Hesperides and Sea-fairies,
34. Brownings description of Aristophanes, in The Last Adventure of
Balaustion,
35. See J. Vianey, Les Foemes harbares de Leconte de Lisle (Paris,
t933)> foJ^ a short analysis of these interesting pieces, and A. Fairlie,
Leconte de Lisle*s Poems on the Barbarian Races (Cambridge, 1947), for
a sensitively written analysis of the sources to which he went for his
imaginative material. Barbares (as Miss Fairlie points out) is used from
the Greco-Roman point of view, to mean non-Greek and non-Roman.
36. So H. Peyre, Bibliographie critique de VHellenisme en France (cited
in n. i), 38.
37. Landor, Homer, Laertes, Agatha, 2. 218 f.
38. Ulysses was written after the death of Tennysons much-loved
friend Hallam, to express the sense of loss . . . but that still life must be
fought out to the end. See the admirable analysis by D. Bush, in Mythology
and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Harvard Studies in
English, i8, Cambridge, Mass., 1937), 210 f. Mr. Bush points out very
appositely that when Tennyson treats a serious problem both in an
NOTES ON 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 687
antique setting and in a modem setting, the antique treatment is always
far superior.
39. Tolstoy, Anfia Karenina, tr. Garnett, pt. 7, c. 30.
40. There is a clever analysis of these plays in D. Bushs book cited in
n. 38: Merope, 260-2; Atalanta in Calydon, 331-44; Erechtheus, 344-9.
W. R. Rutland, Swinburne, a Nineteenth Century Hellene (Oxford, 1931),
praises both Swinburnes dramas very highly and analyses them with
much insight and knowledge ; though few will agree with him in placing
Erechtheus beside Samson Agonistes.
41. There is a full analysis of Balaustion^s Adventure, and of the translation
of Alcestis which it contains, in R. Spindlers Browning und die
Antike (cited in n. 31), i. ly-Ss, 2. 278-94. Spindlers bibliography is
also useful.
42. Prologue to Fifine at the Fair.
43. On the Battle of the Books see c. 14.
44. There is a useful edition of the Priere sur VAcropole by E. Vinaver
and T. B. L. Webster (Manchester, 1934), which shows thatalthough
Renan said he took the text of his prayer from an old manuscript he had
written during his visit to Athensit was in fact composed in several
stages and carefully revised. The editors also point out striking resemblances
to ideas expressed in Chateaubriands Itineraire de Paris a
Jerusalem.
45. France dedicated his Pohnes dores to Leconte de Lisle.
46. Le Procurateur dejudie is stated to have been suggested to France
by Renan. He and Renan were talking together, and Renan declared that
the things described in the Gospels must have made a deep impression on
those who took part in them. This France denied, and Renan, smiling,
said sometliing tantamount to Then, in your view, Pontius Pilate, in old
age .
.
(M. Belloc Lowndes, Where Love and Friendship dwelt (London,
1943), 178).
47. Carduccis bitterest personal attack on the Pope was Per Giuseppe
Monti e Gaetano Tognetti, which describes him as rubbing his old hands
with.delight at the thought of the execution of two Italian agitators. On
this subject see also S. W. Halperin, Italian Anticlericalism 1871-1914
{Journal of Modem History, 19 (1947), i. 18 f.). For Argument i in
Carducci see In una chiesa goticai Addio, semitico numel
48. On Alfieris opposition to the Roman Catholic church see G.
Megaro, Vittorio Alfieri (New York, 1930), c. 3.
49. The victorious locomotive engine appears again at the end of AUe
fonti del CUtumno
:
the last words are fischia il vapore.
50. Leconte de Lisle, Pohnes antiques: Hypatie: Le vil Galil6en ta
frapp6e et maudite, He has an even stronger denunciation, called Les
Sihcles maudits, in Pohnes harbares. In tones which Gibbon would have
admired, even if he disapproved their violence, he calls the Catholic
Middle Ages ^si6des d6gorgeurs, de liches et de bmtes, and denounces
the church as
la Goule
Romaine, ce vampire ivre de sang humain.
688 NOTES ON 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST
51. There is a brilliant monograph on Menard by Henri Peyre {Yale
Romanic Studies^ 5, New Haven, 1932), to which I am much indebted.
Mr. Peyre points out that Menard was a direct heir of the revolutionary
poets: among his early works were a Promethee delivre (inspired by
Shelley) and an Euphorion (inspired by Goethe). Like most of the men of
that generation, he never saw Greece itself, although he had an opportunity
to visit it. He was, of course, a fervent opponent of the naive
nineteenth-century ideal of progress (every day in every way we get
better and better^ * for two reasons^first, because it is impossible for us
to surpass the Greeks (a Battle of the Books argument) ; and second (a new
one) because it is immoral to expect that the tide of progress will carry us
forward, and we should reconcile ourselves to work and the difficulties of
this world. The quotation in the text is on p. 203 of Mr. Peyres book.
52. This is from the first chorus of Swinburnes Atalanta in Calydon.
His The Last Oracle is a hymn to Apollo, representing the Greek spirit
as ruined by Christianity with its gloom and ugliness
:
Fire for light and hell for heaven and psalms for paeans
Filled the clearest eyes and lips most sweet of song,
When for chant of Greeks the wail of Galilaeans
Made the whole world moan with hymns of wrath and wrong.
And his poem For the Feast of Giordano Bruno, Philosopher and Martyr
equals Carduccis hatred for the churches, calling Bruno a
soul whose spirit on earth was as a rod
To scourge off priests, a sword to pierce their God.
It ends by placing Bruno in an atheists heaven between Lucretius and
Shelley.
53. See K. Franke, Pierre Louys (Bonn 1937).
54. Lou^^s himself wrote
:
La po^sie est une fleur YOrient qui ne vit pas dans nos serres chaudes. La
Gr^ce elle-m6me Ia re9ue dTonie, et cest de 1^ aussi quAndr6 Chenier ou
Keats Font transplant^e parmi nous, dans le desert po^tique de leur ^poque;
mais elle meurt avec chaque po^te qui nous la rapporte ^^Asie. II faut toujours
aller la chercher k la source du soleil. Podsies (Paris, 1930), introductory note.
This identification of Ionia with Asia, and the idea that Greece got her
poetic genius from the Orient, is almost entirely bosh.
55. On Dares the Phrygian* see p. 51 f.
56. Wilamowitzs review is reprinted from the Gottinger gelehrte
Anzeigen, 1896, 623 f., in his Sappho und Simonides (Berlin, 1913). He
points out that even the name Bilitis is un-Greek, and conjectures that it
comes from Beltis, one of the appellations of the Syrian sex-goddess.
It must be said, however, that Louys had great talent for description, and
in the early poems of the Bilitis book showed a real pastoral genius : they
evoked three exquisite songs by Debussy.
57. Louys, Aphrodite {Poesies^ p. 163),
58. Nietzsche, Die Gehurt der Tragodie am dem Geist der Musik (1872).
Wilamowitzs reply was Zukunftsphilologie, a name which neatly alludes
to the description of Wagners music (thenmuch admired by Nietzsche) as
NOTES ON 20. PARNASSUS AND ANTICHRIST 689
Zukunftsmtisik, Later, Nietzsche made a personal adaptation of the Theseus
and Ariadne myth, in which he became Dionysus and Cosima Wagner
Ariadne: see Crane Brinton, Nietzsche (Cambridge, Mass,, 1941), 70.
59. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1.5. Theognis says dyaOoi
and KaKoi, icxOXoi and BecXoL Gentlemen are men who have a family
(a gens) with land and a coat of arms ; villains are serfs attached to a villa,
a gentlemans estate. The primary meanings of noble and vulgar show
a similar distinction. On Theognis see also W. Jaeger, Paideia, i. 186 f.
60. Callicles in Platos Gorgias and Thrasymachus in The Republic both
say that justice is really the interest of the stronger.
61. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Bose, part 3, para. 62.
62. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Bose, part 5, para. 195. Cf. also
Zur Genealogie der Moral, cc. 7-1 1 ; Jenseits von Gut und Bose, paras. 44,
46, 201 ; and Antichrist, cc. 24-5.
63. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragodie, cc. 13 and 15.
64. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Bose, 7, para. 218 : Flaubert . . . der
brave Burger von Rouen.
65. This is the main implication of his story Un Coeur simple, at the end
of which an old housemaid has a vision of the Holy Ghost in the form of
her pet parrot. This is significantly juxtaposed to the noble legend of
St. Julian the Hospitaller.
66. Paganisme, Christianisme, muftisme.
67. Flaubert, Madame Bovary and Bouvard et Pecuchet.
68. Pater, Style, in Appreciations.
69. On Les Martyrs see pp. 403-4.
70. On Hypatia see p. 456.
71. Lygia is the daughter of the chief of the Lygians, allied to the
Suevi ; her huge retainer, the bear-man Ursus, is also a Lygian. This is as
near'first-century Polish as makes no matter.
72. Unfortunately Sienkiewicz made the common mistake of searchers
after local colour, and believed that the vulgar millionaire Trimalchio,
whose banquet is described by Petronius in his Satirica, was a typical
Roman gentleman. As a matter of fact, everything that Trimalchio does
is either silly or vulgar or both, so that it is a sure guide to how the upperclass
Romans did not behave. Petronius himself would be politely amused
to see the vulgar superstitions and ostentations, which he observed in
Levantine freedmen, transferred to his own life. The same mistake has
been made, among others, by Mr. J. Carcopino, Daily Life in Aftcient Rome
(tr. Lorimer, New Haven, 1940). It was pointed out by M. Johnston,
Sienkiewicz and Petronius {Classical Weekly, 25 (1932), 79); and see G.
Highet, Petronius the Moralist {Trans. Am. Phil. Assn. 72, 1941, 178 f.).
73. On the advance in history during the nineteenth century see p. 472,
74. On Fenelons Telemaque see p. 336 f. J. J. Barthelemys Voyage du
jeune Anacharsis en Grhce, published towards the end of the eighteenth
century, was reissued surprisingly often, long after his death: in 1845, in
i860, and so on.
75. On Niebuhrs theory and Macaulays Lays see also p. 472
76. For Argument i in the Battle of the Books see p. 262
690
Notes 0/2 21 . A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
1. Browning, A Grammarian^s Funeral shortly after the Revival of
Learning in Europe.
2. One of the strangest types of publication to be found in university
libraries is the annual programme issued by German schools during the
nineteenth century. It was a paper-bound pamphlet of some thirty pages,
prepared for the prize-giving day. Usually it contained a list of all the
classes, with the names of all the boys and masters, and a schedule of
the subjects taught; and then a dissertation in Latin or German by one
of the masters, On the Comet mentioned in JuvenaVs Sixth Satire or The
Sources of Gildas. That kind of publication brought credit to the school,
earned some kudos for the master, and^if there was anything in his article helped him towards
a university position.
3. Sid. Ap. 'p. 6. 4. I. Some have thought that the warning in Carm.
17. 15 f., do not expect wines from Gaza, Chios, and Italy, implies that
the trade-routes were broken ; but it is more commonplace, being only the
favourite theme of the poets frugal meal (cf. Juvenal, Sat. ii). See
C. E. Stevens, Sidonius Apollinaris and His Age (Oxford, 1933), c. 4.
4. Niebuhr befriended Leopardi (p. 430) when he was ambassador at
Rome. En route, he discovered the Institutes of Gains in Verona Cathedral,
and helped to found the modern study of Roman law. There is an agreeable
essay on him by W. Warde Fowler in Roman Essays and Interpretatiofis
(Oxford, 1920), 329-50and an even more charming one on
Mommsen (250-68).
5. On Niebuhrs romantic background see G. P. Gooch, History and
Historians in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1913), 15 f., who points
out that, as a boy, he was enraptured by Vosss translation of the Odyssey
(see p. 375). He was also much interested in Wolfs Prolegomena (p. 3^3 .)
:
he dreamt that the Romans, too, had had a magnificent balladry, or rather
a cycle of heroic poems: eine Epopoe, die an Tiefe und Glanz der
Phantasie alles weit zuriicklasst, was das spatere Rom hervorbrachte
{Romische Geschichte, i. 259).
6. Fueter, Geschichte der neueren Historiographic (ed. D. Gerhard and
P. Sattler, Munich, 1936^), 467, points out that L. de Beaufort, in his
Considerations sur !incertitude des cinq premiers sikcles de Fhistoire romaine
(1738), had already shown that the truth about the early centuries of
Romes existence was virtually unobtainable. The Dutch scholar Perizonius,
in his Animadversiones historicae (1685), anticipated Niebuhr in
distinguishing history from myth in such early traditions.
7. The phrase comes from Rankes preface to the first edition of his Geschichten
der romanischen undgermanischen Volker von I4g4 bis J514 (1824)
:
Man hat der Historic das Amt, die Vergangenheit zu richten, die Mitwelt
zum Nutzen zukQnftiger Jahre zu belehren, beigemessenr so hoher Aemter
unterwindet sich gegenwartiger Versuch nicht: er will bios zeigen, wie es
eigentlich gewesen.
In archaeology, the work of Schliemann was a practical method of following
out Rankes principle. By digging up the actual sites, Schliemann got
NOTES ON 21 . A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 691
nearer to finding out what really happened. In literature, the * realistic
novelists, who professed only to record facts, without choosing or commenting,
were his colleagues.
8. The criticism is the appendix to Rankes Geschichten (cited in n. 7).
It is called Zur Kritik neueren Geschichtsschreihery and contains his famous
dissection of Guicciardini, G. P. Gooch (cited m n. 5), 24 and 79, is the
authority for Mommsens remark, and for Rankes honouring the bust of
Niebuhr.
9. So G. P, Gooch (cited in n. 5), 460.
10. E. Fueter, Geschichte der neueren HistoriograpJue (cited in n. 6),
553. Mommsens son-in-law Wilamowitz saw the problem, but dodged
it in a way unusual for him. In his Geschichte der Philologie (Einleitung
in die Altertumswissenschaft, ed. Gercke and Norden (Leipzig, 19272),
I. 70-1) he says that when Mommsen had, with Caesars autocracy,
reached the goal which he had deliberately set himself on artistic groundsy
he broke off ; and then started the preliminary work which was necessary
to make a perfect history of Romechronology, numismatics, &c. All
that was preparation for his history of the Caesars. 'Dass er von ihr nur
den 5. Band geschrieben hat, werden die Laien beklagen; er urteilte
richtiger- How Mommsens judgement was more correct Wilamowitz
does not tell us, nor even if it was a historical or an artistic decision.
11. A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford, 1939), i. 3.
12. A somewhat similar explanation was given by R. G. Collingwood,
in The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), part 3, sect. 9, 13 1 f. However, he
overstated the antithesis between Mommsens earlier and later work, and
his explanation that Mommsen was affected by the positivistic attitude to
history (treating it only as a group of microscopic problems) is inadequate
in view of such books as the Romisches Staatsrecht.
13. N. M. Butler, Across the Busy Years (New York, 1939-40), i. ,125.
President Butler confirmed this to me in conversation.
14. T. Zielinskis Cicero im Wandel der Jahrhunderte (Leipzig, 19 12^),
to which all students of this subject ow^e so much, was written partly in
order to correct Mommsens falsification. Although it traced the *Cicerocaricature
back to its beginnings in the late republic, it did not entirely
face the problem raised by Mommsen. This has lately been taken up with
great seriousness by W. Riiegg in Cicero und der Humanismus (Zurich,
1946). In a thoughtful preface, called Deutschland und der Humanismus,
Ruegg suggests that both the nature of Mommsens attack on
Cicero and its success were major symptoms of the collapse of German
culture, its abandonment of the liberal, humane, European tradition which
Cicero largely created.
15. Fustels fault as a historian, which is apparent as early as La Cite
antiqucy was that although he insisted that every assertion must be supported
by a document, he did not criticize the documents themselves so
far as to recognize that even a contemporary narrative may be vitiated by
mistakes, or lies, or interpolations. There is a good description of his
work by C. Seignobos in Petit de Jullevilles Histoire de la langue et de la
littSrature franpaisCy 8. 279-96.
692 NOTES ON 21. A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
1 6. Although Monod {Portraits et souvenirs
y
Paris, 1897, 14^ f-) says
Fustel gave utterance to these ideas before 1870, it is dfficult to believe
that he was not moved (perhaps unconsciously) by the spirit of resistance
to German aggrandizement. His theory was of course seized upon with
delight by French nationalists and attacked by their opponents. There is
an amusing chapter in Charles Maurrass Devant VAllemagne iternelle
(Paris, 1937), describing the uproar which went up when the newly
established Ligue Action Frangaise organized a celebration of FustePs
seventy"fifth birthday in 1905.
17. Ranke also insisted that it was impossible to write the history of one
nation by itself : in extreme old age he attempted to compose a universal
history\ but it was too much for him.
18. F. W. Newman, brother of the famous Catholic convert who
became a cardinal, traversed during his long life (1805-99) almost all the
crusades and eccentricities, laudable and ridiculous, of the nineteenth
century: antivivisection, vegetarianism, utilitarian clothing designed by
himself, &c. On him, and on the controversy with Arnold, more details
will be found in L. Trillings competent Matthew Arnold (New York,
1939), 168-78 ; and there is a fuller sketch of his character in I. G. Sievekings
F. W. Newman (London, 1909).
19. These quotations come from Newmans preface to his translation,
pp, iv-v and x.
20. Newmans translation of Iliady 20. 499-500. Ditty is his own
explanation of ballad.
21. When I read Arnolds Since I have been reproached with undervaluing
Lord Macaulays Lays of Ancient RomCy let me frankly say that,
to my mind, a mans powder to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays
is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical rnatters
at air, I wince: for, having enjoyed the Lays since boyhood, I can with
an effort detect the ring of false metal, but it is usually drowned for me by
the clang of true steel.
22. Housman, in his inaugural lecture on being appointed as a successor
to Newman at London University, pointed out one of the worst errors,
Arnolds mistranslation of IL 24. 506 in Last Words ; but agreed that the
effect of the lectures as criticism outweighed all the writings of all the
scholars. And Arnold was tortured by bad taste in translation, because
it ruined passages of poetry he had always loved: see his remarks on
Maginns rendering of Od, 19. 392 f. in the second lecture. Therefore, in
spite of his studied urbanity, he was cruel to Newman. The motto of his
lectures, Numquamne reponam?, comes from the savage cry of the satirist
Juvenal (i. i) forced to listen all day to bad poetry.
*
23. 1 Cor. xvi. 22 : dvddefia = dedicated to a pagan god, == accursed.
Maran-atha is Syriac for O Lord, cornel
24. Rev. xiii. 16-17. Matt. v. 3.
25. Job xix. 20, a passage which many commentators have tried to
explain or emend.
26. See R, E. C. Houghton, The Influence of the Classics on the Poetry
of Matthew Arnold (Oxford, 1923), 8 , who mentions:
NOTES ON 21 . A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 693
Balder Dead, i. 174-7 = Vergil, Aen. 6. 309 f.
Balder Dead, 2. 157 f. = Horn. Od. 1 1. 35-40 and Verg. Aeit. 6. 305 f.
Balder Dead, 2. 265 f. = Horn. Od. ii. 488 f.
Balder Dead, 3. 160 f. = Horn. II. 23. 127 f.
Sohrab and Rustum, 111-16 = Horn. 11. 2. 459-68.
Sohrab and Rustum, 480-9 = Horn. 11. 17. 366 .
To these might be added
:
Balder Dead, 2. loi f. = Verg. Aen. 6. 388-416.
Balder Dead, 3. 65 f. = Horn. II. 24. 723 f.
and many other adaptations ranging from a single word and phrase to a
repeated convention or the broad framework of a scene.
27. Sohrab and Rustum, 556 f.
28. e.g, in Sohrab and Rustum, the pedlars from Cabool crossing the
Caucasus (160 f.), the moonlit cypress (314 f.), the Chinese painter (672 f.),
and the pillars of Persepolis (860 f.) ; in Balder Dead, the spring thaw
(3. 313 f.), the lonely woodcutters (3. 200 f.), and the stonn-tossed sailors
(3 . 363 f.). One or two images which reflect Victorian England seem oddly
out of place : the rich lady (T read much of the night, and go south in the
winter^ in Sohrab 302 f., and the traveller in the English lane {Balder,
1. 230 f.).
29. The lost dog {Balder, 3, 8 f.), the captive stork {Balder, 3. 565 f.),
the cut hyacinth {Sohrab, 634 f.), the dying violets {Sohrab, 844 f.), and a
number of those mentioned in note 28.
30. Taint Homeric echoes is from The Epic, Tennysons introduction
to Morte d^Arthur. On Tennysons adaptations of Homer, see W. P.
Mustard, Classical Echoes in Tennyson (New York, 1904), c. i. There are
more and subtler Homeric echoes in Tennyson than most of us imagine.
31. On Tennyson and Vergil see also p. 446. The quotation in the text
is from the conclusion of Morte d"*Arthur.
32. Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey, c. 15, p. 256.
33. For all these judgements see Lawrences preface.
34. Lawrences translation of Od. 23. 350-1.
35. T. S. Eliot, Euripides and Professor Murray (iqxB), reprinted in
Selected Essays 1917-1932 (New York, 1932), 46-50.
36. Pierre Louys, who had good taste nevertheless, bitterly attacked
the academic translators of his day. In the preface to his Lectures antiques
he wrote of the best-known French translations from the Greek;
T suffit dexaminer les plus c^l&bres pour admirer avec quelle attention
z616e certains universitaires sappliquent k corriger Foriginal. Avec eux, plus
d^pithfetes Sardies, plus de m^taphores a double image; ils r^pandent sur
Iauteur quils daignent embellir une 616gance qui leur est personnelle et surtout
un *goflt qui supprime ou ajoute, au hasard des phrases, ce quil convient de
biffer ou dintroduire qk et 1^. Cest une collaboration dont le Grec a tout
Ihonneur et le savant toute la peine. Tel est leur d^sint6ressement. Je Tadmire.
Je ne Timiterai pomt.*
In his own translations he actually kept the Greek word-order, even if it
was inharmonious in French. What he most admired was the translations
694 NOTES ON 21 . A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP
of Leconte de Lislebecause, although they were harsh and to some eyes
pedantic, they were challenging and original.
37. Quoted from Osler^s article, Science in the Public Schools {The
School World, London, 1916), by Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William
Osier (New York and Oxford, 1932), i. 29 f.
38. See H. Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osier, 2. 124-5, an
illuminating extract from Osiers Linacre Lecture.
39. Nicholas Murray Butler, Across the Busy Years (cited in n. 13),
I. 65 f. President Butler later found his graduate work in classical
philology equally uninspiring:
In addition to my graduate study of philosophy I continued my work in
Creek and Latin, getting some glorious experiences from the study of Plato but
finding little benefit from the work given me by Professor Short. How unimportant
his work was for my particular intellectual interest may be seen from
a very technical philological paper which I contributed at Professor Gildersleeves
request to the American Journal of Philology in October, 1885, with the
title The Post-positive Et in Propertius. (Ibid. 94.)
And yet he records that another member of the Greek and Latin department
who organized a boule, a voluntary class to read Homer, collected a
number of willing and delighted students who got through a great deal of
both epics, and learned to enjoy them.
40. W, L. Phelps, Autobiography with Letters (New York and London,
1939). 136 f.
41. E. F. Benson, As We Were {London, 1930), 133-4.
42. Gibbon, Memoirs of my Life and Writings (Everyman ed.), 46.
43. Byrons note on Childe Harold^s Pilgrimage, 4. 75-7.
44. Quoted from C. M. Bowras presidential address to the Classical
Association, A Classical Education (Oxford, 1945).
45. Here Housmans shyness and defensive arrogance led him into one
of the errors which have helped to injure the study of the classics in our
time. By refusing to say that the literature of Greece and Rome contained
much of the best art and thought in the possession of the human race, and
that it was directly relevant to us (as, for example, Hindu literature or
Mayan art is not), he made it easy for those who were ignorant, mistaken,
or short-sighted, to say that all the study of the past, of art, and of literature
was entirely useless. Henry Ford, for instance, is reported to have
declared History is bunkalthough it is not easy to reconcile that with
his personal passion for collecting antiques, Descartes put it more gracefully
but not less forcibly
:
Ti nest plus du devoir dun honndte homme de savoir le grec etde latin, que
le suisse ou le bas-breton, ni Ihistoire de Pempire germano-romanique, que celle
do plus petit estat qui se trouve en Europe. . . . Savoir le latin, est-ce done en
savoir plus que la fille de Ciceron au sortir de nourrice? (Quoted by Gillot,
La Querelle des anciens et des modernes en France, Paris, 1914, 289 n. i.)
All Housmans readers must have felt that there was something lacking in
his attitude to the subject on which he spent his life. Perhaps it was
humanity. Humanismus*, says a Swiss scholar, ist mehr als WiederNOTES
ON 21 . A CENTURY OF SCHOLARSHIP 695
belebung der Antike ; Humanismus ist auch nicht die Beschaftigung mit
der Antike an und fiir sich . . . : sonst waren die Altertumswissenschafter
die grossten Humanisten, was durchaus nicht der Fail ist. (W. Riiegg,
Cicero und der Humanismus
y
Zurich, 1946, 6.)
46. A. S. F. Gow, A. E, Housman: a Sketch (New York, 1936), 43.
The chart on Mr. Gows p. 90 shows that Housman preferred to lecture
on the fourth book.
47. From a letter written by Mrs. T. W. Pym, and quoted in Grant
Richards, Housman i8gy-ig36 (O.U.P., 1942), 289.
48. Quoted by C. Seignobos, in L. Petit de Jullevilles Histoire de la
langue et de la litteraturefrangaisey 8. 259. Renan himself held that writing
history was as much an art as a science. . . . There is no exaggeration in
saying that a badly arranged sentence always corresponds to an inexact
thought. (Quoted from Essais de morale et de critique^, 131, by E. Neff,
in The Poetry of History (New York, 1947), 162. On the subject of this
entire chapter, Mr. Neffs c. 8, History as Science, is of much interest.)
49. After writing this I was fortunate enough to find the same thought
expressed by a distinguished scholar who is himself a sensitive critic and
an admirable writer. Dr. Gilbert Norwood of Toronto, in his Pindar
(Sather Classical Lectures 1945, Berkeley, Cal., 1946), says on p. 7:
We should hope ... for a seemly elegance in our editions and resent it as an
outrage if we open a copy of Theocritus only to find a horrible apparatus cnticus
lurking at the bottom of the page like some open sewer at the end of a gracious
promenade.
50. Housman has a memorable sneer at this, in the preface (p. xxviii)
to his edition of Juvenal:
The truth is, and the reader has discovered it by this time if he did not know
it before hand, that I have no inkling of Ueherlieferungsgeschichte. And to the
sister science of Quellenforschung I am equally a stranger: I cannot assure you,
as some other writer will assure you before long, that the satires of Juvenal are
all copied from the satires of Tumus.* It is a sad fate to be devoid of faculties
which cause so much elation to their owners ; but I cheer myseff by reflecting
how large a number of human beings are more fortunate than I. It seems indeed
as if a capacity for these two lines of fiction had been bestowed by heaven, as a
sort of consolation-pnze, upon those who have no capacity for anything else.*
*Tumus was a satirist who is known to have written not long before
Juvenal, but whose work has almost entirely disappeared.
Hops on 22. THE SYMBOLIST POETS AND JAMES JOYCE
I. The term symbolists was (like the term Parnassian) appropriated
by one comparatively small school of French writersof whom Mallarmd
has been called the conclusion and crown (C. M. Bowra, The Heritage
of Symbolism (London, 1943), i); but it is very difficult to assert that, in
poems such as Eliots The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday
y
symbols do
not play a part quite as important as in Baudelaires poetry. The modem
poets who canon this wider definition^be called symbolists are much
696 NOTES ON 22. THE SYMBOLISTS AND JOYCE
more numerous than the four dealt with in this chapter, but cannot all
be considered. Some of them make little or no use of classical symbolism
:
Yeats, for instance, feels Celtic imagery much more deeply, and his
references to Helen and Byzantium are decorative but superficial.
2. Valery said that was why he never wrote a novel : he could not bring
himself to write down The countess went out at five o* clock.
3. Goethe repeated this idea at the end of Faust II:
Alles Vergangliche
1st nur ein Gleichniss . . .
although his idea of the relation between symbol and truth was far from
Platos.
4. Mallarme, Las de Varner repos',
Je veux d^laisser FArt vorace dun pays
Cruel, et . . .
Imiter le Chinois au coeur limpide et fin.
5. H. James Joyce (Norfolk, Conn., 1941), 76.
6. Ulysses is a latinized, or italianized, form of the Greek heros name
Odysseus. Like Tennyson, Joyce used it because it was more thoroughly
naturalized in English : as he preferred Dedalus to Daedalus or the original
Daidalos,
7. In particular, Stuart Gilbert, to James Joyce^s ^ Ulysses^ (New
York, 1931) I am indebted for the identifications in the text. In the preface
Mr. Gilbert explains that Joyce never gives lectures or interviews,
never employs any of the devices by which certain modern writers are
enabled to explain themselves to the public. He then goes on to
acknowledge his indebtedness to Joyce, to whose assistance and encouragement
this work owes whatever of merit it may possessevidently
including the merit of allowing Joyce to explain himself to the public.
His work contains a great deal of information which could scarcely have
been derived from any source except detailed coaching by Joyce: names
of obscure books, intricately concealed parallels, &c. (It was probably
Joyce who surrendered himself to Berards theory of the Odyssey, on
which much of Mr. Gilberts exposition is based.) All this is valuable ; but
the defect of Mr. Gilberts book is that it leaves much unexplained and
almost everything uncriticized. Joyce is reported to have said that what
he demanded of his reader was to give up a lifetime to reading Joyces
books. Apparently he imagined himself as a modern Aquinas, and Gilbert
as the first commentator on his Summa Dublinensis, There are good
criticisms of his technique, and discussions of his background, by
S. F. Damon, The Odyssey in Dublin* {Hound and Hom^ 3 (1929),
I. 7-44), and Edmund Wilson, AxeVs Castle (New York and London,
1931), 211 f.
8. As a caricature of O. St. J. Gogarty, who evidently irritated and
stimulated him in his youth, Mulligan was important for Joyce, but not
for Joyces readers.
9 Mallarme, Le Tombeau d^Edgar Poe:
Tel quen Lui-mtoe eniSun F^temit^ le change.
NOTES ON 22. THE SYMBOLISTS AND JOYCE 697
10. Some of the pastoral elements are as old as Theocritus. The setting
is Sicily, the faun plays the syrinx, Venus Erycina may appear. But this
is not the pastoral of lovelorn shepherds and shepherdesses : it is something
more primitive and more real, a satyr dreaming of the breasts of
the nymph in the brake*. Martino, Parnasse et SymboUsme, says it was
inspired partly by a Parnassian poem (Banvilles Diane au bois) and partly
by the rococo painter Bouchers Pan et Syrinx. This is another interesting
example of the way in which classical influence passes on from one artist
to another, taking new shapes and producing new transformations in the
work of every different generation.
1 1 . Debussy also wrote settings of great beauty for three pastorals from
Pierre Louyss Chansons de Bilitis, on which see p. 458,
12. In
les sanglots supr^mes et meurtris
Dune enfance sentant parmi les reveries
Se s^parer enfin ses froides pierreries
the woid pierreries seems to carry both images: jewels* and stonework*.
13. In fact, the young Fate is Mallarmes princess, one night later than
the night of Herodiade.
14. For analysis and commentary, see C. M. Bowra, The Heritage of
Symbolism (London, 1943), c. 2, especially pp. 20-7, and A. R. Chisholm,
An Approach to M. Valiry^s ^Jeune Parque^ (Melbourne, 1938).
15. For instance, diamants extrimes of distant stars, and tomiantes
toisons of trees.
16. The fragments are an elaboration of Valerys early poem Narcisse
parle^ and contain certain themes which are apparently developed from,
and beyond, La Jeune Parque. He treated the same theme again, with
more;emphasis on the tempting nymphs, in the Cantate du Narcisse (1938).
17. For a fuller discussion of La Pythie, see C. M. Bowra, The Heritage
of Symbolism (cited in n. i), 39-44.
18. Stephen also means crown* and implies martyr*. The early
version of the Portrait (written in 1901-2, published in 1944 with an
introduction by T. Spencer) was actually called Stephen Hero. There the
pseudonym was spelt Daedalus. No doubt Joyce altered it in Ulysses to
Dedalus in order to make it look more like Irish names such as Devlin and
Delaney. It is the Greek for cunning* (silence, exile, and cxinning) and
is familiar to readers of Shelley as the adjective daedal.
19. Daedalus son Icarus flew too high, too near the sun: his wings
melted, and he fell. Gide interprets this myth in TMsee as a symbol of the
metaphysician who soars so near the ultimate truths that they blind and
destroy him; and Goethe in Faust adapted it to the career of Byron (see
p. 387 f.). If Joyce himself was the skilful Daedalus in Ulysses, he became
Icarus in Finnegans Wake.
20. Ov. Met. 8. 183-235; cf. A. A. 2. 21-96. Joyce quotes line 188:
dixit, et ignotas animum dimittit in artes
he spoke, and turned his mind to unknown arts. The reference is
misprinted 18 in Joyces text.
698 NOTES ON 22. THE SYMBOLISTS AND JOYCE
21. This point is further discussed in chapter 23, p. 523.
22. Odyssey, 1 1 . There is an even earlier Babylonian legend, in which a
hero passes over the waters of death and speaks with the dead ; but this
was lost to literature until the discovery of the epic of Gilgamesh in the
nineteenth centuiy.
23. Aeneas journey through the underv^^orld is the subject of Aeneid 6.
Perhaps the golden bough is a Celtic myth. Norden agrees that Vergil
was the first to introduce it into literature {Aeneis Buck VI erkldrt von
Eduard Nordeft, Berlin, 1916^, 173), and suggests that he took it from the
Mysteries, where boughs were used by initiates. But the golden bough is
not an ordinary branch. It is likened to the mistletoe which flourishes in
winter when other plants are dead (thus symbolizing life in death) and
which was sacred to the Druids. Celtic elements in the poetry of the
north Italian Vergil have often been divined. By calling the great book in
which he gave new life to the buried religion of our ancestors The Golden
Bough, Sir James Frazer testified to the fertility of the legend.
24. Instead of going to Homer, Pound apparently took his text from
the word-for-word Renaissance translation of Homer into Latin by
Andreas Dhms (Venice, 1537: see G. Finsler, Homer in der Neuzeit
(Leipzig, 1912), 47 on it), so that the story is obscured by a double layer
of mistakes. Yet his eloquence still makes it readable.
25. W. B. Yeats, A Packet for Ezra Pound (Dublin, 1929), 2.
26. S. GiVo^xt, James Joyce's 'Ulysses' (cited in n. 7), 2. 6. 143 f.
27. S. Gilbert (n. 7), 2. 15. 293 f.
28. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, section 3.
29. Mr. H. Levin, on p. 71 of his James Joyce (cited in n. 5), says
Joyce shuns heroics. The relation of the Odyssey to Ulysses is that of
parallels that never meet. This is less than the truth. Joyce do^s not
merely avoid heroics, he inverts them. The two books do not run along
side by side, they move in opposite senses.
30. See c. 14, p. 272.
31. Joyce, Ulysses, the last words of section 2. The apparition is
possibly adapted from the stuffed parrot which appears as the Holy Ghost
in Flauberts Un Cmur simple: see p. 689.
32. See p. 151 f, ; and cf. Shakespeares Merchant of Venice, 5. 1. 1 f., in
which the lovers malie their love more beautiful by recalling famous lovers
of the past, who loved with the same magical intensity on such a night.
33. Eliot, Sweeny erect. In stanza 3 Eliot makes Sweeney still more
repulsive by comparing him to the Cyclops Polyphemus, and the frail
hysterical girl to the young princess Nausicaa : both Homeric characters.
34. See J. P. Marquands novel, The Late George Apley (Boston, 1927).
35. The Roman satirist Juvenal sardonically warns a friend that, if his
wife takes it into her head, she will poison him; and if that fails, your
Clytemnestra will take the axe. It is the same use of the myth, but
Juvenal (6. 655 f.) is emphasizing the ruthlessness rather than the meanness
of his times.
36. Ov. Met, 6. 424--674. Its medieval version, PMlomena^ is mentioned
on p. 61.
NOTES ON 22. THE SYMBOLISTS AND JOYCE 699
37. Swinburne, ItyluSy in which the nightingale Philomela sings to
Procne.
38. Eliot, note on line 218 in The Waste Land.
39. Ov. Met. 3. 316-38. The figure of Tiresias may have been partly
suggested to Eliot by Guillaume Apollinaires surrealist play, LesMamelles
de Ttresias (largely written in 1903, produced as a play in 1917 and as an
opera with Poulencs music in 1947), where an emancipated woman makes
the opposite change, into Tiresias from Therese. Eliots idea that the poet
must pay for his second sight, by suffering the pangs of those whom he
sees, appears earlier in Matthew Arnolds fine classical poem, The Strayed
Reveller : such a price
The Gods exact for song;
To become what we sing.
Tiresias figures in it too: his age, weakness, and second sight are shared
by the poet who sees him. It is a strange poem. Imagination, the poets
vision, says Arnold, is a rare gift;
But oh, what labour!
O Prince, what pain!
In his later Philomela he uses almost the same words in almost the same
rhythm, of that other Greek symbol of poetry, the nightingale
:
What triumph! hark^what pam!
40. Eliot, The Waste Land, 228.
41. Eliot, The Waste Land^ 243 f.
42. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
y
i. 6.
43.
* Petronius, Satirica, 48. 8:
Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis uidi in ampulla pendere,
et cum iili pueri dicerent: SlpvXka, rC respondebat ilia: aTTodaveiv QiXoi.'
Cf, Ov. Met. 14. 130-53.
44. Mallarme, Salut.
45. Eliot, A Cooking Egg and Coriolan i {Triumphal March).
46. Eliot, The Waste Landy 426 f.
47. See Pater, Marius the Epicurean, c. 7 ; and p. 220 of this book.
48. In this, Eliots poem touches Cheniers most famous work, La
Jeune Tarentine, which is a blend of the mourning elegy and the briefer
epitaph. *
49. Pound, Nunc dimittis, in Personae 183.
50. Papyrus occurs in Pounds Lustra, a collection of short poems
containing many adaptations of classical models.
51. The name occurs in E. Lobels edition of Sappho (Oxford, 1925)
at d II. 10 and i 4. 4.
52. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, section 5, init.
He emphasizes his training in Aristotle and Aquinas, and the fact that
he began Latin with Ovids Metamorphoses^like Wordsworth and
700 NOTES ON 22. THE SYMBOLISTS AND JOYCE
Montaigne and many another. In Stephen Hero he outlines a firmly
classicist theory of poetry.
53. Pound has proclaimed again and again that it is essential for poets
and readers to know a wide range of literature, in which certain Greek and
Roman poets are high peaks : see his How to Read and Polite Essays. His
most interesting classical work is Homage to Sextus Propertius (1917).
This is a very free translation of some of Propertius elegies. It is individual,
and bold, and charming; it vibrates with the southern warmth and
Latin energy of Propertius himself. Only it is sometimes repulsive and
often unintelligible, because Pound makes schoolboy mistakes in both
English and Latin. In English he is capable of writing
may I inter beneath the hummock ( = be buried)
and
Have you contempted Junos . . . temples ?
(See Homage to Sextus Propertius^ 3 and 8.) His mistakes in understanding
Propertius* own language are the delight of connoisseurs in dog-Latin.
The best known is so bad that it might have been meant to be funny.
Propertius says that he would rather write love-poetry than epics, and
then mentions a number of heroic subjects, including
Cimbrorum . . . nunas et benefacta Mari
the challenge of the Cimbrians (who invaded Italy and threatened
Rome) and the services of Marius*. Pound translates this
Nor of Welsh mifies and the profit Mams had out of them
{Homage to Sextus Propertius
^
5. 2; Propertius, 2. i. 24). The verbal
mistakes, delicious as they are, do not matter too much; but the spirit is
false. Pound should have known that no poet would dream of writing a
heroic work about coalmining dividends.
Nevertheless, Homage to Sextus Propertius is often eloquent and
efiective. Its vocabulary is far more vivid than the boring elderly language
into which even the most passionate classical poems are too often translated:
thus

You are a very early inspector of mistresses.

Do you think I have adopted your habits ?*
There were upon the bed no signs of a voluptuous encounter,
No signs of a second incumbent.
{Homage to Sextus Propertius, 10; Prop. 2. 29. 31-2, 35-6.) The medium
is not the strict stopped couplet of Propertius, but a frefe unrhymed
variation on the five-foot and six-foot iambic line, with some dramatic
half-lines. Because of the fine sense of rhythm that made Eliot call Pound
the better artist* and praise his discoveries in the art of writing verse, his
variations on Propertius, although eccentric and often incorrect, are still
alive and memorable. Ignorant and brash though he is, Pound is a sincere
and sensitive admirer of classical literature.
54. Eliot, Tfec Waste Land, 265, 288-^1.
701
Notes on 23. THE reinterpretation of the myths
1. See F. Jacoby, Euemeros, in Pauly-Wissowas ReaUEncyclopadie
der classischen Altertumswissensckaft, 6. 952 f.
2. J. D. Cooke, in Euhemerism : a Mediaeval Interpretation of Classical
Paganism {Speculum^ 2 396-410), shows how eagerly the early
Christian propagandists seized on the theory, and used it {a) to harmonize
with the explanation of idolatry given in the Book of Wisdom (that iijjols
were originally commemorative statues of loved and revered human
beings) ; {h) to confirm the stories of Hercules and other deified mortals
;
{c) to account for the stories of the human frailties of the gods. They
concluded that all the Greco-Roman deities were originally men. Lactantius
(in the Divinae institutiones) was the chief elaborator of this theory.
It was transmitted through Isidore of Seville to such late medieval
writers as Vincent of Beauvais (see p. loi), Guido de Columnis (p. 55),
and Chaucers pupils Lydgate and Gower.
3. See p. 150, and note 23 on the passage.
4. Genesis vi. 2-4.
5. Paradise Regained^ 2. 172 f. Similarly, in Paradise Lost^ i. 738 f., the
devil who built Pandemonium is identified with Hephaestus/Mulciber/
Vulcan.
6. Creuzers Symholik vnd Mythologie der alien Volker was keenly
attacked in Germany on two main counts. Onerepresented in Lobecks
brilliant Aglaophamus (1829)was that the elaborate interpretations and
deep significances which Creuzer saw in ancient religious practices were
invented by himself, and that there was little evidence to show that the
Greeks themselves felt them at all. The otherrepresented in Vosss
AntiSymholik (1824-6) and his articles in the Jena Litteratur^Zeitung
was that it was calculated to overthrow the Protestant faith, in favour of
mysticism, priestcraft, and theocracy. In a handsomely written article
(Les Religions de Iantiquitd, reprinted in &udes d'histoire religieuse,
Paris, 1857) Renan dismissed the second of these, and elaborated the first,
comparing Creuzer with the Neoplatonist mystics Proclus and Porphyry.
Creuzers influence on Schellings philosophy is pointed out by
E. Cassirer, in his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Berlin, 1923-9),
2. 21. See the documents edited by E. Howald, Der Kampf um Creuzers
Sytnbolik (Tubingen, 1926).
7. Mdnard and Leconte de Lisle are discussed on pp. 456 f., 446 f. of
this book. See H. Peyre, Bibliographie critique de VHellenisme en France de
XS43 i iS'jjD (Yale Romanic Studies, 6, New Haven, 1932), 60 , and of
course his admirable monograph on M6nard (number 5 in the same
series), to which I am much indebted, both here and in chapter 20.
8. On Ovide moralisi see p. 62.
9. See, for instance, the tenth lecture (Symbolism in dreams) in
Freuds A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (tr. J. Riviere, Garden
City, New Y'ork, 1943). The connexions between myth, ritual, and
psychical symbolism have been further investigated in the periodical
702 NOTES ON 23 .
Imago, started by Freuds pupils Sachs and Rank, and in a number of
penetrating books on ritual by Theodor Reik.
10. For a poetic version of this myth see p. 72. A contemporary
version (inspired by the fourth of Vergils Bucolics) is W. H. Audens ode
to John Warner: The Orators, 3. 4.
11. There is an interesting statement of his point of view in his
Reponse a une enquSte de ^La Renaissance" sur le classicisme (1923), in
volume 10 of his collected works:

Je ne pense pas que les questions que vous me posez au sujet puissent etre
comprises ailleurs quen France, la patrie et le dernier refuge du classicisme. Et
pourtant, en France m^me, y eut-il jamais plus grands repr^sentants du
classicisme que Raphael, Goethe ou Mozart ?
Le vrai classicisme nest pas le r^sultat dune contrainte ext^rieure; ceile-ci
demeure artificielle et ne produit que des oeuvres acad^miques. II me semble
que les qualit^s que nous nous plaisons k appeler classiques sont surtout des qualit^s
morales, et volontiers je considere le classicisme comme un harmonieux faisceau
de vertus, dont la premiere est la modestie. Le romantisme est toujours
accompagn^ dorgueil, dinfatuation. La perfection classique implique, non
point certes une suppression de Findividu (peu sen faut que je ne dise: au
contraire) mais la soumission de Findividu, sa subordination, et celle du mot
dans la phrase, de la phrase dans la page, de la page dans Fceuvre. Cest la mise
en Evidence dune hitorchie.
^11 importe de consid^rer que la lutte entre classicisme et romantisme existe
aussi bien k Fint^rieur de chaque esprit. Et cest de cette lutte mdme que doit
naitre Fceuvre ; Foeuvre dart classique raconte le triomphe de Fordre et de la
mesure sur le romantisme int^rieur. Lceuvre est dautant plus belle que la
chose soumise ^tait dabord plus r^volt^e. Si la mati^re est soumise par avance,
Iceuvre est froide et sans int^rSt. Le veritable classicisme ne comporte rien de
restrictif ni de suppressif; il nest point tant conservateur que cr^ateur; il se
d^toume de Farchaisme et se refuse k croire que tout a d^j^ t6 dit.
Jajoute que ne devient pas classique qui veut; et que les grands classiques
sont ceux qui le sont malgr6 eux, ceux qui le sont sans le savoir.
12. For a recent discussion of Wildes knowledge of Greek and Latin
see A. J. A. Symons, Wilde at Oxford, in Horizon, 1941.
13. I am here indebted to an article by Winifred Smith, Greek
Heroines in Modem Dress (S&wanee Review, July-Sept, 1941, 385 f.).
Hasenclever, exiled in France, killed himself in 1940 to escape the
Gestapo (Letter from France in Horizon, March 1941).
14. See F. Brie, Eugene ONeill als Nachfolger der Griechen, in
Germanisch^romanische Monatsschrift, 21 (1933), 46-59; B. H. Clark,
Aeschylus and ONeill, in The English Journal, 21 (1932), 699-710; and
D. Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Foetry (Harvard,
1937), c. 15, on the entire subject.
15. No one who saw Judith Andersons performance of Medea in
1947-8 in New York will ever forget how she blended the two passions

how, as the weeping nurse told her of her rivals fearful death, she laughed
as luxuriously as a happy lover. Jefferss violent abbreviation of the
Oresteia into a single piece, half-drama, half-poem, The Tower beyond
Tragedy (New York, 1925), contains some fine poetry, some wonderful
THE REINTERPRETATION OF THE MYTHS 703
imaginingsfor instance, Agamemnons voice speaking after his murder
through the body of Cassandra; but the physical violences of lust and
murder are so extreme as to be incredible or repulsive rather than truly
tragic.
16. IcarOj translated by Ruth Draper, with a preface by Gilbert Murray
(New York, 1933).
17. See in particular the first chorus (modelled on the first chorus in
Sophocles Antigone) and Icarus rhapsodical speeches in Act i
.
18. A. Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe: essai sur Vahsurde (Paris, 194I2).
He has also written a play on Caligula, the Roman emperor, whom he
admires for treating life as absurd. There is a searching criticism of his
philosophical attitude by A. J. Ayer in Horizon (March 1946).
19. Byron, Prometheus (Poems of July-September 1816).
20. The best single book on Spitteler is R. Faesi, Spittelers Weg und
Werk (Frauenfeld, 1933), which has a large bibliography. See also
W. Adrian, Die Mythologie in Carl Spittelers Olympischem Friihling
(Berne, 1922) ; F. Buri, Prometheus und Christus (Berne, 1945); J. Frankel,
Spitteler^ Huldigungen und Begegnungen (St. Gallen, 1945); O. Hofer,
Die Lebensauffassung in Spittelers Dichteyi (Berne, 1929); C. G. Jungs
essay on Prometheus und Epimetheus in Psychologische Typen (Zurich,
1921) ; R. Messleny, Karl Spitteler und das neudeutsche Epos (Halle, 1918)
;
F. Schmidt, Die Erneuerung des Epos (Beitrage zur Asthetik, 17, Leipzig,
1928); an excellent essay by A. H. J. Knight in The Modern Language
Review
f
27 (1932), and a sound introductory article by J. G. Robertson m
his Essays and Addresses on Literature (London, 1935). I have not seen
J. G. Muirheads translation of Prometheus und Epimetheus (London,
1931), E. Ewalts Spitteler oder George? (Berlin, 1930) is not worth reading,
except for its collection of Spittelers verbal effects.
21.
* Prometheus was a favourite of Goethe (p. 637), Shelley (p. 419),
Byron, and others.
22. In spite of their strong resemblances, Spittelers book and
Nietzsches book were written quite independently. Neither author knew
or understood the other. See Spittelers own statement Meine Beziehungen
zu Nietzsche (Suddeutsche Monatshefte, 1908), Nietzsches sneer
in Ecce Homo, c. i, and J. Nagaz, Spittelers Prometheus und Epimetheus
und Nietzsches Zarathustra (Chur, 1912).
23. See A. H. J. Knights essay, The Modern Language Review, 27
(1932), 443-4> on Spittelers knowledge of Greek. I am also indebted to
this essay for the remarks on Spittelers pessimism.
24. Spitteler, Olympischer Fruhling, i. 3:<
Und sieh, am Horizonte droben auf der Weid
Wuchs aus dem blauen Himmel eine schlanke Maid,
In Tracht und Ansehn einer schlichten Hirtin gleich,
Doch schimmemd wie ein Engel aus dem Himmelreich.
Die hohlen Hand als Muschel hielt sie vor dem Mund,
Draus stiess sie Jauchzerketten in den Alpengrund.
Jetzt hat ihr Blick die Lagemden erspaht. Juchheil
Und mit verwegneo Spriingen kam sie flugs herbei.
704 NOTES ON 23 .
It is impossible not to think of the first appearance of Venus to her son in
Aeneidf i, 314 f., as a bare-kneed hunting girl with a jolly heus, iuuenes!
25. On Spitteler and Bocklin see Faesi (cited in n. 20), 238 f. There is
a two-volume work on the subject, Spitteler und Bocklin, by S. Streicher
(Zurich, igz^).
26. Andre Obeys Le Viol de Lucrece (1931) is an interesting experiment
in bridging the gap between audience and actors by introducing a
Recitant and Recitante (masked) who sit at each side of the stage throughout
the action. Sometimes they report offstage action, sometimes they
comment on the events shown on the stage, sometimes they speak for
crowds, and now and then they quote the poem of Shakespeare on which
the play is based: poor bird, they say, and poor frighted deer^ pauvre
hiche ejfrayeewhich is changed in the last words of the drama to pauvre
biche egorgee.
27. See p. 5 1 f.
28. Gide has this thought in Considerations sur la mythologie grecque
(Works, V. 9), init.
29. The real books are Notre inquietude by Daniel-Rops, and an essay
called Un Nouveau Mai du siecle by Marcel Arland of the Nouvelle revue
franpaise,
30. My colleague Justin OBrien points out that Gide is interested in
the idea that sin is infectiousas Moliere was. Just as the hypocrisy of
Tartuffe and the greed of Harpagon affected those who came into contact
with them, so the unconscious incest of Oedipus (or was it quite unconscious
?) spreads out from him to infect his whole family.
31. Gide, Le Roi Candaule, 2 fin.
32. Gide, Thesee, ii. The exchange of a sister for a brother is one of
Gides obsessions: see Corydon i.
33* Gide, Thisie, ii.
34. Ovid, Her, 10. 41-2:
candidaque imposui longae uelamina uirgae,
scilicet oblitos admonitura mei.
35. Gide, Thisie, 4.
36. Giraudoux, &ectre, 2. 6.
37. Giraudoux, La Guerre de Troie n^aura pas lieu, 2. 8.
38. This is an atrocious pun on Oedipus incestuous marriage-bed:
On peut dire quil sest mis Ik dans de mauvais draps. For a man of his
lyrical imagination Giraudoux committed a surprising number of such
vulgarities. In Mecire, i. 2, one of the little Eumenides says to the
gardener: Le destin te montre son derrikre. Regarde sil grossitl And
in his Elpinof (1929) there is a poem about the seduction of Helen, ending
C*est un p6ch^, je le confesse,
Mais Pkris vaut bien une messel
39. Cocteau, La Machine infemale^ 2 (pp. 116-17).
70S
Notes on 24. conclusion
1. For details, see P. C. Wilson, Wagner^s Dramas and Greek Tragedy
(New York, 1919). Wagner was very well trained in the classics at school,
and took up Greek again with great enthusiasm at 35 : even his theatre at
Bayreuth was, he said himself, a Greek inspiration.
2. Thoreau, Familiar Letters, 19 Nov. 1856.
3. Quoted and translated by E. J. Simmons, Leo Tolstoy (Boston,
1946), 288-9, 31 1.
4. On Pitts father, see p. 329; on Casaubons, p. 639; on Brownings,
his poem Development, and p. 686; on Montaignes, p. 186. There is
another such tribute in Edmund Gosses Father and Son, which shows
how strangely the childs imagination can be landled and how necessary
it is to kindle it. Gosse, who became an eminent literary critic, was
brought up in a dreary religious household. He found it hard to learn
Latin, which was made as repulsive for him as possible : strings of words,
and of grim arrangements of conjugation and declension, presented in a
manner appallingly unattractive (cf. p. 490 f.). But his father, hearing him
repeating these strings of words, took down the old Delphin Vergil which
had been an inestimable solace to him during his field-trips as a young
naturalist, by the shores of Canadian rapids, on the edge of West Indian
swamps . . . there was a great scratch on the sheepskin cover that a thorn
had made in a forest of Alabama. He thought of the happy months of his
youth spent in the wilds, and of the beloved wife he had lost; and he
began to repeat the first of Vergils bucolic poems by memory. The little
boy could not understand a word, but was struck by the beauty of the
sounds. He listened as if to a nightingale until his father reached
tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
formosam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas.
Then he asked for a translation ; but the lines meant nothing to him when
they were translated : how could a boy of 1 1 brought up among Plymouth
Brethren understand the pagan shepherd singing about his sweetheart?
And yet he was haunted by the music of the words. I persuaded my
Father, who was a little astonished at my insistence, to repeat the lines
over and over again. At last my brain caught them. And thenceforward
he went about repeating them to himself in a kind of glory: as I hung
over the tidal pools at the edge of the sea, all my inner being used to ring
out with the sound of
formosam resonare doces Amaryllida siluas.
This is the same Amaryllis in the shade who charmed Miltons imagination
more than 200 years earlier: see Lycidas, 68.
5. Plato, The Republic,
5076 zz

INDEX
Important references are shown by bold figures, thus : 123. A page-number in
parentheses (123) shows that a subject is mentioned on that page, but not explicitly
named. Titles are given in the same forms as in the body of the book that is, in English translation
when cited from the main text, and in the
original languages when cited from the notes alone.
The index will be more helpful if used together with the table of contents
on pages xiii-xxxvi.
A. O., 124.
Abel, 566.
Abelard, Peter, 48, 50, 60.
ahoyeurs^ 398.
Abraham, 29, 196.
Abraham a Sancta Clara, 308, 649-
50; Judas der Erzschelm quoted,
649.
absolutism, Roman, 476.
abstract adjectives and nouns, 108,
109, no, 160, 319, 321; and see
personifications.
absurdity of life, 527-8, 703.
Academy, French, 278, 280, 443, 638;
Platos, 278, 639; Roman, 639;
Royal (Acadtoie Royale), 373, 665.
Achaean League, 399.
Achaeans, 23; dapper-greaved, 483.
Acheron, 357, 607.
Achilles, 336, 580; armour, 156, 600,
606, 619; character, 74, 281; death
and immortality, 52-3, 521, 575;
descendants, 164; exploits, 150,
155, (157), 521; love, 52-3, 575;
wrath, 52, 156, 281, 577.
Achilles Tatius, CUtophon and Leucippe,
164.
Acrasia, 149, 604.
Acropolis, 454.
Actaeon, 207, 621.
Action Fran^aise, Ligue d, 692.
actors and actresses, 130; baroque,
297; Greek, 443; medieval, 127,
'
X40; Renaissance, 127, 128, 134, ,
138, 1 41; Roman, 140-1.
Acts of the Apostles, 625.
Acts of the SatntSy 567.
Adam, 149, 153, 245, 636.
Adam, Robert, 290.
Adam de la Halle, 166.
Adamas, 378.
Adamastor, 148.
Addison, Joseph, CatOf 293; essays,
192, 295; learning, 295; Pope on,
320; style, 327; tr. Vergil, 295.
Adlin^on, Thomas, 125-6.
Admetus, 452-3.
Adonais, 420.
Adonis, 420, 455, 523, 620, 678.
Adriana, 625.
Aegean Sea, 428, 459, 530, 685.
Aegisthus, 539.
.lfric, 46-7, 568.
Aelius Aristides, 680.
Aeneas, 546 ; ancestor of Brute, 1 5 1
;
and Dido, 68, 99, 116, 217, 580, 582,
592, 621 ; and Lavinia, 56, 580; and
the Sibyl, 73, 516; his armour, 153,
600; as traitor, 51, 53, 99, 575, 592;
character, 74, 607; child of Venus,
169, 563, 605, 704; deified, 520;
describes fall of Troy, 156, 217;
duel with Tumus, 1 50, 1 54, 607 ; exploits
in Trojan war, 52; founder of
Roman stock, 52, 54, 144, 591; in
Italy, 99; in underworld, 49, 78,
153, 511, 516, 698; wanderings in
exile, 52, 76, 78, 99, 151, 337, 511,
563, 575-
Aeolian lyrics, 680.
Aeolic dialect, 481.
Aeschylus, admired and emulated,
295, 360, 419, 423, 460, 526, 542,
648, 667, 679, 702 ; and Shakespeare,
201; despised and neglected, 120,
132, 280, 357, 378; language and
style, 132, 299, 300, 419; quoted,
252; translated, 120, 419, 597, 679. works: Agamemnon^ 300, 538; The
Eumenides^ 538, 678*, Oresteia, 132,
265, 526, 542, 702; The Persians
t
419; Prometheus Bounds 295, 419,
423, 538, 597; Seven against Thebes^
679.
Aesculapius, 148, 520,
Aesop^ 280, 653; fables, 188, 283, 284-
aesthetes, 439, 445* 662.
aesthetic experience, 387-8.
aesthetic sense, ii, 21, 370, 444, 496.
' aesthetics, words dealing with, log,
110.
aetas Ouidiana, 579.
Aethiopicaj see Heliodorus.
Africa, 329; central, ii ; east, 144, 438
;
northern, 3, 4, 5, 12, 36, 421, 458,
SS6, 557; Roman, 3, 4, 556, 557,
7o8 index
Agamemnon and Achilles, 577; and
Aeneas, 52; and the Dream, 605;
and Iphigenia, 373; as personified
tribe, 521; his murder, 284, 425,
SI 3-14. 526, 703.
Agazzari, Agostino, Eumelioy 175.
rrrJculture, 351, 395. 457, S21, 523-
i.nd Hector, 197, 320; and
Ulysses, 167, 619; as a donkey-lion,
272-3; as personified tribe, 521;
conceit, 619; death, 53.
Aladdin, 524.
Alain de Lille, AnticlaudianuSy 65 ; De
planctu Naturae
y
65.
Alamanni, Luigi, hymns, 231, 629;
Opere Toscane, 309; satires, 309-11
;
tr. Antigone
y
120, 133.
Alanus de Insulis, 65.
Alaric, 557.
Alba, 53.
Albert, Prince Consort, 487.
Albertano of Brescia, The Book of Consolation
and Counsel
y
loi.
Alberto of Florence, 571.
Aibigensian heresy, 48, 93-4, 579.
Alcaeus, 220, 225-6.
Alcaic stanza, see metre.
Alceste, 276, 280.
Aicestis, 452-3.
alchemy, 455.
Alcibiades, 197, 198, 623.
Aleman, 669.
Alcuin, 38, 39, 565.
Alcyone, 98.
Aldhelm, 26, 37, 46, 564-5.
Aldnch, Dean, 283.
Aldus, see Manutius.
Alecto (Allecto), 148-9.
Alexander the Great, ambition, 68;
deification, 520; empire and successors,
138, 323; myths and poems
about, $6, 57, 190, 578, 580.
Alexandre de Bernay, 56.
Alexandria, 162, 455, 456, 457, 458-9,
570, 630.
Alexandrian critics, 630; missionaries,
568; poets, 381, 63a.
Alexandrine metre, 56, 137, 317, 529,
603, 604.
AiexiSy 559.
Alfieri, Count Vittorio, 424-7, 428,
430, 431, 455, 687; autobiography,
424, 679; knowledge of Greek and ^
Latin, 360, 424-5, 679. works : Della ttranmdey 679
,
1 troppiy
679; MtsogallOy 425; On the Prince
and Literature
y
426, 679; tragedies,
4*4-7. 679-^0.
Alfred, King, 39-41. 45-6. 47, 275,
571. S7*-3*
Alfred jewel, 31.
Allacci, Drainmaturgia, 665.
allegories, 32, 62-9, 86, 167, 529"-30>
573.
allegorizing, 64, 581.
alliteration, 34, 46, 656.
allusions, classical: 20-1, 156-8, 408-
9, 482; in baroque poetry, 21, 236;
in baroque prose, 327-9, 371; in
Browning, 686; in Dante, 78; m
Eliot, 516, 519; in Gide, 525;
in Goethe, 380; in The Romance of
theRose
y
64-5, 67-8; in Shakespeare,
198-9, 200.
allusive method, 563.
alphabet, Greek, 6, 481; Roman, 6;
Runic, see runes ; Slavic or Cyrillic,
6, 545, 557*
Alps, 530, 555.
Alsatian humanists, 12 1, 310.
Altenstaig, J., 123.
Amadis of Wales (Amadis de Gaula),
169, 170, 186.
Amaryllis in the shade, 705.
Amatas ( Amata, Verg. Aen, 7.
343 f-), 642.
Amboyse, Michel d, 125.
Ambrogini, Angelo, see Politian.
America, the continent: 17, 402, 448;
art, 57; culture, vii, 9, 57, 275, 292,
471, 481, 554; discovery of, 83,
344 ; education, 257 ; languages, 1 1 2
;
literature, vii, 57, 145, 262, 275;
morality, 57; population, 255; religion,
9-10.
America, Latin or South, 9, 144, 280,
39I;
America, United States of: 166, 403,
504, 513, 645; army, 399; art, 269,
370; civilization, 37, 512, 554;
education, 3, 49i, 495, 499, 54
Great Seal, 399; Greco-Roman
names in, 399-400; history, 335;
literature, vii, 275, 3^7, 399, 435,
516-17, 526-7, 531, 541, 542, s6i;
republic, 369; revolution, 255, 329,
^ 369, 391, 399-40IAmerican
Journal of Philologyy The,
471, 694.
Ammian, 188,
Ammonius, 570.
Amphiaraus, 592.
Amphictyonic Council, 399,
amphitheatres, 129.
Amyntas, 140, and see Tasso, Aminta*
Amyot, Jacques, tr. Euripides, 120;
tr. Hehodoms, 124, 164; tr. Longus,
124, 164; tr. Plutarch, 117, 119,
126, 188, 191, 210, 393.
anachronisms: Giraudoux, 534; Louys,
INDEX 709
458; modem French drama, 537;
Racine, 402-3; Shakespeare, 197.
Anacreon, 221, 228, 673; modem
imitators: Ronsard, 233, 235, 247,
632; Leopardi, 430-1.
Anacre(M in Heaven^ 228-9.
Anacreontics (Greek imitators of Anacreon),
221, 228-9, 247.
analysis, 3 32-3

anaphora, 332.
anarchism and anarchy, 393, 394, 409.
anathema and Anathema-Maranathay
484, 692.
anatomy, 180-1, 372.
Anchises, 79, 51 1.
Andromeda, 153.
anecdotes, 89, 304, 306.
Angelica, 145, 153.
angels, 26, 34, 38, 46, 78, 149-50, 151,
153, 203, 364, 529, 539, 5S6, 605;
fallen, 159, 160.
Angles, 23, 38.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle^ 38, 39, 569.
Anglo-Saxons, 22-47, 564; language,
vii, 18, 105, 330, 331, 564, 568;
literature, 22-47, 4^9, SS6, 562-8,
572-3.
animals and heroes, 562; and lovers,
629; in religion, 521, 567.
Anna Karenina, 450.
annmt coeptiSy 399.
Anouilh, Jean, Antigone, 532, 533,
536, 537; Eurydice, 532, 535? Medeay
527, 532.
antenataly 420.
Antenor, 50, 51, 53, 151-
anthologies, 100, 184, 592; and see
Readers Digests.
Anthology, the Greek: 229, 561; imitated
and adapted, 221, 235, 247,
380, SI 6, 629, 635, 667, 673; translated,
380.
anthropology, 468-9.
Antichrist, 439, 453-65.
anti-Ciceromans, 323-6, 327.
Antigone, 532, 536, 537.
anti-heroic stories, 512, 534.
anti-Jewish feeling, anti-Judaism, 259,
377, 454-5, 459, 460.
Antinous, 534.
antiquarianism, 680, 694.
antiquarians, Greek, 184.
Antiqmte classiqnCy L\ 471.
antistrophe, 222, 234, 235, 236, 237,
250, 636.
antithesis, 33, 112, 165, 184, 316-17,
333, 347, 561, 656, 657.
^
Antonine emperors, age of, 465.
Antony, see Mark Antony,
ants and men, 434, 682.
Anyte of Tegea, 61 1.
Aphrodite, 458-9, 595 ; and see Venus.
Apocalypse, the, 145, 364.
apocalypses, 73.
Apollinaire, Guillaume, Les Mamelles
de TiresiaSy 699.
Apollo, Phoebus, and Daphne, 141,
521, 581; and Napoleon, 522; and
the Python, 141, 530; god of music
and poetry, 130, 163, 168, 200, 204,
236, 245, 459-60, 608, 651; god of
prophecy, 509; god of the sun, 152,
195, 199, 459-60, 522; in Rolandy
49; opposed to Christianity, 688;
opposed to Dionysus, 388, 459-60;
statue of, 607 ; temple of, 99,
Apollonius of Tyana, 416, 574.
Apollonius of Tyrey 214, 580.
Apollonius Rhodius, 416, 482.
apophthegms, 190, 192.
apostles, 30, 352.
apostrophe, 112, 671.
Appian, 188.
Apuleius translated, 125-6.
Aquinas, see St. Thomas Aquinas.
Aquino, Maria d, 89.
Arabs, 6, 269, 351, 458, 558, 559, 579;
perfumes of Arabia, 209; Arabic
language, 14, 478.
Arachne, 78, 524.
Aramaic, 104.
Aran Islands, 166,
Arc de Triomphe, 397.
Arcadia or Arcady; real, 163, 611-12,
its poets, 61 1 ; ideal, 163, 166, 167,
169, 170, 175, 176, 177, 273 409>
420, 611-12, 614; the society, 176.
archaeology and its discovenes, 4, 16,
370-1, 468, 563, 690-1.
archaisms, 330,
archetypes of the collective unconscious,
524.
Archilochus, 684.
architecture, 227, 280-1, 367, 499,
645; baroque, 129-30, 290-1, 296,
332, 335 368-9, 654; Dark Ages,
25; French, 368, 397; Gaudis, 537;
Gothic, see cathedrals, churches,
Gothic; Greek and Roman, 2, 152,
262^ 280, 291, 370, 397> 401,
413, 422, 664; Greek revival, 370,
391, 401, 664; in impressionist art,
504; modem, 3; Renaissance, 21,
129-30, 180.
Arden, forest of, 195, 619.
Ardenne, forest of, 618.
arena, Roman, 401.
Ares, 150 ; and see Mars.
Aretino, plays of, 136.
Argantes, 150.
710 INDEX
Argo^ loi.
Argonauts, 50, loi, 422, 435, 521, 576.
Argos, 538.
Argus, 513, 534-
Ariadne, 513, 536 (== Adriane, 593),
689.
arias, operatic, 141, 290.
Ariel, 201, 507, 621.
Ariosto, Lodovico, ideals and spirit,
59, 196, 431, 447; popularity, 146,
366, 603, 678. works: The Casket Comedy (Cassaria),
136 ; The Madness of Roland
{Orlando Furioso), 71, 145, 147-8,
151-5, 160, 170, 182, 343, 603-4,
606-7 ; The Masqueraders {Gli Suppositi)^
136; satires, 309.
Aristaeus, 139.
aristocracy and aristocrats, see noblemen.
Aristophanes, 131-2, 184, 188, 304,
421, (447), 599, 667; choruses, 421;
imitated, 421, 504; translations, 120,
12 1, 489, 597; works: Plutus^ 121,
597-
Aristotle, 56, 83, 549; college, 639;
Lay of Aristotle^ 57; philosophy, ii,
14, 44 57, 75, 77, 78, 79-8o, 84,
149, 188, 197, 263, 264, 578, 586,
601, 603, 604, 617, 644, 699; rules',
146, 292, 298, 301-2, 361, 375, 425;
science, 44, 78, 184, 569-70; teacher
of Alexander, 56, of Plato, 85, of
Theophrastus, 315; translations of,
14, 79, 107, 119, 123, 569*70, 574* works : Categories tr., 574; De interpretatione
tr., 574; Ethics^ 1 19, (149),
188, 569-70, 586, 616; Logic generally,
Jt9, 569-70, 574; Metaphysics
tr 574; Physics, 44, 569-70, 574 ,
Poetics, 71, 79, 123, 132, 136, 142-3,
146, 343, 361, 375 404, 601, 666,
667; Politics, 1 19, 188, 569-70.
arithmetic, 37, 570.
Arland, Marcel, Un Nouveau Mai du
siecle, 704.
Armida, 146, 149, 152, 604, 608.
armies, American, 399; French, 396;
German, 682; Roman, 346, 350-1,
396.
armour, 21, 147, 149, 153, 156, 321,
512, 606, 619; miraculous, 148,
149-50, 153, 600.
Amauld, Antoine, 281.
Arnold of Brescia, 455.
Arnold, Matthew, and Christianity,
93; learning, 446; as a Parnassian,
(438), 441, 446, 450-2; sweetness
and light, 2S6. works: Bacchanalia, 441:; Balder
Dead, 485-6, 692-3; Consolation,
438; Dover Beach, 685; Empedocles
on Etna, 378, 4501, 637; Last
Words on translating Homer, 479-84,
692; Merope, 451-2, 485, 679, 687;
On translating Homer, 452, ''479-84,
485, 487, 489, 563, 692; Philomela,
61, 699; Sohrab and Rustum, 485-6,
692-3; Strayed Reveller, The, 699;
Thyrsts, 174, 176; To a friend, 685;
tr. Homer, 479-80, 485, 487.
Arnold, Thomas, History of Rome,
474-
Arrian, 188.
art, 1, 14, 15, 18, 21, 85, 127, 161, 164,
176, 227, 262, 263, 265, 266, 268,
a69j 275, 283, 327, 359, 368, 369-
74. 386, 395, 417-18, 443-6, 459,
468. 496, SOI, S07, 509, 543, 549,
675, 694; ancient, 371; baroque,
161, 176, 261, 289, 321, 373'~4j 647;
Christian, 263, 390; European, see
Europe ; Far Eastern, 502-3 ; French,
see France; Gothic, see Gothic;
Greek and Roman (excluding literature),
2, 3, 4, 16, 21, 81, 1 14, 129-
30, 147, 164, 196, 254, 262, 268,
291,292, 321, 346, 36^,36^4, 390,
391, 392, 405, 434, 442, 459, 469,
472, 496, 543, 675; history of, 371,
665; Mayan, 694; medieval, see
Middle Ages; modem, 2, 166, 176,
256, 263, 275, 362, 675; Renaissance,
see Renaissance.
art for arts sake, 444-6, 449, 685.
Art Poetique: Boileau, see Bolleau;
Geoffroi de Vinsauf, 582; Jean de
Garlande, 582.
Arthur, King, 24, 64, 146, 147, 186,
196, 487, 522; legends of, 27, 47, 50,
54, 147, 169, 448, 573, 580, 615.
artimal, 573.
Arvers, his sonnet, 58,
Asam, the brothers, 290.
Ascanius, 591.
asceticism, Christian, 57, 169, 353,
461-2, 547, 579; Hindu, 455.
Ascham, Roger, 123.
Asia, 387, 430, 454, 459, 545, 688.
Asia Minor, 323, 370, 420, 455.
Asiatic style (AsianismJ, 323, 654.
Asser, 46, 573.
association, free, 225, 504, 563.
assonance, in Roland, 49.
Assyrians, 29, 547.
Astarte, 455.
Astolfo, 145.
Astraea, 150, 170.
astrology, 44, 573.
astronomy, 37, 44, 282, 430, 448, 496.
INDEX
Astyanax, 144.
asymmetry, 3254, 325-6.
atheism, 333, 421, 688.
Athenaeus, 184.
Athene,(Athena, Athana), 150, (338),
372, 454, 605, 665.
Athens and the Athenians, 10, 51, 53,
221, 225, 365, 384, 397, 446, 452,
454, 509, 595, 618, 687; art, 370,
664; democracy, 197, 361-2, 394,
398, 423, 670; literature, 221, 323,
328.
Athens, Georgia, 400. Ohio, 400.
Athos, Mount, 17.
Atlas, giant, 512. mountain, 605, 607.
Atli, 27.
atoms, 264, 449,
Attic style (Atticism), 323, 654.
Attica, 492.
Atticus, 595.
Attila, 27.
Attis, 523.
Aubignac, D, Conjectures academiquesy
668.
Aubign^, Agrippa d, 635 ; Les TragiqueSy
'^ij-iZy 320.
Aucassin and NicoletCy 61.
Auden, W. H., 256; The OratorSy
702.
audiences in the theatre, 127, 128,
129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 137, I4i>
142, 295-6, 392, 648, 704.
Audrey, 175, (199).
Augustan writers, 268, 281; and see
baroque.
Augustine, see St. Augustine of Canterbury
and St, Augustine of Hippo.
Augustulus, Romulus, 5.
Augustus (Octavian), and Antony,
245; and family, 59, 40i, 557*, and
Horace, 245, 680; and Ovid, 59;
and Vergil, 172, 406, 487, 584, 673;
as ruler and deity, 73, 245, 47b, 477,
521, 647, 672; descendant of Aeneas,
54, 591; letter of, 557; modem
times compared with, 88, 176, 268,
269, 642, 647 ; title, 5, 88.
Aulus Gellms, 188.
Aurelius, Marcus, 5, 400, 465, 555;
the town, 400.
Aurora, 152, 236.
Ausonius, i88, 340.
Austria and the Austrians, 187, 245,
259, 308, 368, 428, 681.
authority, 261, 276, 361, 375^
autobiography, 191-3, 41 3 J in essays,
181, 191-2; in fiction, 169, 536; in
pastoral poems and stories, 172-3.
711
Avignon, 84.
^ Wood, Anthony, 54.
Azores, 152.
Aztec chronology, 364.
R., 1 1 6.
Babeuf, 396.
Babst, Michael, 12 x.
baby, miraculous, 8, 72-3, 422, 524,
702.
Babylon and Babylonia, 49, 60, 469,
510, 698.
Bacchanals (Bacchantes), 254, 388,
457, 508*
Bacchus, 20, 520, 521; and see Dionysus.
Bacelh, Girolamo, 115.
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 241, 290,
296. works: Art of the FuguCy 161;
Masses, 335; Peasant CantatUy 175;
Phoebus and Pan, 175.
background, noble, 151-6, 5x3.
Bacon, Francis, 198, 276, 282, 325,
641, 644.
Bacon, Roger, 558, 559.
Bagehot, Walter, 346.
Baiae, 454.
Baif, Jean-Antoine de, 120, 134, 17 1,
596, 613, 630, 635.
Baif, Lazare de, X17, 120, 596-7.
Balaustion, 452-3.
Bahgant episode of Rolandy 49.
Balkans, 6, 9, 259, 349.
hallady 2x9, 692.
ballads, 219, 364, 375, 4^4, 473, 544,
562; English, 196, 464, 480; European
(various), 22, 24, 220, 364,
375, 384, 480; German, 376;
Homeric, 480, 481, 487, 534; Roman,
473, 690; Scots, 24.
ballet, X76, 224, 250, 254.
Baltic, 23, 41, 249.
Balzac, Jean-Louis Guez de, 327,
330-1, 655-6, 657.
Banquo, 132.
Banville, Theodore de, 450, 697.
barbarians as destroyers of Greco-
Roman civilization, 3, 6, 27-8, 37,
38,41, 45, 47, 81, 170, 255, 348-0,
350, 3SX, 353-4, 462, 548,
558; as heirs of Greco-Roman
civilization, 27-8, 37, 81, 262, 348-
9, 353-4, 500, 548, 602, 630, 675; as
non-Christians, 26-8, 29, 38, 39,
45, 81, 349, 353-4; conquered by
Rome, 548; converted to Christianity,
26-7, 81, 349, 353-4* miscellaneous: American, 280, 400,
645; Anglo-Saxon, 23, ^7, 3^, 37
712 INDEX
47; Danish and Norse, 29, 35, 39,
47, 573 ; Egyptian, 455; in F^nelon,
657; in Flaubert, 461; Germanic,
389; modem, 354; opposed by
Charlemagne, 28, 38; Ostrogothic,
41, 45; Turkish, 6, 81.
barbarians. See also pagans, savages.
barbarism and religion, 352-4, 363,
404, (435), (455)-
Barbieri, Giovanni Francesco, 614.
Barbour, 577.
Barclay, Alexander, 117-18, 310.
bards, 241, 384, 565, 567.
barkers, 398.
Bariaam, 16, 84.
baroque, meaning of the word, 289,
646-7, 654.
baroque age: architecture, see architecture;
art, see art; classicism,
20-1, 236, 291-2, 302, 368-9, 375,
448, 541; conceits, 61 1, 646; criticism
and taste, 249, 261-88, 290,
298, 299, 302, 321, 341, 356, 357-8,
361, 373-4, 383, 405, 414, 443,
512, 604, 61 1, 642, 646-7, 652;
definition, 255, 289-92, 359,
646-7; drama, see drama; education
and scholarship, 264, 291,
298, 469, 473, 552; fiction, 281,
290, 335-44; history, 290, 291,
344-54* ideals : aesthetic and emotional control,
178, 289-92, 302, 321, 347,
359-61, 373-4, 405, 414, 646-7;
aristocratic and monarchic social
order, 165, 274, 302, 338-9, 356,
423-4, 642; grandeur, 175, 347,
368, 638, 647. interior decoration, 290, 647;
literature in general, 290, 647;
music, ree music; oratory, 122, 290,
291, 308, 322-35, 654-7; painting,
see painting; poetry, 236, 239-44,
24-SO, 2SI, 2S2, 270, 276. 279.
281, 290.^, 293-302, 313-21, 32*.
333, 356-7, 358, 40s, SH, S4I, 611,
633. 638, 652; prose style, 113, 308,
322-35. 347-^, 561-2, 654-7, 659-
60; relation to modem times, 328,
443; relation to Renaissance; 178,
255-60, 298-9, 318; relation to
revolutionary era, 344, 355-60;
satire, see satire; tragedy, see
tragedy; translation, 271-2, 276,
277, 287, 29s, 3*9, 342, 480-
Barth^lemy, Jean-Jacques, Travels of
Young Anacharsis m Greece, 339,
464, 689.
Bartdk, B6k, 166#
Basle, 310, 459.
Basques and their language, 13, 49,
556.
Bastille, 321, 679.
Bath, 12, 556.
Battle of Frogs and Mice (Bqtrachomyoniachta),
343, 430, 681.
Battle of the Books, 93, 260, 26188,
336, 362, 374> 404, 453, 464, 547;
Argument i, 262-4, 283, 362, 404,
464, 64s; Arfrnment 2, 264-9, 2:79,
281, 282, 6-". 5, (688), Argument 3,
269, 279, 280, 282; Argument 4,
269^4, 278, 279, 280, 281, 287,
318, 374; Phase I, 277-82; Phase 2,
282-6; Phase 3, 287; results, 287-8.
Baudelaire, Charles, 432, 438, 453,
455, 68i, 695. works: UAlbatros, 32; Les Litanies
de Satan, 455; Paradis artificiels,
453; Petits poernes en prose, 432;
Spleen, 681.
Bauduyn, Benoit, 122.
Bavaria and the Bavarians, s, 166, 308.
Bavms, 172, 173, 613.
Bayle, Pierre, 271, 642; Dictionnaire
philosophique, 281, 645.
Bayreuth, 705.
Beadohild, 10, 561.
Bean, Sawney, 23.
bear-men, 562, 689.
Beatrice, Dantes, 43, 58, 72, 75, 78-9,
87, 89, 263, 511, 586.
Beatrice Cenci, 419.
Beaufort, L. de, Considerations stir
Vmcertitude des cinq premiers siecles
de Vhistoire romaine, 690.
Beaupuy, 410.
beauty, as a value, 443-6; ideal of,
360-1, 387-8, 417-18, 420, 436,
438-9, 441, 442, 447-8, 449, 459,
514; sense of, 21, 370, 444.
Beccari, The Sacrifice, 140, 174.
Becker, Charicles, 339; Gallus, 339,
464,
Bede, the Venerable, 37-8, 46, 565,
569, 571 ; Ecclesiastical History of the
English Nation, 28, 37-8, 40, 566.
bees: bear and bees, 562; miracle of
the bees, 597; poet as a bee, 226,
227, 286, 628; spider and the bee,
285-6, 646,
Beelzebub, 156-7, 646.
Beeston, Vulliam, 620.
Beethoven, Ludwig van, Third
(Heroic) Symphony, 427; Sixth
(Pastoral) Symphony, 166; Ninth
(Choral) Symphony, 251, 376,
485 ; Prometheus overture, 677.
Behemoth, 529.
Belgium, 257.
INDEX
Belial, ISO, i6o, 521.
Bell, Aubrey, 158, 608.
Belleforest, Francois de, 124.
Bellerophon, 4, 23, 556.
Bellini,^ Vincenzo, 670.
Benedict of Peterborough, Chronicle^
618.
Benedictine Order, 7, ii, 53, (91-2),
181, 182, 384, 576, 577-
Beni, Paolo, Comtarn^mv^ di Torquato
Tasso con Owero e 645.
Benoit de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de
Troie, 50-5, 90, (94), 97, 565, 576.
Benson, E. F., As we were^ 492, 494.
Bentley, Richard, 261, 283-5, 286,
384, 467, 64s, 646. works : Dissertation upon the Epistles
of PhalariSy 262, 284; Milton^ 284-
5 ; Remarks upon a Late Discourse of
Free^thinkingy 384, 669.
Benvenuto, 590.
Beowulf (the hero), 22-3, 25, 562,
565-
Beowulf {th.Q poem), 22-7, 29, 30, 31,
35, 38, 49, 482, 562-5-
B^rard, Victor, 696.
Ber90ir, Pierre, 116, 118.
Bergerac, Cyrano de, 305.
Berlin, city, 296, 664; university, 458,
472.
Berlioz, Hector, 670.
Bernard of Chartres, 267, 641.
Bernard of Morval (or Cluny), On the
Contempt of the Worldy 305, 649.
Bernard, Richard, 122.
Bernhardt, Sarah, 272.
Berni, Francesco, 309-10, 313.
Bernini, 290.
Bersuire, Pierre (orBer^oir), 116, 118.
bestiaries, 67.
Bibbiena, Cardinal, La Calandriuy
134*
Bible, the Floly: bad taste, 274; birth
of Jesus, 523; compared with
Homer, 24, 484-6 ; creation
described, 150; criticism of, 385;
in Arnold, 484, 486; in Boethius,
44; in Chateaubriand, 405; in
Dante, 78, 83 ; in Lifet des RomainSy
578; in Milton, 159; in Ovide
moralise
y
581; in Petrarch, 83; in
Shakespeare, 199; King James
Version, 29, 335, 484S; sons of
God, 521 ; style, 486, imitated, 529;
translated from Greek into Latin
(the Vulgate), 7, 26, 28, 35, 46, 80,
557"8 56s, 568, 650; translated
from Hebrew into Greek (the
Septuagint), 104-5, 594-5; translated
into modem languages, 22,
28-9, 46-7, 106, 559, 571 ; and see
separate hooks of the Bible by
name.
Biblical history and myths, 15 1, 448,
.
580, 643.
bibliophiles, 82.
biemenncc^y leSy 299, 360.
bilingualism, 5, 7, 28, 70, 71-2, 85, 89,
94, 105-6, 109, 186, 188, 446, 556.
Bilitis, 458, 688.
Binet, 630.
Bmgham, J., 117.
Bion, 603; Lament for AdoniSy 678,
BioUy Lament for
y
173, 420, 421, 678;
translated, 375, 420.
Bischoff, Johannes, 121.
bishop *s crook, 173.
Bismarck, 476.
Bitner, Jonas, 121.
Black Death, 89, 93.
Black Sea, 521, 575.
Blackwell, Thomas, Enquiry into the
Life and Writings of Homer
y
379,
664, 668.
Blair, The GravCy 429.
Blake, William, 224; quoted, 435, 438.
Blenheim, 296.
blindness of the seer, 515.
blood, sweat, and tears, 335.
Bloom, Leopold, 505, 506, 513.
Bloom, Molly, 504, 505, 507.
Bluebeard, 276.
Boccaccio, Giovanni, and Chaucer,
96, 99 590, 593; and Dante, 82,
89, 92, 589-90; and Petrarch, 82,
84, 89, 92; learning, 16, 90, 91-2,
1 1 8, 558, 589 ; life, 89-93 ; paganism,
89-91, 92-3; reputation, 282; spirit,
59. works: Admetus, 167, 175*, Decameron,
89-90, 92, 95; Fiammetta,
60, 89, 90-1, 92, 169; FilocolOy 606;
FilostratOy 55, 90, 94, 97, 590, 592;
Genealogy of the Gods, loi, 593,
603, 678; Patient Griselda, 92, 95;
Theseidy 90, 94, 97 I47, 589*
590; tr. Homer, 16, 91; Vision of
Love, 94.
Bochetel, 120, 596.
BockHn, Arnold, 531, 704.
Bodvar Biarki, 562.
poijferv, 45,
Boethius, career, 41, 54, 603; Consolation
of Philosophy, 41-6, 570-3
;
imitations and adaptations of the
Consolation, 64-5, 68, 79, 80, 86,
99-100, 570-2, 650; translations of
the Consolation, 64-5, 99, no, 570-
3, 581; Boethiuss translations from
^the Greek, 14, 557, 569-70.
714 INDEX
Boffin, Mr., 347.
Bohn translations, 470,
Boiardo, Matteo Mano, Count
Scandiano : Orlando Innamorato^
145, 607, 621; Ttmone^ 598; tr.
Apuleius, 125; tr. Herodotus, 116.
Boileau, Gilles, 313.
Boileau, Nicolas (Despr^aux>, character,
243, 321, 359, in the Battle of
the Books, 261, 277, 278, 279,
280-2, 287, 645; influence, 652. works: Arret burlesque, 644; Art of
Poetry, (279, 290), 314, 318, (435),
645, (683); Critical Reflections on
Longinus, 281 ; epigrams, 280, 645
;
epistles, 314; The Lectern, 270, 281,
314, 315, 652; Ode on the Capture of
Namur, 242-3, 633; satires, 232,
286, 290-1, 313-14, 316-21, 339,
347, 642, 652, 653-4, 659.
Boisrobert, 278.
Bolivia: its science, 435.
Bologna: city, 48, 270, 680; university,
II.
Boltz, Valentin, 121.
Bonagiunta, (76), 585.
Bonaparte, Napoleon, see Napoleon 1.
Bonaparte, Pauline, 361.
Boner, Hieronymus, 116, 117, 122,
595.
Booby, Lady, 342.
Book of Bailymote, 115.
Book of Wisdom, 701.
Bordeaux, 186, 187, 188.
Boris Godunov (Moussorgsky), 130.
Bosch, Hieronimus, 605.
Bosis, Lauro de, Icarus, 527.
Bossuet, Jacques-B^nigne, as an
orator, 290, 308, 327, 3293o, 555,
055; Discourse on Universal History,
345, 659; pupil of Jesuits,
543; tutor to Dauphin, 336, 345,
639.
Boston, 513.
Boswell, 330.
Botoner, 119.
Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 442.
Boucher, 269 ; Pan et Syrinx, 697.
bough, the golden, 511, 698.
Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 478.
Bourbon dynasty, 233, 403.
Bourdaloue, Louis, 327, 332-3.
bourgeoisie, 180, 226, 340-1, 444-S>
461.
Bourlier, J., 122.
Bowra, C. M., quoted, 494, 606, 694,
69s, 697.
Boyle, the Hon. Charles, 283-4.
Bracciolini, Poggio, 15, 593, 599.
Bradamante, 153, 155.
Brant, Sebastian, The Ship of Fools,
310, 650; tr. Terence (.?), 12 1.
Brawne, Fanny, 378.
bread and circuses*, 306.
Brend, John, 117.
bricks in the edifice of scholarship,
499-
Bridges, Robert, 541.
Brief life is here our portion, 649.
Briseida, 52, 55, 575, 576.
Briseis, 52, 53, 281, 577.
Brisset, Roland, 122.
Brissot, 395, 397.
Britain, climate, 32; culture, 34-6,
37-8, 39-40, 46-7, 48, 1 13, 257,
259, 281, 367, 369, 428, 470, 504,
564, 568, 626, 662, 664; history, 4,
23, 29, 34, 35, 151, 153, 194, 217,
328, 329, 335, 397, 577, 659, 660,
662 ; literature, 397 ; and see England,
Scotland, Wales.
Britomart, 153, 155.
Brittany and the Bretons, 49, 145,
403, 568, 694.
Brodzinski, Casimir, 435.
Bronze Age, 338-9, 481, 534.
Browne, Sir Thomas, 325, 327, 329,
331, 348, 490.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 365, 453,
686.
Browning, Robert, career, 94, 365,
453; education and knowledge of
the classics, 446, 452-3, 543, 686;
style, 447, 482, 563, 686. works : Balaustion's Adventure
686, 687; Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower came, (i 96, 482), 6 1 9 ; Development,
686; Fifine at the Fair, 450; A Grammarian^s Funeral, 466; The
Last Adventure of Balaustion, 447,
686; Pan and Luna, 450; The Ring
and the Book, (448); Sordello, 686;
tr. Agamemnon, 686.
Bruccioli, A., 119.
Bruckner, 531.
Brueghel, Pieter, 605 ; Children's
Games, 310; Dutch Proverbs, 310;
Temptation of St. Antony, 461;
Triumph of Death, 364.
Brumoy, 666.
Bruno, C,, 123.
Bruno, Giordano, 688.
Brute, 15 1.
Bratus, 74, 336, 396, 397, 424, SS7; m Shakespeare, 210, 217.
Bryskett, 604.
Buchanan, George, 120, 133, 135, 187,
543, 616.
bucolic poems, 170-1 ; and see pastoral
poetrj^, Theocritus, Vergil.
INDEX 7^5
bucolic poets, 162-3, 375, 420; and see
Bion, Theocritus, VergiL
Bud6, Guillaume, 119, 190, 470.
Budd series, 470, 498.
Buenos Aires, 9, 129.
Buffon", 543.
Burckhardt, Jakob, 530.
Burgundians, 478.
Burgundy, duke of, 336-8, 647.
Burke, Edmund, 327, 328, 329, 397,
655*
burlesques of romances, 615; of
romantic love, 58; and see Margites,
parody,
Burney, Dr., 366.
Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of
Melancholy,, 190, 325, 416, 641.
Burton, William, tr. Achilles Tatius,
164.
Bury, J. B., 346-7, 349, 560.
Bury, John, 123.
Butcher, S. H., tr. Odyssey, 485, 488.
Butler, E. M., The Tyranny of Greece
over Germany, 363, (366, 371), 662,
663, 664, 665, 666.
Butler, Nicholas Murray, Across the
Busy Years, 475, 491, 494, 691, 694.
Butler, Samuel, the elder, Hudibras,
315, 319-
Butler, Samuel, the younger, The
Authoress of the Odyssey, 487-9;
The Humour of Homer, 487; tr.
Iliad, 488-9; tr. Odyssey, 488-9.
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, as
Euphorion, 387-9, 412, 697; career,
94, 361, 365, 3S8, 389, 403, 405,
412-15, 677; character, 94, 366, 388,
389, 403, 405, 412-15, 432, 528, 664,
677; education and knowledge of
the classics, 4i3i5, 418, 419, 494;
style, 319, 357, $66, 405, 424, 425 - works: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,
357, 36s, 4i3-i4> 677; The Corsair,
440; The Curse of Minerva, 6yy;
Don yuan, 359, 361, 661; English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 412,
677; The Isles of Greece, 362, 415;
letters, 677; Mazeppa, 424; Prome^
them, 415, 528, 677, 703; A Vision
of Judgment, 649.
Byzantium,culture, 6, 16-17, 19, 22,
348-9, 351, 353, 545, 557, S6o-i,
571; history, 5, 6, 17, 19, 346,
348-51, 545, 557, 560-1, 618;
missions, 6, 349, 353, 557, 568; in
poetry and romance, 164, 696; and
see Constantinople.
Caccini, 141, 601.
Cacus, 406, 674.
cadenzas, 290, 647.
Cadmus, 90, 580.
Caedmon: career, 28, 37, 38, 566;
influence, 29, 35; style, 28-9, 30,
31, 35, 565- works : Hymn, 26, 29 ; other works,
289.
Caesar, see Julius Caesar.
Caesar, the title, 6, 28, 346, 521.
Caesarisms, 268.
caesura, 300, 317.
Cain, 26, 566.
Galas, Jean, 328.
Calcagnini, Celio, Gigantes, 615.
Calchas, 55.
Calderdn, 129, 138, 364, 368, 543, 628.
Caledonians, untutored, see Scotland,
calendar, Christian, see Christian era;
Roman, 36, 99.
Caliban, 507.
Caligula, 703.
Callicles, (450-1, 460), 689.
Callieres, Fran9ois de, Poetic History
of the War lately declared between
the Ancients and the Moderns, 270,
281, 285, 645.
calligraphy, 184.
Callimabhus, 430, 623, 630.
Callisthenes, 56.
Calpumius, 17 1,
Calverley, C. S., 638.
Calvin, 653.
Calypso, nymph, 505 ; songs, 496.
Cambridge University, ii, 17, 54, 282,
283, 29s, 341, 495, 497, 641.
Camenae, 595.
Camilla, 155, 607.
Camillus, 396, 400, 672.
Camoens, Luis de: career, 144; style,
144, 158-9. W'orks, The Sons of Lusus (Os
Lusiadas), 144, 147, 148, 151, 152,
153, 602, 604; tr. Plautus* Amphitryon,
134.
Campbell, Roy, Adamastor, 604.
Campo Formio, treaty of, 428.
Camus, Albert, Caligula, 703; The
Myth of Sisyphus, 527-8, 703.
Can Grande della Scala, 70,
Canada, 403, 490, 705.
cancion, 634.
Candauies, 536.
Candido, Pietro, 596.
cannibals, 23, (57), 193,
canon law, (2), 9, 560.
Canova, 361,
Canterbury, 39, 40; archbishop of, 36,
31 1 ; pilgrims, 12, 90, 196.
canzone, (87), 236, 237, 245, 433, 583,
,629-
7 i 6 index
cap of liberty, 396.
Cape of Good Hope, 148, 155.
Capet, the %vidow ( == Marie-Antoinette),
392.
capital and capitalists, 255, 437, 511.
Capitol, Rome, 352, 391, 398, 399,
456; United States, 391, 399;
Virginia, 401.
Caporali, 313.
Caracalla, 575.
Carbach, N., 118.
Carducci, Giosufe: career, 446, 455;
education, 446; ideas, 441, 455-6,
688; style, 246, 443, 684. works, Barbarian OdeSy (246), 443,
684; By the Springs of CHiumnuSy
456, 687; Classicism and Romanti-
cisMy 441-2; In una chiesa goticOy
687; Intermezzo, 684; Per Giuseppe
Monti e Gaetano Tognetti, 687; To
Satan, 455.
Carlsbad, 366.
Carmagnole, 275, 390, 406, 643-
Cameades, 561.
Caro, Annibale, 116, 123, 124.
Carthage, 154, 196, 461, 462.
Carthaginian language, 5.
Casanova, Giacomo, 571.
Casaubon, Isaac, 192, 258, 309, 311,
^ 543. 639, 650.
Cassandra, 151, 703.
Cassiodorus, 54.
Cassius, 74, 210, 21 1, 212.
Casson, Stanley, 471.
Castalian spring, 152, 204.
Castelvetro, Lodovico, 123, 142-3.
Casti, Talking Animals, 681.
Castor, 520.
Catalan language, 6, 122, 571, 661.
catalogue-pictures, 310.
catalogues of warriors, 154.
Cateau-Cambrdsis, treaty of, 259.
cathedrals, baroque, 290-x, 332;
Gothic, 14, 31, 39, 64, 67, 440, 489,
504, 677; in Monet, 504; of scholarship,
499,
Catholic church, see Roman Catholic
church.
Catholic League, 31 1.
Catiline, 393, 398.
Cato, the elder, 592.
Cato, the younger, 78, 397, 400, 421,
424, 476, 586.
Catullus, career, 229; imitations and
influence, 68, 188, 221, 229, 380,
635* 65a, 667, 675, 686; manuscripts,
8; translations, 572, 680. works, 220, 229, 63 s, 642;
Alexandrian poems, 680; epigrams,
229, 555. 572; epithalamia, 237;
love-poems, 229, 629, 635; lyrics,
220, 229.
Catulus, see Catullus, 572.
Caupolican, 152, 602.
Cavalcante, Guido, 77.
Cave of the Winds, 505.
Caxton, William, 55, 116, 119, 596.
Cayuga, Lake, 400.
Ceffi, Filippo, 577.
Cellini, Benvenuto, 182, 193.
Celts, see Gaels,
censorship, 259.
centaurs, 78, 176, 586.
Ceolwulf, 37.
cerastes, homed, 148.
Cerberus, 78, 148, 586.
ceremony of baroque age, 296.
Ceres, 152.
Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote,
58, 145, 168, 343, 476; Galatea,
168.
Ceyx, 98.
chaconnes, 241,
Chadband, Mr., 340.
challenge and response, 13 1, 218, 231,
351. 388-9. S42-
Champmesl6, 297.
Chandler, Richard, Antiquities ofIonia,
370, 664.
Changi, Pierre de, 125.
chansons de geste, 573.
Chapelain, 347, 659.
Chapman, George, his translation of
Homer: and Keats, 115, (210), 368,
415-16, 686; and Shakespeare^ 55,
197; its style, 114, 115, 479.
character-sketch, 192, 291, 304, 310,
3r4-3C5> 324*
characters, stock, 140-1.
Charlemagne, 9, (28), 38, 39, 49, 345,
349. S73. 603.
Charles V of France, 107, 116, 117,
119.
Charles IX of France, 601.
Charles XII of Sweden, 542, 575.
Charles the Bald, 39, 46.
Charles Martel, 145, 603.
Charles of Orleans, 571.
Charlie, Prince (Charles Edward
Stuart), 425,
Charon, 78, 336, 586.
Charpentier, Fran9ois, On the Excels
lence of the French Language, 275.
Charterhouse, 295.
Charj'bdis, 534.
Chateaubriand, Franpois-Ren^,
vicomte de, career, 365, 403, 662;
character, 403 ; education and knowledge
of the classics, 466, 674;
ideas, 403-5, 662; style, 403-4, 462.
INDEX 717
Chateaubriand, works, 435; The
Genius of Christianity^ 403, 404;
Journeyfrom Paris to Jerusalem, 365,
687; The Martyrs, 355, 403-4, 462;
Memoirsfrom beyond the Tomb, 403
;
The Natchez, 403.
Chatterton, 431, 482.
Chaucer, Geoffrey, and Boccaccio,
94-7, loi, 590, 592-3; and Dante,
94, 95, 97, 99, 100, loa, 590; and
Keats, 416; and Petrarch, 95, 97,
loi; and Spenser, 171; career, 94,
145, 231, 577, 701; character, 94,
95, 102; education and knowledge
of the classics, 60, 94, 95-103, 218,
590, 591-3; ideas, 94, 95-8, 101-3,
127, 183; language, 109-10, iii. works, Anelida and Arcite, 590;
The Book of the Duchess, 98.
The Canterbury Tales, 12, 62,
94-5, 183; Prologue, 103; Clerk's
Tale, 95 ; Knight's Tale, 90, 94,
590; Man of Law's Tale, 96, 98;
Manciple's Tale, 592; Merchant's
Tale, 593; Monk's Tale, 97; Pardoner's
Tale, 593 ; The Parson's Tale,
593; The Tale of Melibeus, 101; The
Wife of Bath's Tale, 100, 593.
House of Fame, 94, 95, 96, 97,
98, 99, 102, 593; Legend of Good
Women, 60, 99, loi ; Parliament of
Fowls, 100, 590; Romaunt of the
Rose, 69, 94, 581; tr. Boethius, 99,
no, 571; Troilus and Criseyde, 55,
90, 94, 96, 97, 99, 590, 591, 592,
593; Truth, 100.
Chandon, Arnault, 1 17.
Chavez, Carlos, 166.
chemistry, 359, 493.
Ch6nedoll6, 674.
Chenier, Andr6, career, 401, 434, 679;
education and knowledge of the
classics, 355, 401-3, 428, 673, 688;
ideas, 426-^; influence, 401, 673,
688, 699; style, 402, 424. works. Bucolics, 176, 402, 673, 683;
elegies, 402 ; Essay on the Perfection
and Decadence of Literature, 426;
Hermes, 389, 402, (403); lambics,
401; La Jeujie Tarentine, 673, 699;
Liberty, 426 ; Lyde, 673 ; Mnazile et
Chloe, 403.
Chenier, Marie-Joseph, 401-2.
cherubim, 203, 238, 240.
Cherubini, 670,
Chesterfield, Lord, 272, 322.
Chiabrera, Gabnello, career, 235-6,
543; Heroic Poems, 236; Horatian
lyrics, 245, 246, 684; Pindaric
lyrics, 236, 238.
children, 186, 336, 411-12, 490, 492-5,
676, 705.
Chile, 145, 153.
Chimera, 23.
Chma, art, 502-3, 693; history, 268;
language, 561; poetry, 502-3;
thought, 502; to Peru, 652.
Chios, 30, 690.
Chirico, 532.
chivalry, 48, 196; c6de of, 57, 208;
tales of, 62, 307, 355, 544, 661;
and see romance.
Chloe, 165, 177.
choirs, 221, 234, 296.
Chopin, 58.
Chopinel, Jean, 62,
Chorus in Chaucer, 591 ; in Henry V,
533-
chorus m classical drama, 134, 141,
222, 225, 301, 378, 419, 421, 533,
570, 629, 648; in modem drama,
130, 134, 137, 376, 421, 452, 504,
533, 537-8, 629, 648; in opera, 130,
392, and see 141 ; invented by
Greeks, 130; meaning of the word,
219.
Chr6tien de Troyes, 62, 580.
Christ, see Jesus Christ.
Christ (the poem), 30, 567.
Christ Church, Oxford, 283-4.
Christian era, 38, 544.
Christianity: Christian thought in literature
:
early Church and Dark Ages, 26,
28-35, 44, 46, 291, 323-4. SII. S59.
560, 565, 570. 584, 640, 701;
Middle AgeSj Vii, 66, 70, 72, 74, 75,
78, 89-90, 92-3, 102, 127, 579;
Renaissance, 146-7, 149-51, 154-8,
1 81, 238, 368, 607; baroque age,
249-50, 278-9, 291, 294, 308, 347,
351, 352-4; revolutionary era, 403-
5, 41 1, 431, 682; nineteenth
century, 462-5; twentieth century,
518, 528-9, 549. ^ Christian traditions analysed, 468. conflict of barbarians and Christianity,
and conversion of barbarians,
26^, 29, 35, 39-40, 81, 236, 349,
35^-4, 389, 557, 560-1, 565, 568. conflict and interpenetration of
Christianity and Greco-Roman cul-,
ture, 2, 7-10, 1 1, 59, 73, 238, 262-4,
278-9, 283, 291-2, 294, 326, 380,
389, 404-5, 521, 542, 547, 548, 553,
558-9, 560, 570, 578, 640, 674, 701. conflict of Christianity and paganism
in modem literature, 89-90,
92-3, 169, 173, 247, 262-4, 278-9,
283, 288, 328, 352-4, 362-3, 377,
7i8 index
Christianity {contd.):
403-5, 431, 437-9, 453-65, 521,
522, 546-7, 640, 662, 678, 688. conflict of Christianity and Roman
empire, 43, 88, 351, 353, 404, 476-8. conflicts within Christian church:
British (Celtic) v. Roman, 36-9,
568; Greek Orthodox v, Roman
Catholic, 6, 545, 560; liberal Roman
Catholics V, conservative Roman
Catholics, 179-80, 1 81, 193, 326;
Protestant v, Roman Catholic, 179,
187, 193, 311-12.
Christina, Queen, 176.
Christine de Pisan, 69.
Christmas, 237-8, 523.
chronicle poems, 24-5, 29.
chronicles, medieval, 67, 577.
chronology, 569, 691.
Chryseis, S3, 577-
Church, British (Celtic), 36-7, 38-9,
568; Irish, 568; Lady Holy, 43;
Orthodox, or eastern, or Greek, 6,
8, 545 560; Protestant, 179, 263-4;
Roman Catholic, or western, 2,
6-10, 32, 36, 59, 74, 94, 176, 179
80, 181, 187, 193, 263-4, 278, 292,
308, 311-12, 326, 344, 352, 356,
362, 389, 403, 455^, 51 L 542, 545 *
558, 559, 560, 568, 614, 639, 687;
and see Christianity.
churches (buildings), 428, 484; baroque
or Jesuit, 290, 368, 374, 397;
Gothic, 57 ; nineteenth-century, 93,
^ 438-9, 440.
Churchill, Winston, 335.
Churchyard, Thomas, 125.
Churriguerra, 290.
Cicero, background and career, 303,
397, 399, 400, 401, 476, 477, 548-9,
555, 672, 677, 691, 694; character,
83, 476, 542, 654, 691: language
and style, 6, i8, 44, 83, 89, 113-13,
184, 333-4, 3*6-7. 33a, 334-5 . 348,
654, 682; imitations and influence,
i8, 20, 37, 44, 89, 100, 1 12-13,
179, 184, 188, 333-4, 336-7. 338,
333, 334-5. 348, 390, 393. 397-9,
400, 542, 559, 561-2, 570, 588, 595,
650, 655, 656, 670, 672, 673,'69i. works, 277, 490, 670; letters, 83-4,
188, 323, 587; philosophical works,
9, 79, 80, 84, 105, 188, 323, 548,
655; rhetorical works, 84; speeches,
6, 20, 79, 83, 84, 105, 1 12-13, 323,
393, 397-S, ^55 , 672.
Agmnst Catiline^ 398, 418;
Against Verves^ 328; Brutus, 654;
De fimbus, 587; De muentime, 657;
De natura deorum, 668; De qfficiis,
1 1 9, 587, 655; De oratore, 603;
Dream of Scipio, 44, 63, 100, 120,
593; For ArchiaSy 123, 587; For
King Deiotarusy 123; For Ligarius,
123 ; For MarcelluSy 123 ; For Sextus
RosciuSy 398; For Sulla, 398;
Hortensius, 9; On the Commonwealth,
63, 431, 681; On Duties,
1 1 9, 587, 655; On Friendship
(Laelius), 68, 79, 119, 587; On
Moral Aims, 587; On Old Age
{Cato), 68, 1 1 9, 587; Orator, 654;
Paradoxes, 120; Tusculan Discussions,
44, 119-20, 603, 673.
Ctd, El Cantar del mio, 559.
Cimbrians, 700.
Cincinnati, 399.
Cincinnatus, 396, 399, 400.
Cinderella, 165, 276, 524-5.
Cineas, 615.
cinema, see moving pictures.
Cinthio (Giovanni Battista Giraldi),
599-600, 604; Lectures on Comedy
and Tragedy, 142; Orbecche, 133,
136-7.
Circe, 50, 139, 149, 204, 505, 510, 512,
534, 604.
cities and city-life, 162, 165, 166, 296,
351, 368, 439, 447, 469, 471, 543.
city-states, Greek, 393.
civilization, 435, 43940, 47^9, S2i-
2, 530, 671, 680; European (western),
vii, I, 2, 3, 4, II, 23, 27, 37,
38, 40, 47, 50, S 3 , 210, 255, 259,
262, 267, 268-9, 350, 391, 429, 461,
542-3, 544-5 , 54^, 554; Greco-
Roman, vii, I, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 25, 35,
37, 49, 1 14, 255, 34S-9, 35i, 353 ,
387, 439-40, 461-2, 546; meaning
of the concept, 2, 267-8, 275-6,
^ 436, 439-40, 5479, 552.
Clarence, 301.
Clarke, Cowden, 415.
classical, meaning of the word, 227-8,
358, 364, 390; classicaP opposed to
romantic, 337-8, 355-9, 375, 39,
393, 441-3, SSI, 638, 683, 703;
classical* age, 356; see also Greco-
Roman,
Classical Association, 518.
Classical Quarterly, T^,^47i.
classicism and classicists, 275, 292,
320, 358, 369, 390, 412, 44I--2, 448,
504, 52s, 647-8, 700, 702.
classics, classical literature, see Greco-
Roman literature,
class-war, 460.
Claudian, 188, 592-3; De VI cons.
Honorii, 592; Laus Serenae, 592;
Rape of Proserpine, 100, 592.
Claudius, emperor, 304, 670.
clausulae, Ciceronian, 570.
clay tablets, 468.
Clement VII, 181.
Clement of Alexandria, 640.
Cleopatra, 15 1, 152, 157, 205-6, 212-
13, 214, 329, 442, 578, 621.
Cleopatra (romance), 658.
clergymen as shepherds, 173.
cliches, 275, 300, 357, 409, 564.
Clifford, Martha, 505.
climax, 67, 1 12, 184, 323, 333.
Clodius, 398.
Clopmel, Jean, 62.
Clorinda, 155, 607.
Clough, Arthur Hugh, elegy on, 174;
The Bothie, 382.
Clovis, 27, 279.
clowns, 127.
Cluny, 305.
Clytemnestra, 300, 523, 698.
Cocteau, Jean, 532, 533, S39~4o;
Antigone^ 531, 533; The Infernal
Machine, 531-2, 536, 538, 539~4o;
Orpheus, 531, 537, 539.
Code Napoleon, (391).
Coimbra, city, 172; university, 134.
coinage, Roman, 474.
Colbert, 320.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, career and
character, 359, 389, 406; knowledge
of the classics, 409, 412, 675'-6. works, The Ancient Mariner, 364,
(53s); Christabel, 357, 364; Dejection:
an Ode, 676; Kuhla Khan, 357,
(406, 541); Table Talk, on Gibbon,
349-50.
Colet, John, 216, 626.
Colin, Jean, 119.
colleges, 127, 135, 257, 369, 393, 400,
470, 518, 670.
College de Coqueret, 12 1, 231; de
Guienne, 186; de Navarre, 401;
Louis-le-Grand, 393.
Collins, 252; To Evening, 249, 252; To
Simplicity, 249, 252.
colloquialisms, 406, 629.
Cologne, X2.
Colosseirai, 423.
Columbia College, 491, 664, 694; university,
ix, 45*5*
Columbus, 83, 235, 264, 431.
Comedie Fran^aise, 297, 648,
comedy, Athenian (Greek), 128, 131,
192, 225, 230, 304, 421; baroque,
290-1 ,318; character and definition,
70-1, 84, English, 20, 137-8, 259;
French, 20, 134, 137, 232, 599; invented
by Greeks, vii, 20, 128, 546;
Italian, 20, 133~4, 136, i40i, 599;
INDEX 719
mask of, 130; modern (in general),
vii, 20, X33, 136; Roman, 84, 114,
120-2, 128, 131, 136, 230; and see
Aristophanes, Moliere, Plautus,
Terence.
comic relief, 273-4, 299, 301. strips, 130.
commedia dell* arte, 14 1.
Committee of Public Safety, 391-2.
communism, 255, 559.
Comneni, 349.
comparative literature, 479.
compensation, psychological, 155 ; and
see wish-fulfilment.
Compostella, 12.
conceits, 61 1, 646.
Concepcidn, 152.
Cond6, 320.
conflict, spiritual, 178-81, 182, 185,
529.
Congreve, Discourse on the Pindarique
Ode, 633.
Conquistadores, 144.
Conrad, Joseph, 563.
Constant, Benjamin, 685.
Constanta, 59.
Constantine, emperor, 30, 347, 350,
353, 404.
Constantinople (ancient city), see By-
2antiumj (modern city), 328, 401,
561.
Constituent Assembly, 398.
consul, 396.
contemporaries, 170, 268.
contractions, in Greek, 17.
Convention, National, 391-2, 396,
398.
conversion, 44, 7 , 79, 90, 92, 176,
187, 278-9, 344, 352, 353, 403, 404,
455, 464-5, 533, 568, 584, 692,
Copernicus, 3, 15, 105, 282.
Copland, Aaron, A Lincoln Portrait,
241.
copyists, 496.
Corday, Charlotte, 395, 401,
Cordelia, 667.
Corin, 175.
Corinna, 96, 98.
Corinth, 10.
Come\jle, Pierre, career and character,
178, 294; education and knowledge
of the classics, 293-4, 302, 543. works, 66, 128, 232, 290, 298,
302, 375; Le Cid, 600; Midee, 294;
Polyeucte, 279; Rodo^ne, 375;
Trois discours sur le poeme drama'"
tique, 295.
Corneille, Thomas, Timocrate, 298.
Cornelius Gallus, 68, 163, 167, 168,
172, 174. 583. 613-
720 INDEX
Cornelius Nepos, 51, 190.
corpses on stage, 133.
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 656.
Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum (
CIG), 469.
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum ( =
CIL), 469, 474,
Correggio, Niccolo da, Cefalo ( Cephcdus)
f 136, 598; tr. The Brothers
MenaechmuSy 133.
Corsican dialect, 6.
cosmos, Greek, 456.
Costanza, 59.
costume, 21, 290, 296, 301, 374, 396.
coterization, 256.
Council of Love (Council of Remiremont),
60, 579.
Council of Trent, 259.
counterpoint, 161, 241, 290, 296,
335-
Counter-Reformation, 255, 259, 368.
couplets, see metre,
courts, imperial, royal, and ducal;
courtiers; court-life, 16, 49, 127,
133-4, 135, 139, 145, 162, 165, 168,
172, 176, 181, 182, 187, 296, 298,
30i 308, 310, 312, 320, 347, 379,
386, 409, 480, 543-
cowboys, 162, 166, 175, 566.
Cowley, Abraham, DavideiSy 633
;
Odesy 239-40, 250, 633, 634.
Cowper, William, 416; The Task, 382;
tr. Homer, 479.
Crabbe, 316.
Cracow University, ii.
crafts, discovered, 522; forgotten, 266,
640.
Crane, Hart, 254,
Crashaw, 239, 633; Prayery an Odcy
633-
creation of the world, 26, 28, 59, 150-
433, 577-S, 604-
Creede, 624.
Creon, 526, 536, 537.
Cressida, 52, 195.
Cretan language, 544.
Crete, 53, 509.
Criseyde, 99,
critics and criticism, aesthetic, 21,
173, 261, 287, 369-71, 371-4, 550;
dramatic, 123, 125, 127, 128, 132,
133, 2:42-3, 301-2, 374-5, 598,
601; ecclesiastical, 173; literary,
12, 125, 3:42-3, 261-88, 290, 335,
374-5, 445, 479-^9, 529, 550,
582, 601, 630, 685; scholarly,
479-89, 691.
Critolaus, 561,
Croce, Benedetto, on baroque, 646,
Croniamental, 638.
CronicqueSy Grandes et Inestimahles,
182, 615.
Cross, 26, 31-2, 158, 456.
crowd scenes, 301.
Cruden, Concordance to the Holy
Scriptures, 484.
cruelty, 198, 207, 304.
crusades, 352; Albigensian, 48, 93-4;
First, 146, 573 ; Fourth, 6, 349.
cryptograms, 97, 529.
Ctesiphon, 10.
culture, classical, see Greco-Roman
culture.
culture-heroes, 521.
culture-languages, 13, 106, no, 644.
Cumae, 99, Si5 699.
Cupid, 63, 141, 228, 229; and Psyche,
661.
cupids, 21, 212, 213, 360.
Cura9ao, 13.
curt manner in prose, 32S--6, 654.
Cybele, 523.
Cybile, Gilles, 12 1.
cycles of ballads, 24.
Cyclopes, 23.
Cyclops (Polyphemus), 153, 5 ^5 , 534,
674, 684, 698.
Cynewulf, character and career, 29-
31. 37. 38, 56s, 567- works, 31, 35; Christy 30, 567; The
Fates of the Apostles, 30; Helena, 30,
3 1 ; Juliana, 30, 567.
Cynic philosophers and cynicism, 41,
270, 304, 308, 395 -
Cyprian, 559.
Cyprus, 455, 458.
Cyrene, 234.
Cyrillic alphabet, 6, 545, 557*
Cyrus, 633.
Cytheris, 600.
Czar, the title, 6 ; and see Tsar.
Czech language, 55, 577.
da Cruz e Silva, Antonio Dinys, Odes,
633-
da Feitre, Vittorino, 183, 615.
da Ponte, Lorenzo, (368), 664.
da Vinci, Leonardo, 15, 178-9, 372.
Dacier, Andr6, tr. of and commentary
on Aristotle's Poetics
Dacier, Mme Anne, 277, 287, 374; On
the Causes of the Corruption of Taste,
287; tr. Iliad, 287.
dactyls, 381-2, 667-8.
Daedalus, 99, 505, SO9-'i0, 527, 581,
696-7.
daemons, 228, 382.
Dali, Salvador, 256.
Damon, 177.
INDEX 721
dancing, 219, 220-2, 224-6, 234, 241,
250, 253-4, 301, 305, 417, 544.
Danes, 23-4, 29, 35, 39-40, 45, 47,
93, 472, 474; and see Northmen.
Daniel, Amaut, 585.
Daniel, ^ook of, 29.
Daniel, Samuel, 41 1.
Daniel-Rops, Notre Inquietude, 704.
Danish language, 55, 577.
Danse Macabre, 364, 614, 662.
Dante Alighieri, and Beatrice, 43, 58,
72, 75, 78, 87, 263, 586; and the
church, 10, 59, 72, 74, 85; and
Vergil, 71, 72-8, 79, 84, 102, 144,
153, 263, 387, 548-9, 584-5, 586;
career, 81-2; character, 82, 431;
dolce stil novo, 75-7, 585; ideas, 10,
38, 70-80; influence on later writers,
82-s, 87, 88, 89, 92, 94, 95, 99, 100,
102, 309, 337, 405, 429, 431, 446,
481, 511, 559, 590, 606; Imowledge
of the classics, 14, 59, 70, 72-8,
79-80, 83-4, 85, 96, 97-9, 126-7,
135, 156, 263, 407, 421, 446, 544,
571, 583-4, 585-7, 634. works: The Comedy, ii, 48, 59,
62, 66, 70-80, 82, 84, 87, 90, 126,
144, 155, 161, 263, 274, 300, 309,
319, 337, 429, 481, 511, 544, 555,
559, 583, 58s; Inferno, 72, 74, 76,
77, 87, 150, 153, 291, 421, 511-12,
571; Purgatorio, 72, 75, 87, 584-5,
589; Paradiso, 38, 63, 71, 72, 569,
571, 583, 590.
De monarchia, 74, 571 ; De vuU
gafi eloquenUa, 71, 275, 583-4, 644;
Eclogue, 584; Letters, 70, 71, 583-4;
lyrics, 71, 76, 77, 220, 585; New
Lifey 58, 585*
Danton, 393, 398.
Danubrio, Eva de, 60.
Daphne. 141, 521, 581.
Daphnis, 173.
Daphnis and Chloe, see Longus, Rousseau,
and Ravel.
Daremberg and Saglio, Dictionnaire
des anttquites classtques, 469.
Dares (Trojan warrior), 52.
*Dares the Phrygian, The History of
the Destruction of Troy; character of
the book and parallels to it, 51-3,
56, 163, 271, 283, 340,372,458, 533,
574-S, 576; influence on later
writers, 50-1, 32, 53, 54, 55, 94, 97. ,
1 14, S33. S6s, 574-6. 578, 596; ,
style, 51-3, 56s, 574. 575-
Dark Ages, art, to, 346; culture (in- ,
eluding Hterature), vii, i, 3-11, 13,
21, 22, 23-47. SO, 54. 81. 93. I05.
109,220,255,258-9,267,303,517, ,
SO76
541, 552, 558-60, 564-5, 569, 570-
I, 634, 681 ; languages, 5-8, 12-13,
14, 22, 105, 109, 111-12, 558-9;
moral and social life, 4, ii, 60, 109,
558; politics, 5-7, 9-10, II, 49, 93,
109, 1 5 1, 558; religion, 8, 292, 560,
564-5, 681.
dauphin, 336, 345, 470, 639.
David, Jacques-Louis, career and influence,
391-2, 399, 401, 442, 670. works: The Death of Socrates, 391
;
Give Behsarius a Penny, 391; Les
Horaces, 670; Marat assassinated,
391 ; Napoleon distributing the Eagles,
396; Napoleon pointing the Way to
Italy, 391; The Sabine Women, 391.
David, King, 24, 57, 62, 219, 263,
426, 524, 545, 581.
Day, A., 124, 164.
de Abril, Pedro Simon, 121-2.
de Ercilla y Zuniga, Alonso, see Ercilla.
de Herrera, Fernando, 244-5, 634.
de Jauregui y Aguilar, Juan, 116, 596,
611.
de la Fresnaye, Vauquelin, 650.
de la Peruse, Jean, Medie, 597.
de la Vega, Garcilaso, Eclogues, 17 1,
634; Horatian lyrics, 244-5; La
Flor die Gnido, 634.
de Ledn, Luis, 245; Prophecy of the
Tagus, 245; iQue descansada vida!,
634; tr. Horaces lyrics, 245; tr.
Vergils Bucolics and Georgies, 124,
245
de Mena, Juan, iii, 114.
de Mesa, Cristobal, 115, 124.
de Paiencia, Alfonso, 1 17.
De Quincey, Thomas, 432, 438, 645.
de Soldo Strozzi, Francisco, 117.
de Timoneda, Juan, 134.
de Vega, Lope, 129, 138; 600, 635; La
Dragontea, 145 ; ISlew Art of Making
Comedies, 138,
de Viana, Carlos, 119.
de Villegas, Geronimo, 125.
de Villena, Enrique, 115.
de Zapata, Luis, 125.
dead languages, 70, 544, 556-7*
Dead^Sea, 662.
death, 364-5, 373, 377, 432, 507, 51 1,
527, 528, 535, 544, 614, 698.
Death as a deity, 364-5, 452, 539, 614.*'
death-wish, 372, 377.
debates in drama, 208; in epic, 154.
debunking, 532.
Debussy, Claude, 502; Prelude to the
Afternoon of a Faun, 176, 508;
Three Songs of Bilitis, 688, 697.
Decii, 151.
7^^ INDEX
decoration, see interior decoration.
Dedalus, Stephen, 505-7, 509-10,
512-13, 696, 697.
degrees, academic, 499.
dei Ramboldini, Vittorino (da Feltre),
183, 615.
deification, 520-1, 701.
deism, 328.
deities, see gods,
Dekker, 54.
del Enzina, Juan, 124.
Delille, 406, 429.
Delphi, 232.
Delphmi series, 470, 638-9, 705.
Demeter, 523.
Demetrius, 618, 624, 626.
Demiourgos^ 678.
democracy, 2, 255, 3945, 39^, 423,
493, 546, 671.
Democritus, 264.
Demogorgon, 421, 678.
demons, see devils.
Demosthenes, 552, 556; influence,
324, 654-5. works: Olynthiacs^ 122, 654; Philippics^
122, 328, 654.
Denmark, 563 ; and see Danes.
Deor, 28
des Essemtes, 445, (453).
des P6riers, Bonaventure, 118.
Descartes, classical education and
works in Latin, 3, 106, 276, 292,
543; Discourse on Method^ 106; m
Battle of the Books, 641, 644, 694.
Desdemona, 57, 125.
Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Jean,
278-9. works: Clovis
^
279, 645; Comparaison
de la langue . . , franpaise
m^ec la grecque , . 644; Delices de
resprit, 645; 279,
645.
Desmasures, 115.
Desmoulins, Camille, 390, 393, 398,
670, 672.
detective stories, 256.
Deucalion, 34,
Devil, the, 26, 46, 146, 149, 150, 263,
'
^
333 334, 3^3, 3%, 599-
devils, 148-50, 152, 154, 159, i6q, 182,
197, 249, $11, $12, 521, 586, 605,
615, 662, 701,
'dialects, 13 ; American and English,
503; Chinese, 561; European in
general, 5, 7, 12-13, 22, 48, 106-7,*
1 11-12, 126, 166, 518, 556-7, 55^
9; German, 308, 559; Greek and ^
Latin, 284, 478, 481-2, 562; Italian,
I35 4^4, 559; Romance, 6, 7, 558-
% 644.
dialogues, philosophical, 41, 64, 67,
86, 167, 279, 291, 304, 43^-3, 525.
Diana, 21, 139, 140, 169, 204, 356,
573, 607.
diatribes^ 67, 304.
Dickens, Charles, 158. ^ works: Bleak House, 308; David
Copperfield, 344; Hard Times, 495;
Martin Chuzzlewit, 444; Our Mutual
Friend, 347, 444.
dicta Catonis, 592.
dictionaries, 469.
Dictys of Crete, Diary of the Trojan
War: character of the book and
parallels to it, 52-3, 56, 163, 283,
574-5, 576; influence on later
WTiters, 53, 55, 1 14, 576; style, 52-3.
didactic poetry, 42, 59, 65-6, 124, 256,
306, 402, 603-4.
Didacus Stella, 641.
Diderot, 340, 391, 543, 555, 671.
Dido, 68, 99, 1 16, 158, 196, 205-6,
291, 580, 5S2, 586, 592, 608, 621.
Didot series, 470.
Dieregotgaf, Scher, 577.
Dilettanti, Society of, 370.
Dio Cassius, 649.
Dio of Prusa, called Chrysostom, 680;
TpcotKos, 575.
Diocletian, 404.
Diodorus Siculus, 189.
Diogenes, 561.
Diogenes Laertius, 189.
Diomede, 55, 79.
Dion of Syracuse, 410.
Dionysus, 459, 521, 689; and see
Bacchus.
Diotima, 378.
diplomacy, 324, 326, 560.
Directoire costumes, 396.
dirges, 420.
discipks of Jesus, 522, 604.
discipline of the classics, 364, 407,
413-14, 443, 495, 507, 518*
Discordia, 148.
discoveries, 14-15, 193, 218.
displaced persons, 39, 82.
dissertations, 42, 470-1, 499.
dithyramb, 250, 254, 459, 627.
division, in oratory, 332-3.
Divus, Andreas, 698. ^
Dobbie, E. V. K., ix, 569.
Dobson, Austin, 342.
Dog Latin, 12, 700.
Dolce, Lodovico, tr. Euripides, 120-1,
597; Homer, 115; Horaces Letters,
125.
Dolet, Etienne, 118, 120, 124.
Dolman, John, 120.
Domenichi, R., 117.
INDEX 723
dominae^ 578.
Domitian, 314, 578.
domnei, 578.
Don Juan, 361, 524.
Don Quixote, 145, 168, 476; and see
Cervantes.
Doneau, 639.
donkey, 272-3, 642.
Donne, John, career, 179. works: 498; Biathanatos, 179;
Ignatius his Conclave^ 179; Pseudo-
Martyr
f
179; The Reliquet (306)*,
satires, 31 1, 312, 315; sermons, 326,
333-4. 348.
Doomsday, the event, 32, 153, 240,
3334; poems on it, 22, 34, 249.
Dorat, Jean, career and name, 231,
543, 629-30; Latin odes, 631, 635-
6; tr. Prometheus Bounds 597.
Doric dialect, 162, 17 1.
Doris, 504.
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment,
344; The Idiot, (373)-
Douglas, Gawain, tr. Aeneid, 115, 596.
Douglas, Norman, 365.
Dovizi, Bernardo (Bibbiena), 134.
Downhalus, C., 237.
dragons, 23, 25, 145, 421, 580, 678.
Drake, Sir Francis, 145.
Drama, 127-43, 194-218, 293-302,
424-7, 525~7 531-40; especially
127-31, 198, 207-8, 215, 297, 538-
40; American, 526-7; and see
moving pictures; baroque, 129-30,
13 L 290-2, 293-302, 333, 374-5,
6bo; English, 12 1-2, 126, 127-34,
136, 137-9, 140, 168, 174-5, 194-
218, 259-60, 290, 291, 293-302,
342, 355, 362, 418, 419, 421, 422,
450-2, 544; French, 120-2, 127-31,
133-
4, 137, 166, 174-5, 275, 293-
302, 374-5, 401-2, 525-7, 531-
40, 600, 648, 704; German, 114,
121-2, 129-30, 134, 135, 141, 368,
374-5, 376, 37S, 380, 386-90, 526,
551 * Greco-Roman, or classical: characters,
132, 140-1; devices, 132-3,
137, 538-9; dramaturgy, 129-30;
form, vii, 79-1, 84, 97, 127-9, 130-1,
134-
5, 230, 291, 293-4, 298,
309, 374-5, 376, 392, 425-6, 533;
plots, vii, 13 1, 141, 426, 533, 534-7;
stimulus, 104, 137, 131-3, 136-7,
141, 193, 392,542, 598; translations,
120-2, 128, 133-4, 419, 677, 679,
686; verse and language, 71, 112,
120, 131, 300, 538. Greek (specifically), influence, 280,
294-3. 304, 364, 379, 380, 386,
451-3, 504, 541, 666; music, 141;
mythical plots, 525-7, 531-40;
origins, 469; speeches, 141; spirit,
198, 373, 459-60; study of, 494;
survival of, 8, 131 ; translations,
120-1, 133-4, 446.
Drama, Italian, 120-2, 127-37, ^39-
43, 174-S, 236, 290, 293, 295-7, 302,
4247, 527. Latin (specifically), influence, 131-
3, 140-1, 207-9, 214-15, 294, 426,
618, 666; modem Latin, 127, 134-
5, 137-8, 187, 232, 599, 624; spirit,
105; study of, 494; survival, 8, 84,
13 1 ; translations, 121-2, 133-4- miscellaneous types, biblical (religious),
127, 129, 135, 138, 601;
eclogues, 174; historical, 128; interludes,
130, 138; Japanese, 130;
lyrical, 298; masques, 139, 175;
medieval, 127, 128-30, 137, 140,
143, 599, 601; miracle-plays, 130;
musical, 130, 236; mystery plays,
129; Parnassian, 451-2; popular,
127, 138, 140; Portuguese, 134. modem, 20, 127-33, 135, 142, 143,
256, 309. 392, 525-7. S32-3. 538-
40. S4I. 598- Renaissance, 20, 120-2, 126-43,
194-218, 293, 299-301, 364, 368,
426, 54X, 544, 598-601. Spanish, 120-2, 128, 129-30, 133-
4, 138, 27s, 293. and see actors, comedy, farce,
moving pictures, opera, tragedy.
Drant, T., 123, 125.
Dream of the Rood, The, 31-2, 35, 63,
565.
dreams, 31, 63-4, 69, 192, 301, 325,
420, 459> 503, 504, 507. 53CO, 517.
- 523-5. 555, 604, 605.
Dresden, city, 368, 369. chma, 176.
Drink to me only with thine eyes (by
Ben Jonson, translated from Philostratus),
vii.
Drisler, Henry, 491.
Dromio, 625.
drugs, 438.
Dmjds, 698.
drunkenness, 182, 242, 318, 358.
dryads, 377 ; and see nymphs.
Dryden, John, career, 293, 297, 314*
character, 178; critical writings, 98,
295, 314; education and knowledge
of the classics, 282, 295, 302, 314,
316, 651; influence and reputation,
241, 400. works: Absalom and Achitophel,
314-15, 317, 318; Alexander's
724 INDEX
Feast, 241 ; Aureng-Zebe, 298 ; Dis^
course concerning Satire, 650; Essay
on Dramatic Poesy, 295 ; King
Arthur, 297; MacFlecknoe, 314-15;
The Medal, 314; satires, 290, 314,
315-21; Song for St. Cecilia^s Day,
240 ; To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished
Young Lady, Mrs. Anne
Killigrew, 243-4, 634; tragedies,
292, 295 ; translations, 295, 314, 650.
du Bartas, Sieur (Guillaume de Salluste),
La Sepmaine, 603-4.
Du Bellay, Joachim, career, 313; influence,
17 1. works : Defence and Ennoblement of
the French Language, 134, 231-2,
275 630-1, 641; odes, 631; tr.
Aeneid, 115.
Dublin, dear old dirty, 504-6, 510,
512.
Dubos, abb6 Jean-Baptiste, 478.
Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster), 133,
Duchi, Claudio, (231), 629.
Duncan, Isadora, 254.
Dupuis, C. F., 522.
Durand, Guillaume, 125.
Dusseldori, 368.
Dutch, see Holland.
dwarfs on the shoulders of giants^
267, 640-1.
dyarchy, 476.
E. K., 603.
E pluribus unum, 399, 672.
eagle, in Aeschylus, 300; in Arnold,
485; in Chaucer and Dante, 590;
Napoleons, 356, 396; poet as an
eagle, 226, 238, 460, 515; Prometheus,
535; Roman, 356, 516.
Earle, Microcosmographie, 192, 315.
East, the, 358, 522, 545 ; Far East, 144,
438, 502-3; Middle or Near East,
3, 4, S. 6, 9, i7 56, 60, 73, 89, 164,
^ 345, 383, 403, 526, 688.
Easter, 36.
Echo, 68, 582.
eclogue, 61 1.
eclogues, the genus, 280, 507; Dantes,
584; dramatic, 174; of Garcilaso de
la Vega, 171; of Petrarch, 86; of
Ronsard, 17 1; of Sannazaro, 167;
Song of Solomon, 245 ; and see pastoral
poetry, Vergil,
economics and economists, 339, 350,
^ 351, 467, 473, 478, 493, 595.
Eden, 150, 153.
Edessa, lo.
Edgar, 196.
education, and civilization, 545, 547-
9, 552; classical, 8, 25-6, 28, 183-^,
186-7, 263-4, 281, 293-6, 390-1,
392-3, 395, 407, 472, 490-500,
542-3, 546, 673; in Dark Ages, 35-
6, 38-9; m Middle Ages, 11-14,
570; in Rome and Sparta, 395, 399;
modem discussions of, 26 f, 266;
self-education, 44-5, 113, 181, 183-
4, 187-8, 201, 295, 341, 344, 369,
415-16, 418-19, 424-5, 428, 430,
446, 457, 498; spread of modern
education, 256, 257, 493, 542-3;
translations important in, 40-1,
45-6, j:o56.
Egypt, 5, 151, 158, 164, 213, 265, 268,
371, 448, 458, 461, 468, 469, 478,
517, 533, 548, 55.6, 567, 574, 648.
El cantor del mio Cid, 559.
Electra complex, 523.
elegiac poems, baroque, 376; Cheniers,
699; in Dark Ages, 22, 556,
564; eighteenth-century, 429; German,
380-2, 667; Greco-Roman,
247, 281, 309, 3x3, 337, 380-1, 439,
546, 578, 583, 667; Italian, 428-9;
pastoral, 173-4, 216, 237.
Elgin Marbles, 360, 413, 416, 677.
El Greco, 290.
filie, Maitre, 62.
Eliot, T. S., and classical form, 504;
and Greek myth, 501, 507, 513-16;
and mysticism, 518; and quotation,
157, 516-17, 519; and symbolism,
501-4; education and knowledge of
classics, 518; on Murray, 489; on
Shakespeare, 205; specialized art,
256, 516-17. works: Ara Vos Prec, 501; Ash
Wednesday, 515, 695; The Classics
and the Man of Letters, 621; A Cooking
Egg, 516; Coriolan I {Triumphal
March), 516; Prufrock, 501, 515;
Seneca in Elizabethan Translation,
598, 622; Sweeney Agonistes, 501,
504; Sweeney among the Nightingales,
513-14; Sweeney erect, 513,
698; The Waste Land, 61, 157, 256,
' 501, S14-16. 519. (693), 695. 699-
Elizabeth, Queen, 58, 105, 122, 132,
178, 399, 571-
Elyot, Sir Thomas, tr. Isocrates, 123,
597; Lucian, 124; Plutarch, 119.
Elysium, 338, 357, 376.
' Empedocles, 450-1.
emperor, the title, 396.
Empire, the First, 405.
emulation of classical literature, 14,
102, 104, 135, 230, 322, 369, 380,
423, 498.
encomia, 233, 309-10.
, Encyclopaedia, The, 402.
INDEX 72s
encyclopaedias, 8, 15, 48, 67, 98, loi,
220, 402, 469, 498.
England and the English, art, 31, 370;
character, 29, 31, 94, 194-5,
education, 216, 257, 490-500; history,'
23, 26-7, 29, 34-5, 35--41,
45-7, 93-4, 194, 233, 258, 259-60,
296, 568; language, vii, 12-14, 18-
19, 22, 40, 46-7, 54, 94, 99, 106,
109-10, 111-12, 158-61, 171, 200,
236, 275, 330, 334-5, 345, 484, 57i,
659; literature and classical influence,
20, 1 12, 1 13-14, 232, 246,
362, 368, 408, 531, 533; and see
Contents,
enjambement, 673.
Enlightenment, 345, 374.
Ennius, 159, 635.
ennuif 681.
Ephesus, 625.
epic : general, its form and nature, vii,
20, 24-5, 27-8, 29-30, 71, 97, 161,
165, 311-12, 336, 339, 342-4, 358,
403-4, 546, 591, 700; Babylonian,
698; comic, 182, 336, 342-4, 430,
658-9, 674; Finnish, 469; jGreco-
Roman, or classical, 25, 71, 73,
114-16, 144-61, 184, 279, 281, 299,
335, 337, 341, 344, 403-4, 552, 563,
577, and see Homer, Lucan, Statius,
Valerius Flaccus, Vergil; modem,
256, 335-6. 342-4. 382-3, 403-4,
407. 485-6,. 506, 529-31, 658-9;
modem Latin, 85-6; Renaissance,
144-61, and see Ariosto, Camoens,
Ercilla, Milton, Spenser, Tasso,
Trissino; Swiss, 529-31.
Epictetus, 326, 410, 685.
Epicureans and Epicurean philosophy,
189, 193, 224, 247, 304, 312, 421-2,
433. 455. 465-
Epicurus, 264, 593,
Epidamnus, 215, 625.
Epidaums, 625.
epigrams, 629; Greco-Roman, 229,
306, 310, 316, 382, 445, 457, 458,
555, 572, 629, 673; modem, 229,
290, 310, 3x1, 382, 629, 678;
(= aphorisms), 238, 352.
Epimetheus,-528-9.
Epistemon,*i83, 615.
epode, 222, 234, 235-7, 250, 636; and
see Horace.
Eppendorf, H. von, 119.
epyllia, 485.
Er, Vision of, 584.
Erasistratus, 279.
Erasmus, 82, 119, 120, 180, 368, 543,
615, 6$6; Adages, 184, 192, 615;
Echo, 615; Praise of Folly, 185, 310*
Ercilla y Zuniga, Alonso de, 144-5,
148, 153, 231; The Poem of Arau~
cania, 144-5, I47, h8, 151-2, 153-
5, 602-3.
Erechtheus, 451.
Erigena, see John Scotus.
erotic poetry, 1 93 ; and see love.
escape with the skin of the teeth, 484.
escapism, 89, 165, 365-7, 440, 447,
453-
Esiona, 50.
essays, 20, 191-2, 324, 370-1, 470,
546; Alcums, 38; Montaignes,
185-93; Senecas, 126, 191, 324;
Shelleys, 420.
Essex, the earl of, 198.
Este family, 133, 153; Ippolito d
133-4; Leonora d, 172.
Estienne, Charles, 122,
Et in Arcadia ego, 614,
Eteocles, (536), 580.
Ethiopia, 155, 164.
Eton College, ii, 341, 418, (421),
623.
Etmria, 371, 456.
Etruscan language, 544, 556.
Etzel, 27.
Euclid, Elements, 106.
euhemerism, 520-1, 701.
Euhemeros, 520.
Eumenides (the Furies), 704.
Euphorion, 387-9, 4x2, 688.
Euphuism, 656.
Euripides, influence, X31, 132, 208,
294. 360, 419. 452-3, 648, 673, 679;
style, 208; translations, 120-1, 419,
453-3, 679, 687. works: general, 52, 131, 132, 301,
498, 533; Alcestis, 136, 4B2-Z, 679,
687; Cyclops, 419; Hecuba, 120;
Helen, 533, 574; Iphigenia at Aults,
120, 121; Iphigenia in Tauris, 380;
Letters, 284; Medea, X20, 491,
527; Orestes, 538; The Phoenician
Women, 120-1.
Europe, art, 57, 182, 261, 262, 371,
390; civilization and culture, vii,
1-21, 23, 24, 38, 41, 48, 70, 88,
93-4, 111-12, XI 3-14, 126, 135,
194-5, 2x8, 255"7> 25% 361-2, 269,
275-6, 291-2, 293, 296, 345-6, 370,
390, 454, 469, 47^-2, 495, 534, 54^
544-
5, 546, 548-9, 557-9, 573, SSS,
595, 691; languages, see languages;
literature, 22, 57, 59, 62, 92, 93-4,
126, 128, 170, 173, 219-21, 227,
261, 322, 355, 363, 390, 528, 541-4,
545-
6, SSL 57L 633; politics, 17,
74, 255, 296, 328, 349, 427, 435,
443, 544, 545, 546.
726 INDEX
Eurydice, 139, 174, 388, 452, 535, 537,
539, (580), 586.
Eve, 149, 636.
evolution, social, 474.
exameiron, 97, 591.
examination system, 494.
examples illustrating moral lessons,
67-8, 91, 190-2.
Exempla diuersorum auctorurrif 634.
Exodus, 29.
Exodus (the poem), 29, 564.
exsufflicate^ 200.
Evb, Albrecht von, 121.
Ezzelino da Romano, 134, 599,
Fabius, 400.
fables, 20, 284, 285-6, 304, 306, 330,
336, 544, 561, 650.
fabliaux, 57, 89, 136, 137, 183.
Fabricius, 671.
fairies, 197, 204, 206, 621.
fairy-tales, 29, 182.
FalstafF, Sir John, 194, 196.
farce, 303, 649.
farce, 127, 130-1, 134, i37~8, 140,
303, 309, 316, 421, 544, 59S.
Farinelli, 647-
Farmer, Richard, Learning of Shakespeare,
201.
fasces, 396.
fascism, 255.
fatalism, 207-8.
Fate, xoo, 529, 540, 542, 565.
Fates, the, 90, 508, 509,
Father of his Country, 399, 672.
fathers as teachers, 543, 686, 705.
fathers of the church, 7, 9, 31, 37, 80,
109, 308, 324. 560, 565, 568-9.
Fauchet, Claude, 118.
fauns, 21, 139, 148, 176, 443, 507-8,
521, 541 ; and see Mallarmd, satyrs.
Faust, 386-90.
favole boschereccie, 175,
Federalist, The, 399.
F^nelon, Francois de Salignac de La
Mothe-, career, 336-7, 430; ideas,
322, 336, 338-9; influence on other
writers, 337-8, 339-40, 34L 343,
404, 657, 658-9, 674.
- works, 327, 336-9, 657; Dialogues of
the Dead, 336; fables, 336; Telemackus,
33540, 34 L 343, 404,
464, 657-8.
Ferdinand III, 559.
Ferdinand of Spain, 259.
Ferrara, 12 1, I33~4, ^3^, 140, 143,
Ferrex and Porrex, 137.
feudalism, 57, 193, 256, 356, 437, 460,
47^f 478, 57B, 689.
Ficino, 118, 543, 676.
fiction, 227, 342, 343, 355, 548;
Greek, see romance; modern,
169, 170, 404, 462-5, 488; and see
novel.
Fieldmg, Henry, 290, 341-2, 058. works : All the Revenge taken by an
Injured Lover, 342; The History of
the Adventures of Joseph Andrews,
342, 343, 658-9; Letter to Walpole,
658; Tom Jones, 58, 3356, 34^-3,
512, 658, 674.
fifth-columnists, 50, 53.
Filleul, Nicolas, The Shades, 174.
films, see moving pictures.
Fmland, language, 13; literature, 24,
469.
Finnsburh, 25.
fire, divine, 421; discovery, 522;
liquid, 351.
firedrake, 23, 25.
Fisher King, 256.
Fiton, 148.
Flamenca, 61-2, 580-1.
Flaubert, Gustave, 461-2. works: Bouvard et Pecuchet, 308,
(461); Un Cceur simple, 689, 698;
Letters, 461, 683; Madame Bovary,
58, (461); Salammbd, 344, 459, 461;
The Temptation of St, Antony,
461.
Fleming, Abraham, 124.
Flemish language, 19.
Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess,
174*
flies, as guilt-symbol, 538.
Flood, 26, 34, 160, SI o, SSI, 566.
Flordal, 396.
Florence and the Florentines, 16, 18,
81, 82, 95, 123, 135, 141, 167, 236,
428, 599, 080-1.
Florentine dialect, 424, 559, 658,
flower, the mystic, 524.
flyting*, 174-
Folk, the, 435, 544.
folk-dance, 219, 234, 544.
folk-lore, 8-9, 73, 102, 266, 516; and
see myth.
folk-music, 162-3, 1756,2i9, 611-12.
folk-poetry, 48, 87, 276,- 358, 364, 368,
^ 379, 3^4, 464, 473, 669.
folk-song, 13, 20, 22, 24, 76, 162, 195,
219-20, 229-30, 232, 235, 276, 364,
375-6, 433, 544.
folk-speech, 195.
folk-tales, 13, 20, 29, 56, 73, 89, 232,
376; and see myth.
Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de,
279-80, 322.
Fontenelle, works: Dialogues of the
INDEX 727
Deady 279; Digression on the Ancients
and Moderns
y
280; Discourse
on the Nature of the Eclogue^ 280;
pastorals, 280; Remarks on the
Greek Theatre^ 280.
fools, i40-i, 304-5, 33to, 320.
For theCf O dear^ dear country
^
649.
Ford, Henry, 694.
forgeries, literary, 51-2, 56, 163, 283-
4. 328, 43>-i:. 458, 583, 594-Sform,
classical sense of, 67, 417-18,
4423, 504, 507.
forms, literary, 20, 70-1, 112, 126,
127-8, 143, 291, 293, 303, 306, 307,
355, 361. 546-
Forrest, T., 123.
fortifications, 58, 64.
Fortune, 64, 431; her Wheel, 628,
637.
Foscolo, Ugo, 427-9. works; Inniy 680; The Last Letters
of lacopo Ortisy 428 ; Le GraztCy 680
;
lyrics, 428, 680; Ode to Bonaparte
the Liberator, 427; On Tombs {Dei
Sepolcri), 428-9, 431; plays, 427;
tr. Catullus and Homer, 680.
Fouion, Abel, 125.
Foundmg Fathers, 672.
Four Horsemen, 364.
Fox, Charles James, 397.
Fragonard, r6o.
! ranee, \ni.tolc, 454. works: The Governor of Judea,
454~5> 687; Poemes dores, 687;
Thais, 455, 459.
France, art, 269, 390-2, 396, 401,
502-4, 518; culture, 38-9, 60, 81-2,
182, 185, 194-5, ^10, 257, 261-2,
268, 274-6, 282, 296, 340-1, 366,
369, 400-1, 409, 435, 439, 449, 470,
518, 532, 639, 702; history, vii, 48,
93, 144-5, 167, 170, 187, 3it, 362,
363, 390-9, 409, 427, 449, 459,
470-2, 477-8, 532, 534, 558^,
577-8, 602, 603, 624, 639, 662, 692,
and see French Revolution; Republic;
language, vii, 5, 6-7, 14, 18-19,
105-9, no, III, 144, 186, 199, 232,
233, 235, 275, 330-1, 334, 341,
344-5, 405-6, 424-5, 446, 558-^f
644, 657, 661 ; literature, in general,
20, 22, 48, 48-69, 58, 87, 92, 93,
94-5, 102, 113-14, X17, 133, 171,
210, 219-20, 229, 231-2, 268, 275,
297, 368, 409, 429, 449, 553, 559,
577, 657, 695; and see Contents and
names of authors.
Francesca, 79.
Francion, 144.
Franciscan order, 1 81, 571.
Francus, 144, 602.
Franks, 23, 279, 346, 389, 478, 558.
Franks Casket, 10, 346, 561.
Fraternity of the Passion, 129.
Frazer, Sir J. G., The Golden Bough,
523, 678, 698.
Fredegar, 602.
Frederick the Great, 5, 357.
Frederick II (Hohenstaufen), 88, 589.
free verse, 239-40, 251, 254, 376, 633,
637, 700.
freedom, the sense of, 193, 359-60,
361-3, 393, 396, 423, 426-7, 436,
661.
French Revolution, vii, 255, 275, 339,
356, 363, 382, 390-9, 401-2, 405-6,
409-10, 425, 478, (5SS), 657, 670,
672, 679.
Freud, Sigmund, 523-4, 701-2.
Freyssleben, C., 121.
Fritslar, Herbert von, Liet von Troye,
577.
Froissart, 93.
Fronto, 680.
Fructidor, 396.
fugues, r6r, 241, 290.
Fulgens and Lucres, 137.
Fulgentms, 581.
Fureti^re, Antoine, 313, 645.
Furies, 137, 301, 538, 539*
furniture, 396.
Fustel de Coulanges, Numa-Denys,
477-8, 566, 691-2. works: The Ancient City, 477, 691
;
History of the Political Institutions
of Ancient France, 478.
G. T. P., 125.
Gabriel, archangel, 149-50.
Gaels or Celts, 36, 38, 566, 698; gods,
573; history, 448; imagery, 696;
language, 115; legends, see myths.
Gaius, Institutes^ 690.
Gaius Caesar, 401.
Galahad, 510.
Galen, Art of Medicine, 180, 184.
Galilaeans: Jesus, 456-7, 461; St.
Peter, 456.
Galileo, 180, 428.
Galius, Cornelius, 68, 163, 167, 168,
172, I74 583, 613.
Gama, Vasco da, 144, 148, 152.
Garasse, 657,
gardens, 21, 296, 366, 428.
Gargantua, 182-4; his education,
183-4, 1 86.
gargoyles, 197, 440. _
Gascoigne, Gcoxgt, Jocasta, 121; The
Steel Glass, 31 1; Supposes, 136.
Gaudi, 537.
728 INDEX
Gauguin, 438.
Gaul, 144, 170, 471-2, 478, 557, 568,
578, 630,
Gautier, Theophile, 443-4, 461. works : Albertus^ 685 ; UArt, 443-4
;
Le Roi CandauUy 536; Mile de
Maupiriy 685.
Gazette de Ftancey 640.
Geatas, 22-3, 562.
Gellius, Aulus, 188.
genealogies, antique, 54, 576.
Genesis, the book, 29, 456, 565, 604;
poems on it, 22, 26, 29, 604.
gentlemen, 460.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 54, 577,
578.
^
Geoffroi de Vinsauf, 582.
geology, 496.
geometry, 570.
George, Stefan, 256, 389, 541.
Georgia, 618,
georgics (= poetry of the farm);
Polish, 435; Roman, see Vergil.
Germany and the Germans, art, 664;
culture and education, 19, 186, 257,
259, 366-7, 367-9, 389-90, 459,
470, 496, 498-9, 522, 542, 552, 554,
595, 662-3, 664, 681, 690-1, 701;
histo^, 259, 362, 391, 463, 474,
476-8, 532, 534, 538, 639, 692;
language, 5, 19, 22, 55, 106, iii,
114, 381, 55s, 559, 571, 577, 646-7,
663; literature, in general, 20, 22,
29, 48, 114, 219, 229, 232, 309, 340,
498, 530, 541, 551, 553, 554, 577,
650, 669-70; philosophy, 435, 551,
682, 685.
Germinal, 396.
Gerson, Jean, 67, 69.
gerund-grinding, 414.
Gettysburg Address, 112-13, 334,
561.
ghost-stories, 192, 544.
ghosts, 132, 174, 198, 208, 209, 301,
.358, 5X0, 512, 574-5-
giants, 23, 182-4, 245, 267, 61 5.
Gibbon, Edward, career, 327, 344;
character, 322, 3^4-5, 687; education
and knowledge of the classics,
327, 344-5, 348, 430, 467, 4944 innuence
on other writers, 1 12-13,
435, 448, 659; style, 113, 291, 345,
659-60; quoted, 17, 18, 322, 344,
347, 350-3, 494, 659-60
works: T/ie Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire
^
17, 18, 146, 290,
291, 341-54, 361, 363, 371, 404,
435, 448, 46s, 478, 659, 660-1;
Mermtrs of tny Life and WfitingSy
322, 344, 494.
Gide, Andr^, and Louys, 458 ; andWilde,
446, 525-6; career and character,
446, 525-6, 704; influence on other
writers, 53 1,535, 704 ; view ofGreco-
Roman culture, 446, 52s, 532, 536-8. works: Considerations on^ Greek
Mythology
y
525, 704; Corydony 525,
704; If the Seed die noty 526; The
Immorahsty 526; King Candaulesy
525, 526, 536 ; Mopsusy 526 ; Oedipus
y
525, 533, 535, 536, 537-8, 704;
Oscar Wtlde, 525-6; PhilocteteSy 525,
537; Prometheus drops his Chains
525-6, 535 ; Reponse d une enqu^te
de ^La Renaissance* sur le classicismcy
702; Theseusy 525, 536-7, 697.
Gilbert, Stuart, JamesJoyce*s Ulysses
511-12, 696, 698.
Gildas, 37, 568, (690).
Gilgamesh, epic of, 698.
Ginebreda, i^tonio, 571.
Giono, Jean, 533-4; The Birth of the
Odysseyy 533-4.
Giordani, 430.
Giorgino, 125.
Giorgione, 269.
Giovanni di Virgilio, 584.
Giovio, Paolo, 639.
Giraldi, Giovanni Battista, see Cintbio.
Giraudoux, Jean, 531, 533, 539, 704. works: Amphitryon 38, 531, 535;
ElectrUy 531, 537, 539, 704; Elpinory
704; The Trojan War will not take
placy 531, 532, 534, (537).
Girondins, 397.
glamour
y
4.
glass, malleable, 640.
Glaucus, 676,
Gloucester, 538.
glossaries, 558.
glosses, 578.
Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 392, 670. works: Alcestis, 392, 670; Orpheus
and Eurydice-y 175, 392.
gnomic poems, 22; and see Hesiod,
Theognis.
Gnosticism, 529.
goatherds, 162.
goats and the goat-song, 583.
God, and history, 345 ; and Louis XIV,
320; and the Roman emperor, 73;
in the Bible, 510, 521; in Islam,
352; in literature, 26, 28-9, 33, 42,
46, 73-4, 78, 90-1, 95, 100, 149-51,
157, 238, 332-4, 345, 352, 378,
410-11, 423, 442, 455, 464, 505,
529, 540, 581 ; m modem paganism,
362, 378, 423, 455-7, 464, 528, 688:
in music, 296; in philosophy and
theology, 9, 12, 36, 44, 326, 410-11,
INDEX 729
Godeau, 280.
Godfrey de Bouillon, 149, 153, 158,
605.
gods, the pagan, in art, 512; in Christian
thought, 9, 520-2, 701 ; in
classical books, 51-3, 149-50, 154,
245, 247, 271, 371-2, 421, 434, 533,
538, 542, 574, 595, 681, 682; in
classical mythology, 510, 520-2,
527, 533, 540-1, 595; in Homer, 51,
52, 150, 153, 154, 270-1, 278, 280,
485, 487, 642; in modem literature,
91, M7-8, 150-2, 154, 155-6, 169,
234, 236, 238, 245, 376-7, 412, 416-
17, 421, 437, 477, 4S5, 521, 529-30,
535, 538, 540, 542, 573, 605, 667,
680, 699; in modern paganism, 91,
169, 363, 376-7. 431, 434, 437. 676,
680.
Godwin, William, (409), 420.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, career,
359. 361, 365, 366-7, 377, 380, 435;
character and opinions, 356, 359,
362-3, 366-7, 372, 379, 387-90,
391, 424, 555, 664; editions, 498;
influence, 688; knowledge and use
of the classics, 250-1, 355, 360, 372,
375--6, 379-83, 386-90, 407, 457,
466, 518, 614, 664, 666, 702, 703;
portraits, 664. works: Achilleis, 386; Anacreon^
s
Grave, 380; Das Gdttliche, 251, 637;
Dichtung und Wahrheit, 667; Die
Bekehrte, (177); Faust, 357, 359, 363,
38,6, 390, 530, Faust I, 386-7, 669,
Faust II, 386-90, 412, 669, 696,
697; Ganymed, 251, 637; Grensen
der Menschheit, 251, 637; Hermann
and Dorothea, 246, 382-3, 386, 668,
669; Homer wieder Homer, 669;
Iphigenia in Tauris, (360), 380;
Mahomets Gesang, 251, 637; The
Natural Daughter, 386; Pindaric
lyrics generally, 250-1, 386; Prometheus,
251, 637, 703; Roman Elegies,
355, 361, 380-^, 402, 551, 667, 684;
The Sorrows of Werther, 428;
Venezianische Epigramme, (366),
663; Wanderers Nachtlied, 669
;
Wanderers Sturmlied, 251, 637 ; Wilhelm
Meis^, 365 ; Winckelmann und
sein Jahrhundert, 667; Xenia, 382.
Gogarty, O. St. J., 696.
Golden Age, 68, 72, 170, 422.
golden bough, 511, 698.
Golden Fleece, 50, 521 ; Order, 576.
Golding, Arthur, tr. Ovid's Metamorphoses,
1 1 6, 203, 205-7, 619-21.
Goldoni, 543-
Goldsmitjb, Oliver, 330, 638.
Goliath, 524.
Gombauld, 280.
Gombo dialect, 13, 561.
Gdngora, iii, 116, 290, 541, 61 1.
Gongula, 517.
Gorhoduc, 137. ^
Gorges, Sir A., 116.
Gorgons, 148, 604, 678.
Gospels, the, 22, 26, 47, 60, 149, 385,
511, 565, 687. ^ ,
Gosse, Sir Edmund, on Cowley, 633
;
Father and Son, 705.
Gotaland, 22.
Gothic architecture and art, (14), 31,
39, 57, 64, 67, 93, 387, 390,413, 439,
(504)-
Goths, 146, 149, 153, 199, 346, 351,
389, 435, 579-
Gower, 60, iii, 701.
Gracchus, Gams, 396, 401-2.
Graces, 152, 212, 361.
Gracian, Baltasar, 646; Diego, 117.
Gradgrind, Mr., 495.
Grail, 64, 307, 6x5.
grammar, Greek and Latin, 414, 481,
491, 494-5, 558.
grammar, 4.
grammar-book, Latin, 46, 216, 490.
grammarians, 569.
Grand Cyrus, 658.
Grandgousier, 184.
Grandichan, 125.
Gratian, 560.
Graves, C., Horace^s Fifth Book of
Odes, 470.
Graves, R., I, Claudius, 340; King
Jesus, 51.
Gray, Thomas, 83, 244. works : The Bard, 244 ; Elegy written
in a Country Churchyard, 429,
678; Hymn to Adversity, 637; Progress
of Poesy, (226), 241.
grecisms, 158-^1, 60^1:x.
Greco-Roman civilization, as a
historical fact, vii, i, 3-4, 5-6, 8,
lo-ii, 25, 50, 53-4, 78, 80, 81,
151-2, 194-200, 255, 268-9, 344-5,
348-9, 461-2, 466-7, 472-9, 544-5,
547-9,
Grec^-Roman culture, as a spiritual
force, vii-viii, 1-21, 25-7, 35, 36,
70, 78, 80, 81, 88, 98, 127, 162, 170,^
178. 183-4, i8s, 193. 194-aoo, 2S5.
257, 262, 268-9, 278, 286, 291-2,
341. 344-5. 348-9. 353-4. 356, 360,
363, 364. 367, 369, 389, 390-1, 400,
408, 413-15, 435-6, 438-9, 445,
446, 447-53, 461-2, 465, 493, 500,
504, 518-19, S41-9, 550, 553, 560,
,^569-70, 588, 675, 682.
730 INDEX
Greco-Roman literature, generally,
vii, viii, 2-3, 4, 5, 8, II-I4, I5"2i,
23. 31, 44, 5, 6i. 68, 72, 77, 81, 83,
8s, 94, 102, 103, 127, 156, 158, 161,
172, 180, 181, 186, 187, 203, 218,
220, 227-8, 23s, 257, 26a, 263, 264,
269, 270-1, 278, 285, 287, 288, 291,
292-3, 298, 300, 306, 321, 327, 329,
341, 355, 356-8, 362, 364, 369, 374,
379. 38s, 390, 392-4, 400-1, 402,
405, 407, 413, 414, 428, 434, 435,
442-3, 445, 453, 461, 469, 470, 490,
492^, 503, S16-18, S33, 542, 553,
569, 604, 638, 640, 648, 680-1,
682, 683, 688, 694, 700, 70s; and
see separate authors and forms, e.g.
epic, Homer.
Greece and the Greeks art, 2, 254, 348, 360, 362, 363, 366,
369-74, 379, 387-8, 396-7, 401,
417, 442, 459-60, 524, 552, 561,
^'75-
character, civilization, culture,
ideals, morality, 45, 177, 264, 278,
294, 335, 336, 363-5, 369-70, 374,
377, 386, 387-8, 389, 390, 392, 423,
436, 437, 438, 439-40, 442, 445-6,
456, 457-9, 460-1, 462, 525-6, 530,
546, 547, 552, 600, 604, 662-3, 688;
and see Greco-Roman civilization;
Greco-Roman culture; paideia.
the country as a geographical fact,
163, 339, 360, 365-6, 370, 378,
387-8, 389, 412-13, 415, 427, 439,
633-
history and politics, 2, 5-6, 23,
50-1, 54, 154, 194, 197-8, 221,265,
328, 339, 345, 356, 361-2, 371-2,
378, 384-5, 389, 393-5, 396-9, 402,
405, 412, 415, 420, 423, 431, 435,
448, 468-9, 472-4, 478-9, 481, 482,
483-4, 492, 520-^, 534, 542, 545,
546, 547-9, 564, S74-5, 661-2.
- language, character and distribution,
5, 13, 70, 104, 106, 284, 322,
349, 381, 454, 481-4. 517, 556-7;
influence on European languages,
6, 106, 108-11, 158-61, 219,
275-6, 322, 561 ; influence on Latin,
5, 41, 104-5, 246, 349, 561, 568-9,
S9Sf knowledge of Greek in
modem Europe and America, 6,
13-14. 16-19. 36-7, 38-9, 41, SI,
54, 84, 91, 92, 105, 1 1 3-14, 120,
126, 184, 186, 188, 199, 200-1, 210,
220, 244-5, 246-7, 257-8, 275-7,
281, 284, 294-^, 327, 341, 348, 355,
360, 368-9, 375-6, 377-8, 379-
80, 393. 401, 402, 409, 41S, 419,
424-5, 428, 430, 446, 457, 466-72,
Greece and the Greeks (contd.)
478, 490-2, 493, 495, 5 1 8, 542-5,
556-8, 568-9, 570, 588, 594-5,
599, 616, 619, 631, 658, 664, 670,
673, 674, 680, 685-6, 694, 705;
modern Greek, 6, 16-17, 4-28, 558,
571, 661. literature, in general, vii, 17-18,
19-21, 22, 23, 31, 84, 96, 104, 105,
106, 1 13-14, 114-26, 127-34, 136-9,
141-3, 159, 184, 188, 198, 200-3,
220, 263-4, 287, 301-2, 323-4,
327-30, 337, 348, 355, 358, 364,
368-9, 376, 379, 381, 388, 417-18,
431, 436, 440, 459, 469, 481-2, 492,
533, 542, 543, 552, 630, 655, 686,
688, 694; and see Greco-Roman
literature and separate authors and
forms, e.g, epic, Homer. music, philosophy, religion, see
music, philosophy, religion.
Greek revivar in architecture, 370,
391, 401, 664.
Greene, Robert, autobiographical
works, 193; Menaphon, 612, 619.
Greff, Joachim, 12 1.
Gregory I (the Great), 7, 36, 38, 558,
568. works, Homiliae in euangelia, 30,
567; Regula pastoralls, 40, 569, 573.
Gregory of Tours, History of the
Franks, 558.
Grendel, 23, 25, 26, 564-5.
Grenewey, R., 118.
Grenville, Sir Richard, 179.
Gretchen, 387, 669.
Grieg, Edward, 166.
Grillparzer, Tristia ex Ponto, 435,
Gnmald, Nicolas, 119-20.
Griseida, 55.
Grosseteste, Robert, 558.
Grote, History of Greece, 474.
Grumio, 625.
Guarini, Battista, The Faithful Shepherd
{Pastor Ftdo), 140, 174, 613.
Guarino, 117.
Guelphs, 587.
Guercino, 614.
Guez de Balzac, see Balzac,
Guicciardini, 691.
Guido de Columms, Historia destructionis
Troiae, 55, (94), 97, 577, 701.
Guigniaut, J. D., The Religions of
Antiquity, 522.
Guillaume de Lorris, 62, 68, 583.
Guillaume de Tours, Michel, 124,
597-
guilt, sense of, 538.
Gyges, 524-5, 536, 604.
gymnasiunii 639.
INDEX 731
H. D., 541-
Habert, 116, 125.
Hadrian the missionary, 36-7, 568.
Hagesandros, 665.
hagiography, 569.
Haid^e^ 361.
Halberstadt, Albrecht von, 116.
Hall, Arthur, 114.
Hall, Joseph, Characters of Virtues and
Vices
y
192; Virgidemiaruniy 311.
Hall of Mirrors, 296.
Halle University, 384.
Hamburg, 328, 665.
Hamilcar, 279, 461, 645.
Hamilton, Alexander, 399.
Hamilton, Sir William, 370.
Hamlet, 4, 179, 195, 198, 208, 21 1,
217, 299, 556, 614, 627; King
Hamlet, 132, 195.
Hammerstcin. Oscar, Oklahoma!
y
176.
Han of Iceland, 674.
Handel, 290; Acts and Galatea^ 175;
Alexander's Feastj 241; Xerxes
(Ombra mai fu), 291.
handwriting, Greek, 17; Irish, or
'insular, 38, loi ; Petrarchs, 589.
Hannibal, 279, 400, 456, 548, 555, 566,
684.
Hardy, Thomas, The Dynastsy zji,
Harington, John, 119.
Harpagon, see Moli^re.
harpies, 21, 78, 148, 586.
Harrow School, 414, 418.
Harvard University, 237, 518.
Haryey, Gabriel, 246, 635.
Harvey, William, 279, 282.
Hasenclever, Walter, 702; AntigonCy
526.
Hastings, Warren, 328.
Haydn, 250, 587.
Haydon, Benjamin, 416,
Heaven, 33, 72, 75, 87, 150, 334,
411-12, 420, 529, 585, 688.
Hebe, 530.
Hebrew language, 14, 104-5, 106, 478,
544, 556.
Hebrew scriptures, 104-5, 106, 335,
556, 594-5 ; attd see Bible.
Hebrews, see Jews.
Hecate, 604. *
Hector, 20, 74, ^44, 150, 151,
156, 157, 197, 320, 400, 429, 513,
534, 546, 575, 580, 606.
Hecuba, 526.
Heidelberg University, ii, 375,
Heine, 58, 365, 432, 662.
Helen of Troy, 50, 99, 151, 271, 386-
90, 440-1, 449-50, 451, 513, SMy
533, 546, 574, 575, s8o, 657, 696,
704-
Helena, Queen, 30-1.
Helenus, 53.
Helicon, Mount, 156, 608.
Heliodorus, Aethtopicdy 155, 164, 165,
189, 294, 607, 648; translated, 124,
164, 648.
Helios, 377; and see Apollo,
hell, vii, 49, 72, 74, 75, 78, 86, 100,
148, 155, 156, 159, 185, 263, 291,
319, 334, 338, 421, 511, 527-S, 585,
586, 604, 607, 662.
Hellenistic age, 268, 458.
Hellespont, 389, 415.
H61oise, 60, 455.
helots, 394.
Helv6tius, 424, 426, 680.
Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to
ArmSy 682.
hemorrois, 148.
hendecasyllables, 686.
Henri, Monsieur, 535.
Henri II, 133, 233.
Henri IV, of Navarre, 187, 31 1, 624.
Hensel, Paul, 367, 389, 663-4.
Heorot, 26.
Hephaestus, 701 ; and see Vulcan.
Hera, 487, 529.
Heraclitus, 621.
Heraclius, 347.
heraldry, 384.
Herculaneum, 468.
Hercules (Heracles) (Alcides), 24, 152,
176, 209, 406, 448, 451, 452, 453,
510, 520, 522, 524-5, 529, 580, 624,
701.
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 367,
375, 379, 380, 666, 669; Homer ein
Giinstling der Zeity 669.
Heredia, Jos^-Maria de, 442-3, 518,
683. works, The Trophies
y
442-3, 448,
683; Antoine et Cleopdtrey 442, 6S4;
Apris CanneSy 684.
heretics, 36, 69, 423, 456.
Hermaphroditus, 620,
Hermes, 149, 605 ; and see Mercury.
Hermogenes, 680.
Piero and Leander, 580,
Herod, King, 599,
Her(jdias, 508.
Herodotus, 38, 52, 116-17, 189, 191,
369, 536, 567, 603, 673-
heroes, 154, 427, 431, 485, 520-1, 528,
541 ; Anglo-Saxon, 565 ; Greek, 49,
53, X51-2. 400, 429, 5io 542;
Homeric, 272, 278, 280, 314, 575,
642, 646; Roman, 49, 151-2, 400,
$11, 542; Trojan, 49, 151-2, 3H
576; Wagnerian, 542.
li^eroic age, 385, 484, 513, 667.
732 INDEX
heroic poems, :245 27-8, 562, 563;
Anglo-Saxon, 22-^, 35, 46, 562-5;
Greek, 22, 29; medieval, 182; old
French, 577; Roman, 563, 690; and
see epic, romance,
heroics and heroism, 533, 537, 698.
Heroides, 102; and see Ovid.
Herr, M., 119.
Herrick, and Horace, 248, 636; Ode
to Sir Clipsehy CreWy 248.
Hesiod, 29, 30, 38, 383; Theogony,
150, 603, 681; translations, 375,
416; Works and Days, 30.
Hesione, 50,
hexameters, see metre.
Heyne, 668.
Heywood, Thomas, 118.
Hiawatha, 521,
Hiero, 529.
Highlanders, 166.
Hilda, abbess of Whitby, 28, 566.
Hippocrates, 180, 183, 184, 264, 265;
Aphorismsy 180.
hippogriff, (145), 148, 604.
Hippolyta, 155, 607.
Hippol3rtus, 209.
Histoire ancienne jusqu^d Cesar, 577-8.
Historia Augusta, 189.
historians, baroque, 344-54, 473;
Greco-Roman, m general, 210, 335,
499; of medieval times, 349, 577-8;
Roman, 200, 348, 393, 409-10, 473,
577 672, 679; nineteenth-century,
448, 472-9-
historical perspective, lO-ii, 54, 55,
151, 346. 371, 383-4, 448, 488, S 5 S,
577-8-
Histone of Error, The, 634-5.
history, art of writing, 37-8, 290, 355,
359, 388, 428-9, 495-6, 499, 52-^,
569, 690-1, 69s; moral value of,
67-8, 78, 336, 345,428-9,431, 439,
542, 548; permanent relevance of,
544-6, 694; of art, 371, 479; of
astronomy, 430; of the barbarians,
558; of Britain, 37-8, 153 ; of the
E^t Indies, 153; of education, 543;
of Greece and Rome, to, 20, 41, 49,
53, 78, 116-18, 151, 153, 154, 194-5,
199, 218, 271, 293, 339, 344-54,
359, 369, 393-9. 409, 426, 4*8-9,
430, 431, 433, 462-5, 468-9. 47*-8,
492,495-6,313,572,574,577-8,588,
671 , 686, 690-1 ; of the Middle Ages,
469, 577-8; of religion, 479; of the
world, 40-1, loi, 153, *65, 345, 448,
46S-9, 478-9, 5*4, 555, 577-8, 692.
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 432.
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, Eleetra,
526; Der Rosenkavalier, 581*
Hogarth, 316.
Hogg, T. J., 418, 421.
Holderlin, J. C. F., character and
career, 366, 3779 Z^9f 432, 434,
45 3 J 55 1 J
664, 666; knowledge of
the classics, 250-1, 355, 3^8, 664;
parallel with Keats, 378-9, 666. works, An die Parzen, 379, 666;
The Death of Empedocles, 378, 389;
elegiac poems, 378; Hymns, 251,
378; Hyperion, 362, 378, 379, 435;
lyrics, generally, 250-1, 378; translations,
250, 637.
Holland and the Dutch, education,
257; language, 13, 400; law, 2;
literature, 368, 577, 657.
Holland, Philemon, 118-19.
Holofemes, (199), 216.
Holy Roman empire, see Rome,
empire, Holy Roman.
J-Iolv Spun, 274, 404, 608, 643, 689,
698.
Holyday, Barten, 125.
Homer and the Homeric Poems (the
two epics are considered together
wherever possible). content, the Homeric age^historical
background, 4, 23-4, 38,
49, *73-4, 287, 370, 374, 383-4,
447, 469, 482, 485. 564; battles,
23-4, 64, 150, 153, 197, 277, 485,
487; characters, 138, 197, 272-4,
600, 619, and see individual names;
examples, 67-8; gods, 51-3, 150,
153, 271, 278, 280, 287, 485, .487,
574, 642; humour, 272-4, 487;
stories, 6i, 577. influence, admiration and study
of Homer, 59, 65, 83, 84, 96, 251,
330, 360, 364, 367, 375, 378, 379,
400, 407, 416, 418, 419, 423, 425,
457, 491-2, 542, 549, 552, 5^5, 666,
668-9, 674-5, 680, 684, 685; commentaries
on Flomer, 295, 405;
criticism of Homer, 51, 156, 270-4,
277-8, 280, 285, 287, 302, 357, 374,
383, 384-6, 481, 484, 574-5, 642-3,
645, 668; imitations, 25, 50-3, 77,
138-^, 146, 150-1, 153-5, 167,
t97, 235, 28s, 336,^337-9, 340'2,
382-3, 402, 404, 406,-485-6, 487,
504-7, 511-13, 534, 541, 602, 606,
610, 61 1, 674, 693, 698; knowledge
of Homer in the west, 53,
188-9, 340, 369, 418, 468-9, 490-2,
590, 603, 642, 650, 664, 694; manuscripts,
84, 384-5, 556, 668;
parodies, 270-1, 342, 600, 652;
quotations, 572, 673; translations,
16, S3, 84, 91, 104, 114-15, 197,
INDEX 733
286-7, 368, 37S, 416, 419, 430, 446-
7. 457. 479-90, 576, 596, 643, 650,
652, 680, 690, 698.
Homer, personalityy 30, 49, 51, 65, 336,
364, 370, 384-6, 428-9, 4879> 572,
590, 668. style, composition, 384-6, 482,
487-8, 489, 669; language, 272-4,
287, 299, 404, 480-5, 486, 488,
562-3, 642; richness and variety,
49, 562-3 ; similes, 155, 271, 272-3,
343, 358, 404, 482, 485-6; verse, 49,
480, 486, 488, 562. works considered separately
:
cyclic poems (spurious), 29.
Hymns, 30, 38, 115, 419.
Iliad, authorship, 30, 487; content,
23-4, 27, 52, 55, 197, S73, 358,
384; imitations, 150-1, i53"4, 336;
the Latin translation, 53, 565, 576,
593.
Margites, 336, 343.
Odyssey, authorship, 30, 487;
content, 23-4, 52, 77, 104, 153,
505-6, 510-13; parallelism with
Dantes Comedy, 71 ; with F6nelons
Telemachus, 336-9, 343, 658; with
Joyces Ulysses, 505-7, 511-13, 698.
homophones, 331.
homosexuality, 65, 389, 446, 458,
525-6, 537*
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, The ^Eury^
dice', 254; The Windhover, (32); The
Wreck of the ^Deutschland', 254.
Horace, career and character, 224,
aaS-8, 237-8, 286, S49. 595, 632,
680; influence and reputation, 8, 44,
59, 188-9, 191, 192, 229, 230, 231,
244-50, 251, 252-4, 277, 286, 291,
309, 310-11, 312-13, 314-15, 340,
393, 400, 407, 413-14, 435, 455,
491, 585, 588, 590, 597-8, 602-3,
631-3, 634, 673, 675, 677, 680, 683,
684; models, 96, 222, 224, 225-8,
231, 233, 242, 684; translations,
124-5, 245, 247-9, 375- works, Art of Poetry {Ep, 2, 3),
125, 132, 142, 247, 248, 314, 342,
(435), 590, 598, 683.
epodes,,245, 603, 630, 634, 637.
letters,or epistles, 68, 96-7, 125,
192, 248, 303, 314, 315, 603, 634,
652,
odes, 68, 84, 220-1, 225-8, 230,
233, 235, 238-9, 245-8, 286, 413,
443, 446, 497, 549, 597-8, 603, 610,
628, 631, 634, 635-6, 637, 680, 695
;
*fifth book, 470 ; translations, 124-5,
247, 249, 497-
satires, 8, 68, 80, 84, 125, 248,
303, 312-13, 314-15, 549, 610, 634,
650-1, 653, 673; imitations, 291,
309-11, 312-13, 652,
Horatian metres, 225, 246-50, 378,
443-
Horatian odes imitators, 226, 228,
240, 244-50, 252-3, 254, 443, 631,
633, 634-6, 637, 678, 680.
Horatius the hero, 152, 473.
Hotman, F., 118, 639.
Hotspur, 208.
Houdar de la Motte, Antoine, Discours
sur Homhe, 646 ; Reflections on
Criticism, 287; tr. Iliad, 287.
Houdon, 401.
House of Commons, 328-9.
Housman, A. E., career and character,
496-7, 694-5 ; Introductory Lecture,
496, 692; Juvenal preface, 695;
More Poems, 497; on Bentley, 284;
on Lucan, 672; A Shropshire Lad,
266, 306-7.
Hruodland, 49, 145.
Huet, and the Delphin edition, 638;
Letter to Perrault, 281.
Hugo of Trimberg, Registrum auctorum,
634.
Hugo, Victor, career and character,
250. 275. 405-7. 442. 444; education
and knowledge of the classics,
250, 406-7, 414, 494, 549, 674;
reputation and influence, 405-6,
441-2, 662. works. Contemplations, 275, 407,
643, 674; Cromwell (preface), 406;
Han d'Islande, 674; Interior Voices,
407 ; The Laughing Man, (440) ; The
Legend of the Ages, 407; Le Pas
d'Armes du Roi Jean, (442); Les
Misdrables, 404; Les Onentales, 362,
661, 674; Notre-Dame, (440, 674);
Odes and Ballads, 250-1, 628, 637;
The Toilers of the Sea, 58, (440);
William Shakespeare, 406, 444,
685.
humanism, 83, 95, 135, 183, 193, 346,
535> 546* 547, 588, 595-6, 615, 691,
694-5.
humanists, 19, 85, 121, 134, 171, 181,
192^ 193, 216, 244, 295, 309, 368,
490, 578, 589, 631, 639, 656, 695,
Hume, David, 350.
humour, in comedy, 71, 128, 132,
137-8, 140-1; in fantastic tales
and dialogues, 432; in fiction, 342;
in Homer and heroic literature
generally, 271-3, 342, 487, 658; in
Rabelais, 178, 182, 185; in satire,
30s, 339*
h4|maurs, 315.
INDEX
Hungary, (iii), 259, 55^, 657.
Huns, 346, 353.
Hunt, Leigh, 683.
Hunter, Mrs, Leo, 638.
huntsmen, 173, 174-5
Huss, 455 ; his follov^ers, 48.
Hutten, Ulrich von, 368.
Huysmans, J. K., 263, 445, 446; A
Rehours, 445, 45 3 685,
Hyginus, 581.
Hylas, 402.
hymn, 219.
hymns, 34, 43, 229-30, 305, 496.
Hypatia, 456, 462-3.
hyperbole, 484, 633.
Hyperion, 195, 379.
L A/, 125.
lachimo, 195.
lago, 195-
lamblichus, 676.
lanthe, 419.
Icarus, 99, 226, 387, 510, 527, 581,
697, 703.
Iceland, language, 55, 577; literature,
22, 25, 26, 55, 219, 577; people,
432, 674.
Ideas, the theory of, 412, (501), 507.
idols and idolatry, 352, 573 > 675,
701,
idyll, 61 1.
idylls, see pastoral poetry,
illiteracy, vii, 3-4, 28, 39-40, 3S4~5>
556, 55S.
illustration, 630.
imagery, 158, 202; in Ariosto and
Spenser, 607; in Arnold, 693; in
Cocteau, 533; in Giraudoux, 533,
539; in Keats, 417; in Pindar, 224,
628; in Plato, 420; in Shakespeare,
212, 621, 623; in Spitteler, 530;
in Vergil and Beowulf, 564. avoidance of, in baroque tragedy,
300; classical imagery adapted by
modern writers (excluding Shakespeare),
19, 79, 221, 230, 238, 329,
356-7 402, 416-17, 418, 4^5, 516,
693; classical ihiagery adapted by
Shakespeare, 195-6, 198-200, 201,
208, 218, 416; Hebrew imagiery in
English, 1 12, 238, 484; natureimageiy,
79, 198-9, 507, 621 ; sexual
images, 63-4, 449~50, 509; vulgar
imagery in classical literature, 272-3,
278.
imagism and imagists, 541.
imitation of classical works of art,
classical not imitative', 390, 408,
416, 423; deadening or plastercast
imitation, 85-6, 87, 190, 2^,
321, 356-7; general, 104, 106, i34-5
136, 156-8, 378, 3S0; theory of, m
Quellenforschung, 499*
immortality, 33, 43> 44> ^5? ^26,
411-12, 417-18, 420, 429-
Imogen, 667.
impartial, zoo.
impassibility, 441.
impressionism, 502-4, 532.
improvisation in poetry, 250, 254> 305>
309, 357, 366, 629, 668.
Imtheachta Mniasa, 115, 596.
Incas, 14.
incest, 376, 523-4, 53b-7,, 539, 704*
incontinence, 586; personified, 149.
Index of Prohibited Books, 259, 639.
India, ascetics, 455; the country, 56,
148, 328; a houri, 57; literature, 25,
469, 694; mysticism, 518; myths,
448.
Indians of North America, 37, 166,
280, 289, 333, 400, 403, 645; of
South America, 145, 148, iSi~2,
154, 155, 280, 645-
Indies, East, 144, i53; West, 705.
individualism, 226, 394, 428.
industry, effects on education and culture,
255, 257, 437, 438, 440, 455-6,
493, 512, 662; methods applied to
scholarship, 468-71, 475 J value m
civilization, 549.
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 518. w'orks. Apotheosis of Homer, 442;
Ruggiero and Angelica, 153; The
Spring, 442.
Inquisition, 245, 259, 352, 4S6-
"
inscriptions, P'ranch, 397, 644; Greek,
3, 469, 556, 561 ; Latin, 3, 318, 469,
474, 556, 644- , ,
interior decoration, 21, 290, 296, 302,
396, 647, 664.
interludes, 130, 137-8.
internal-combustion engine, 113.
mtoierance, religious, 259, 352-3, 423,
437, 462-3, 678.
Ionia, 370, 542, 664, 688-
Iphigenia, 121, (373), 380^
Ireland, and the Irish church
(=5 British or Celtic church), 7,
36-9, 568; culture apd knowledge
of the classics, 7, 3% 38-9, i<^5,
557, 568, 573; handwriting, 38,
loi ; history, 39, 248, 389, 513, 573;
language, 7, 105, 115, 697; literature,
22, a6, 501-2, 504-7, 5 1 1-^3,
584; missions, 38.
Iris, 149, 626,
Iron Age, 391, 481.
irony, 305, 306, 352, 648-
Isabella of Spain, 259,
INDEX 73S
Isidore, in Timon of Athens^ 197; of
Seville, his Origines or Etymologies
^
578, 701.
Isis, 523.
Islam, 269, 352, 448, 603.
Ismenef (536).
Isocrates, 122-3, 189, 656; imitated
and adapted, 323, 655-6; translated,
122-3, 189, 597. works: Nicocles, 123, 597; To
DemonicuSf 123, 639; To Nicocles
^
122-3, 597-
Isolde and Isotta, see Tristan and
Isolde.
Itala, 557.
italic type, 589.
Italy and the Italians, character, 195,
380, 415, 618; the country, 74-5,
99, 163, 167, 168, 175, 187, 194,
226, 313-13, 363, 365-7, 388, 391,
401, 413, 415, 422-3, 566, 6x8, 662,
663, 6go; culture and society, 16,
19, 81, 82-5, no, 113-14, 176, 195,
231, 261, 277-8, 296, 309, 369, 370,
390, 423-4, 430, 543, 557, S^i,
680-1; history, 41, 146, 259, 350,
362, 376, 423-4, 427-8, 428-9, 431,
557, 560, 639, 686, 700; languages
and dialects, vii, 5, 6, 14, 48, 55,
70-2, 76, 82, 85, 87, 89, 90, 94, 134,
195, 199, 275, 293, 31 1, 341, 424-5,
443, 446, SI 8, 559, 571, 577, 583-4
(in Milton, 61 1), 658, 661, 664;
leadership in Renaissance, 81, 113-
14, 127-31, 186, 195, 231, 244-5,
259, 309, 366, 543, 639, literature,
20, 22, 48, 59, 70, 87, 94-5, 102,
113, 127-37, 139-43, 219, 229, 231,
244-6, 270, 541, 611, 625, 657,
670; and see Contents and names of
authors.
Ithaca, 534.
lulo and lulus, 591.
ivory door, 604.
ivory tower, 187, 439, 683.
7. D/, 119.
fackfuggler, 138.
Jack-the-giant-kilier, 524.
Jacobins, 555. ^
Jaconello, 117.
Jaeger, Werner, ix, 560; Paideia, 552,
582, 597, 658, 671, 675, 685, 689.
Jamyn, Amadis, 114.
Jansemsts, 281, 294.
Janus, 610.
Japan, 448; drama, 130; pictures, 502.
Jason, 527, 576, 580.
Jay, John, 399.
Jean de Garlande, 582.
Jean de Meun, 62-9, 3x3, 571, 58X.
Jeffers, Robinson, 527; Medea, 527;
The Tower beyond Tragedy, 702-3.
Jefferson, Thomas, 400-1, 542, 673.
Jehovah, 150, 455, 456.
Jenkins, Thoma^, 619.
Jerusalem, 9, xo, 12, 30, 31, 37, 78,
146, 346.
Jerusalem the Golden, 305.
Jesuits, 259, 277, 28 X, 320, 326, 654:
as orators, 326, 332-3; as
wrights, 135, 294, 599; as teacheir'
135, 264, 291-2, 293, 518, 543, 599,
657; their statues of saints, 374,
397*
Jesus Christ, adoration of, 32, 237;
as a Jew, 362, 454, 662; as a shepherd,
166, 173; as a sun-myth, 522;
ascension, 30, birth, 8-9, 72-3,
523; cross and crucifixion, 26, 3X-2,
158, 456; disciples, 522, 604; harrowing
of hell, 5 1 1 ; mentioned in
literature, 31-2, 46, 149, 263; mission,
9, 26,51,78, 264,362, 363,461,
463, 574; omitted in literature, 26,
44, 46, 9x, 363; resurrection, 32, 35,
5 1 1 ; revelation, 74, 1 56, 465 , teaching,
9, 579; temptation, 147, 521.
Jews, cuhure, 6, 14, 557.
luvoiy, 29, 30, 51,' 146-7, 196, 345,
394, 463, 564; anti-Jewish feeling,
259, 377, 454-5, 459, 460. language, 14, X04, 106, 454, 478,
544, 556; literature, 73, 104-5, 1x2,
263, 368, 556, 640; myths and
legends, 29, 146-7, 439, 505, 5x0. religion and thought, 8, 294, 454-5,
460; conversion, 90, 187, 279; Jesus,
362, 454, 662.
Joan of Arc, 155.
Joannes Secundus, 632.
Jocasta, 538-9.
Jodelle, ]denne, 599, 630. works* Captive Cleopatra, 137, 232,
599-600; Eugene, 137, 232, 599*
John de Hauteville, Architrenius, 649.
John of Salisbury, 50; Metalogicus,
64X.
John Scotus Erigena, 38-9, 569.
Johns.. Hopkins University, 490.
Johnson, Samuel, career and character,
83 ; education and knowledge of the
classics, 295, 327; style, 299, aSoT
654, 655. works: Dictionary, 469; Irene, 293
;
London, 315, 675; The Vanity of
Human Wishes, 315, 627, 652, 675,
jokes, 183* 185, 256, 299, 304, 308,
318, 544, 557-
joking in earnest, 305, 308.
736 INDEX
jongleurs, (48), 77.
Jonson, Ben, education and knowledge
of the classics, 123, 200, 202, 218,
248; on Shakespeare, 199, 200, 201,
619; sons, 248.
* works : Drink to only with thine
eyesj vii; Every Man in His Humour
quoted, 54; Ode on the Death of Sir
H. Morison, 238, 239; Ode tojames^
Earl of Desmond
f
632; odes, generally,
238-9, 248, 676; plays, generally,
200, 218; The Sad Shepherd^
i74-*5-
Joseph of Exeter, Bellum Troianum^
590.
Josephus, War, 189, 578.
Jove, see Jupiter.
Joyce, James, education and use of the
classics, 501-2, 507, 509-10, 518,
543 ; specialized art, 256, 501-2, 696. works: Firniegaris Wake, 504, 510,
525, 6^71*A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, 332, 502, 509-10,
512, 518, 697-700; Stephen Hero,
697, 700; Ulysses, 338, 502, 503,
504-7, 510, 511-13, 696, 697-8.
Judas Iscariot, 74.
Judea, 454, 459, 510.
Judges, 24, 30.
Judith, the heroine, 29 ; the princess, 46.
Judith, the poem, 29.
Julia, 59.
Julian family, 591.
Julian the Apostate, 353.
Juliana, 30, 567.
Juliet, (199), 205.
Julius Caesar, career, 51, 546, 548,
578, 588, 672, 691; foundation of
empire, 74, 326, 398, 476-7; invasion
of Britain, 37, 217, 577;
murder, vii, 5, 59, 326, 533, 557. personality, 5, 6, 151, 424, 476-7
557? 665, 672; in Shakespeare, 132,
210-12, 624. works : Memoirs (Commentard) read,
188, 217, 578, 603; translated, 117.
Julius n, 16. .
Julius Valerius, 56, 578.
Jung, C. G., 523-4, works: (Eranos, 523); Das goUllche
Kind, 584; lntcgrati07i of the Per^
sonality, 523 ; Psychologische Typefi,
703; Psychology and Religion, 523;
Psychology arid the Unconscious, 523.
'
Junius, 400,
Juno, 19s, 515.
Jupiter, 49, 150-1, 152, X9S, 205, 206,
226, 234, 352, S15, 521, 573, 595,
^631, 657.
Justice, 170,
Justin, 189.
Justin Martyr, 640.
Justinian, 41, 146, 149, 560.
Juvenal, 200.
Juvenal, career, 303, 669, 695 ; editions,
491, 496, 498, 695; and Martial,
3 16, 557 ; read, imitated, and quoted,
8, 66, 68, 80, 84, loi, 125, 189,
217-18, 306-7, 309-12, 314, 340,
406, 582-3, 603, 642, 650-3, 67s,
684; translated, 314, 342, 650, 651,
675- works: satire i: 68, 315, 649, 651,
653, 692; satire 3: 295, 303, 315,
318, 650, 651, 675; satire 4: 314,
651 ; satire 6: 68, 125, 303, 307, 319,
34^, 557, 582-3, 651, 653, 690, 698;
satire 7: 68, 80; satire 8: 125, 329,
%3, ^55y 675; satire 10: loi, 125,
217-18, 303, 306, 315, 593, 627,
651-2, 675, 684; satire ii: 125,690;
satire 13: 125, 319, 651; satire 16:
651.
kahuki plays, 130.
Kaiser, the title, 6.
Kalevala, 24.
Kant, quoted, 44, 444; Religion within
the Limits of Pure Reason, 363.
Keats, John, and Chapmans Homer,
(210), 360, 368, 415-16, 686; and
Hoiderlin, 378-9 ; and Shakespeare,
210, 218, 415-18; career, death,
and influence, 174, 210, 241, 365,
402, 415, 420-1, 424, 434, 435, 447,
613; education and Imowledge of
the classics, 218, 252-3, 360, 415-
3e8, 457, 498, 637-8, 688; ideas, 361,
408, 417-18, 444. works, Endymion, 361, 402, 415,
4x6-18; Hyperion, 337; 379, 415,
416; Lamia, 416, letters, 408, 675;
odes, 241, 252-3, 417; ode On a
Grecian Urn, 355, 417, 418, 444,
682; ode On Indolence, 677; ode To
a Nightingale, 61, 252, (441), 637-8
;
The Pot of Basil, 417; sonnets:
Sonnet 17, 662, On first looking
into Chapman*s Homer, 115, 210,
416, When I have Fears, 379, 666;
Staffa, 613,
Keller, Gottfried, 529.
King Alfred jewel, 31.
Kmglake, Eothen, 365.
Kings, Books of, 107, 573.
Kingsley, Charles, Hypatia, 462.
Kinwelmersh, Francis, 12 1.
Kipling, Rudyard, Horace*s Fifth Book
of Odes, 470.
Kiauer, M. G., 664.
INDEX 737
Klinger, F. M. von, Sturm und Drang.
664.
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 355;
The Messiahy 381; odes, 376.
Knebel, K. L. von, 667.
knights^: in Chaucer, 12, 90, 94;
medieval, 49, 196; in Spenser, 153;
and see Don Quixote.
Kochanowski, Jan, 541.
Kozmian, Kajetan, 435.
Kraljevic, Marko, 24.
Krasinski, Zygmunt, Irydiony 435.
Kjronos, 529-30,
Labdacids (the house of Oedipus),
536.
La Bruyere, Jean de, CharacterSy 192,
315; style, 325.
Lachesis, 90, 508.
Lactantius, 32-4, 324, 559, 701.
Ladm dialect, 6.
Laertes, 208, 216.
Laestrygones, 23.
La Fontaine, Jean de, 642.
Lagerlof, Selma, 166.
Lambert le Tort, 56.
Lambinus, 616, 639.
lampoons, 306, 425.
Landino, Cristoforo, 244, 634.
Landor, Walter Savage, 675, 683;
education and knowledge of the
classics, 3, 446, 5 1 8, 556, 683 ; ideas,
365, 449. works, 518, 531, 683; Imaginary
Conversations
y
448, 657; dramas,
4^4-8; heroic idylls, 685 ; Latin works,
3, 446, 556, 685-6.
Lang, Andrew, general, 484, 489. works: Homer and the Epicy 484-
5; tr. Iliad and Odyssey
y
485, 487,
488.
Langhans, C. G., 664.
language, as an art, 124; as a school
subject, 184, 467, 493; as a tool of
thought, 14, 546, 562.
languages, dead and living, 12-13, 70>
5445 ; European (excluding Greek
and Latin), vii-viii, 2, 5-7, 12-14,
18-20, 22, 29, 48-9, 94, 105-12,
124, i6,.J35, 144, 171, 227, 230,
275 305^322, 3^4, 326-7, 330, 334,
335, 467, 493, 514, 544, 546, SS^-g,
568, and see individual languages;
private, 256.
Laocoon, 16, 371-4, 665.
Lapaccim, 123.
lapidaries, 67.
la Pianche, Etienne de, 118.
Lascaris, Janus, 17, 561.
Laso de Oropesa, Martin, n6.
Latin Language: as a modern international
language, vii, 2-3, 12, 16,
18, 22, 36-8, 40, 48-9, 55, 70,
72, 83-7, 89, 91-3, loi, 104, 105,
109, III, ii:^-i4, 120, 122, 126,
127, 134-5,, 137, 144, 171, 229,
232-4, 275, 276, 295, 305-6, 310,
31 1, 324, 368, 446, 556, 558-9, 579,
584, 587, 631, 632, 636, 644, 657,
661, 678, 685-6; as a subject taught
in schools and colleges, 8, 11-12,
13-14, 37, 46, 96-7, 104-6, 186-8,
199-201, 203, 210, 218, 257, 294-6,
327, 341, 348, 360, 375, 379, 393,
397, 413-14, 415, 418-19, 466-7,
469-71, 490-500, 518, 543, 565,
568, 657, 686, 694, 699-700, 705;
character and distribution, 5, 348-9,
544-5, 557-9, church-Latin, 3, 7,
109, 220, 229, 31 1, 324, 558; colloquial
or basic, 6-7, 12, 56, 107, 109,
318, 558-9; 12, 51, 574, 700;
influence on modern languages, 6-7,
12, 14, 18-19, 59, 99, 105-12,
158-61, 200, 322, 330-x, 345, 368,
398-9, 443, 546, 558-9, 568, 609-11,
655-6, 657, 661; legal Latin, 109,
558, 560; literary Latin, 6-8, X2,
13-14, 18-19, 41, 72, 76, 81, 104-12,
1 13, 126, 184, 199-200, 215, 246,
277, 281, 348, 360, 402, 404, 409,
415, 424-s, 446, 477-8, 511, 558-9,
572, 673, 680.
Latin literature, classical, 8, 72, 131,
220, 303-4, 318, 400-1, 441, 543,
570, 598, 635, 690; debt to Greek,
104-5, 13 1, 304-5, see also Greco-
Roman literature and separate types;
influence on modern literatures, 32-
5, 40-7, 53, 94-5, 104-5, 1 12-13,
113-26, 135, 158-61, 184, 186, 263-
4, 277. 312, 330-1, 379, 381,406-7,
421, 433, 543, 609-11, 655; see also
individual authors and typeSy e.g.
Horace, drama.
Latin literature, modem, see Latin
language, as a modern mternationai
language.
Latin i, Brunetto, tr. Aristotle, 119; tr.
Cicero, 123, Treasure, 48, 578, 634.
Litmisms, 158-61, 330-1, 433, 609-11,
655-6; and see Latin language,
influence on modem languages.
Laura, 87, 89, 93.
Laureateship, 88, 243, 589.
laurel, 88, 141, 321, 356, 396, 397-
Lavinia, in the tale of Aeneas, 56, 156,
580; in 7'itus AndronicuSy 61.
law, general, 2, 181, 187, 262, 456,
472, 536, 548, 604; American and
738 INDEX
western European, 2, 9, 550, 553,
675; canon, or Church law, 2, 9,
560; of the Dark Ages, 9, 25, 558;
French, 2, 391 ; Gennanic, 9 ; Greek,
675; Italian, 2, 560; medieval, 391,
560; poetic, see rulej Roman, 2, 9,
262, 328, 391, 472, 474, 477, 548,
550, 553, 560, 690.
Lawrence, D. H., 365.
Lawrence, T. E., Seven Pillars of Wtsdom,
488 ; tr. Odyssey^ 488-9.
Lay of Aristotle
t
57, 578.
lays, 29, 384, 484, 488, 562.
Lazanllo de TormeSy 169.
Leaf, Walter, tr. Iliady 485.
Leander, 91, 415, 580.
Lear, 301.
ie Blanc, Richard, 118, 124.
Le Bossu, Traite dupoeme epique^ 642.
Le Chevalier dAgneaux, Antoine and
Robert, 115.
Leconte de* Lisle, Charles-Marie-
Ren^, career, character, and ideas,
441, 444, 448-9, 456-7, 683, 684,
686--7 ; education and knowledge of
classics, 446-7, 456-7, 686; influence,
441, 454, 456-7, 52a, 683,
687. works: Antique Poems
y
448, 450;
Barbarian Poems, 448, 686-7 ; Popu^
lar History of Christianity, 456;
translations, 446-7, 457, 686, 693-4.
Le Dit de Franc Gontier, 166.
Le Duchat, 122.
Lef^vre, Raoul, 55, 577.
legends, see myths.
Legislative Assembly, 398.
Legouv^, G. M. J. B., 429.
Leicester, 198.
Lemaire de Beiges, Jean, Illustrations
des Gaules, &c., 602.
Lempri^res classical dictionary, 416,
498.
Leo, the Arch-priest, 56, 578.
Leo X, 16.
Leonidas of Sparta, 431 ; of Tarentum,
172.
Leopardi, Count Giacomo, character,
education, and knowledge of the
classics, 355, 423, 49~34 680-2,
690.
- works, 430, 433, 442; Alla primavera,
681 ; Amore e morte, 432, 681
;
The Dream, 433 ; Hymn to Neptune,
430; La ginestra, 682; Ode to Love,
430; Ode to the Moon, 430; On an
Ancient Grave-relief, 433; On the
Monument of Dante, 43 1 , 681 ; Paralipomenidella
batracomtomachia, 681
Sappho^s Last Song, 432^-3 ; Short-
Works on Morals, 432-3, 681 ; Sopra
il ritratto di una bella donna {Canti,
31), 682; To Angelo Mai, &c., 431,
681 ; To Italy, 431, 681 ; translations,
430, 681; Zibaldone, 682.
Lepanto, 148, 153, 634.
Leroy, Guillaume, 115.
Le Roy, Loys, 118-19, 122-3.
Lesage, 543.
Lesbia, 229.
Lesbos, 164.
Les Fails des Romains, 578.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, education
and knowledge of the classics, 367,
371-5, 66s-6: inrluence, 374-5, 379- woik.',- Reytru'^e zur Historic und
Aufnahme des Theaters, 666; Hamburg
Dramatic Journal, 374-5, 665-
6 ; How the Ancients represented
Death, 364-5, (373), 680; Laocoon,
371-4 ; in Letters on Modern Literature,
374-S, 665; on Homer, 665;
on Seneca, 666; tr. Plautus Captim,
666.
Letter from Alexander to Aristotle*,
S6-
Letter of Aristeas*, 594-5.
letters, 1 2, 544; Abelards and H^loises,
60; Alcuins, 38; Erasmuss, 82;
Gargantuas, 183-4; Greek, 517;
Horaces, see Horace, letters ; in fiction,
340; Isocrates, 122-3; Montaignes,
191; Petrarchs, 82-3, 87;
poetic, 290, 429; Senecas, 191;
Sidonius, 471.
Letters of Euripides, Socrates, Ttliemistocles,
284.
Le Vieux Cordelier, 672.
Lex Ribuaria, 560.
Leyden University, 341.
liberalism, 444, 455, 476, 69*1.
libertinism, 326.
liberty, see freedom,
libraries, 8, 13, 15, 83-5, 91, 415, 466,
490, 556, 57L 588, 690.
libri Catoniani, 592-3.
Liddell and Scotts Greek Lexicon, 469.
Lifet des Romedns, 578.
natures, 17.
Ligue dAction Franpaise#* 692.
Lily, William, 216, 626.
limbo, 75, 80, 99, 51 1*
Linacre, 490.
Lincoln, Abraham, 20, 659; Gettysburg
Address, 3:12-13, 334, 561.
Lindisfame Gospels, 47, 573.
linguistics, 468.
Lino (Linus), 593,
Liszt, Franz, 365 ; Annees de Pelerinage,
87; Rhapsodies, 254,
INDEX 739
literature, and civilization, 275~6,
545-6, 547-^; and morality, 445;
and progress, 265-6; and scholarship,
472 f. ; and society, 255-7, 269,
289792, 297-302, 321, 355-60;
myths and symbols in, 524; national
and international, 275-6, 479; and
see individual nations.
Little Red Riding Hood^ 276.
Livius Andromcus, 104-5, 595*
Livy, imitations and adaptations, 68,
136, 189, 204, 217, 393, 588, 655,
679; knowledge and reputation of
his work, 84, loi, 217, 367, 393,
473, 490, 588, 669, 679; quoted,
566, 649; speeches, 672; style, 348;
translations, 118, 672.
Locher, Jacobus, Stultifera nauis (tr.
of Brant), 650; tr. Terence (?), 121.
Lochinger, Jonas, 119.
Locke, John, 400.
Lockier, Dean, 314.
locomotive as a symbol, 455, 687.
Lodge, Thomas, 132; Rosalynde, 612,
618-19.
Loeb translations, 470.
logic, 503, 542, 569-7o> 574-
Lollius, myn auctor, 96-7, 98, 590-1.
Lombards, 135, 346.
Lombardy, 555, 558.
London, city, 39, 130, 194, 282, 299,
427, 5 so; Musical Society, 240;
University, 496, 686, 692.
Longfellow, H. W., 481; Evangeline,
246, 382, 667.
Longinus, On the Sublime, 142, 281,
362, 667.
Longus, Daphnis and Chloe, 124, 164,
168, 169, 170, (176), 343.
Loomis, iloger, ix, 576.
"loose manner in prose, 325-6, 654.
Lopez de Ayala, Pedro, 118.
Lopez de Mendoza, Inigo, Marques
de Santillana, iii, 596, 635.
Lorenzo, 203.
Lorrainian dialect, 107.
Lorris, Guillaume de, 62, 65-6, 68, 583.
Lot, 29.
Loti, Pierre, 438.
Louis XIII; 644.
Louis XIV, 268, 272, 274, 280, 289,
302, 320, 321, 336, 337, 338-^, 345,
(362), 5X2, 633, 638.
Louis XVI, 356, 391, 401, 555.
Louisiana, 403, 561.
Louvet, 398.
Louvois, 320.
Louvre, 268.
Louys, Pierre, and Gide, 458; and
Leconte de Lisle, 457, 686, 693-4;
classical knowledge and paganism,
457-9, 688.
Louys, works: A New Pleasure, 457;
Aphrodite, 458-9 ; prefaces, 688,
693; The Songs of Bilitis, 458, 688;
tr. Lucian, 4s8; tr. Meleager, 457;
translations generally, 693-4.
Lovati, Lovato de, 134.
love in literature, "courtly love, 578-9
;
in classical literature, 59-62, 65-6,
98-9, 162-6, 205, 228-30, 313, 378,
380-1, 420, 458, 496, 578, 582-3,
698, 700; m modem literature, 52,
59-69, 71, 87, 91-2, 98-9, X02,
X35-6, X39-40, 145, XS2, X 55 , x 66-
73, X74, 199, 205, 230, 236-7, 248,
305-6, 313, 322, 340-4, 379, 380-1,
382-3, 417-X8, 420, 428, 432-3, 440,
449-50, 457-9, 507-9, 512, 527,
535, 540, 541, 544, 581, 583, 585,
698, 700; Platonic loye, 378, 420,
579; romantic love, 53, 56, 57-8,
63-4, 66-7, 87, 89, 90-1, 95, 102,
139-40, 145, 158, 163-4, 170,
578-9.
Low Countries, 48.
low words, 272-5, 299-300, 318-20,
405-6, 642-3.
Lowes, J. L., The Road to Xanadu,
406, 565, 676.
Lucan, The Civil War, and Vergil,
271, 324, 421; as a historian, 71,
X16, 577-8; character and ideas, 79,
271, 421, 496, 586; influence and
reputation, 59, 79, loi, ri6, 148,
188-9, 217, 340, 421, 44X, 577-8,
585, 587, 602, 603, 626-7, 639, 678;
quoted, 397, 672; style, 271, 299,
324, 421, 596, 602, 61 1 ; translated,
116, 596, 611.
Lucentio, 204.
Lucian, character and ideas, 304, 599;
known and imitated, 184-5, 188-9,
304-5, 308, 336, 432, 599, 603,
615-16, 667; style, 304, 307, 432;
translated, 123-4, 457-8. works: Courtesans' Conversations,
458; The Cynic, 124; Dialogues of
the Dead, 123; Menippus, or Necronfancy,
124, 615; Sale of Lives, 615;
The Ship, or Wishes, 615; Toxaris,
124.
Lucifer, 580.
Lucilius, 192, 303.
Lucius Caesar, 401.
Lucretia (Lucrece), 99, 204, 217, 319,
588, 620.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things,
ideas, 264, 433-4, 682, 688; known
and imitated, 159* 188-0. 276-^-
740 INDEX
402, 421-2, 433-4 44950 45i, 567>
603, 651, 655, 675, 688.
Ludendorff, 526.
Lully, 290, 297, 587. ^
Lusitama and Lusus, 602.
Luther, Martin, 367, #455, 555; tr.
Bible, 559; Lutheranism, 259.
Luxembourg, Marechale de, 274, 643.
lycee and Lyceum, 639.
Lycidas, 172, 613; and see Milton.
Lycoris, 600.
Lycurgus, 3945, 396, 671.
Lydgate, 577, 701.
Lygia and the Lygians, 689.
Lyly and Euphuism, 656.
Lynceus, 593,
Lyons, 133, 182, 189, 231, 578.
*lyre, the, 244.
lyric
f
219, 627.
lyric poetry, 20, 42, 71, 219-54;
Austrian, 256, 435, 518; English
and Ameri?:an, 20, 26, 28, 61, 100,
1 71 -2, 219-21, 228-31,23^44,246,
248-54, 363, 408, 410-12, 414-15.
416-18, 420, 422-3, 437-9. 440-1,
450-2, 457, 501, 513-14, 517-19,
564-5, 675-9, 688; European, vii,
20, 22, 58, 87, 126, 219-54, 364,
544; French and Provencal, 20, 22,
48, SO, 60, 76, 125, 219-20, 229-30,
231-5, 242-3, 246-8, 250-1, 281,
354, 362, 401-3, 405-7, 432, 439,
442-4, 448, 450, 502-3, 516, 518;
German, 20. 364-5, 368, 376-9,
386; Greco-Roman, 8, 20, 41-3, 84,
124-5, 184, 219-54, 281, 309, 364,
434, 497, 516, 549; Italian, 20, 22,
48, 7x, 76, 84, 87, 125, 219, 229,
231, 235-6, 237, 245-6, 423-4, 428,
42934 44X-2, 45S"6; modem
Latin, 631-2, 686; Spanish, 20, 22,
124, 229, 244-5, 54x; see
Anacreon, Catullus, Horace, hymns,
odes, Pindar, songs, sonnets, and
individual modern poets.
Lysander, 400, 624.
Lytton, Bulwer, The Last Days of
Pompeii^ 340, 462.
Mabillon, 384, 467, 576.
Mabinogion^ 27.
7i$ficabri^ 662.
Macaulay, Lord, on the rules, 357;
on William III, 289-90. works. History of England^ 289-90,
474; Lays of Ancient Rome, 464,
473, 481, 692.
Macault, 123.
Macbeth, 87, 209, 21 1, 614; his Lady,
209, 299 ; his porter, 299.
McChoakumchild, Mr., 495.
MacDowell, Gerty, 505.
Machiavelii, political theory, 1 81, 326;
reputation, 282, 428; tyrants, 180,
599- ^ works, comedies, 136; The Prince,
181.
machinery, 265, 267, 547.
Macmillan schoolbooks, 470.
Macpherson and his Ossian, 356, 375,
435, 668.
Macrobius, 63, 68, 184.
Madeleme, 397.
Madison, 399.
madness in drama, 133, 207-9, 358,
426.
madrigals and the ode, 239.
Maeldubh, 37.
maenads, 441, 535.
Maerlant, Jacob van, 577.
Maevius, 172-3, 613.
Magdalen College, Oxford, 295, 344,
494.
magic, 3, 4, 49, 73, 148-9, 153, 196,
206, 573, 584.
Maginn, Homeric Ballads, 481, 692,
Mahomet, 49, 185, 269.
Mai, Angelo, 431, 681.
Maillol, 532.
Maintenon, Mme de, 289, 320, 338.
Maison Carrie, 401.
Malacoda, 586.
Maldon, 24, 566.
Malherbe, 224, 275, 280.
Mallarm6, St6phane, career and
i friends, 501-2, 508, 518, 695; ideas
and technique, 502-3, 507, 516. works, Afternoon of a Faun, 176,
501, 507-8, 697; Herodias, 501, 504,
508, 697; Las de Varner repos, 502,
696; Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe, 507,
696; Le merge, le vivace, et le hel
aujourdltui, (32); Salut, 516.
Mandarin dialect, 561.
Mandeville, Sir John, 57.
manic depression, 179.
Maniiius, 189, 496.
Manlius, 400.
Mantovano, Formicone, 136.
Mantuanus, Baptista (Spagnuoli), 171,
173, 216, 340.
MS. found in a Bottle (Poe), 52.
manuscripts, Greek, 17-18, 84, 284,
458, 668; Latin, 8, 13, 15-16, 38,
83-4, 91-2, lOI, 133, 558, 578, 681;
miscellaneous, 258, 469 ; ofBoethius,
571 ; of The Romance of the Rose, 69;
of the Venetian archives, 477.
Manutius, Aldus, 230, 235, 589;
Paulus, 235.
INDEX 741
Marat, 391, 393, 395.
Marcellus, captor of Syracuse, 400;
client of Cicero, 123; heir of
Augustus, 79, 154; in Hamlet, 624.
Marcus Aurelius, 5, 400, 465, 555.
Marfisa, 607.
Margaret (== Gretchen), 387, 669.
Margites, 336, 343.
Marie-Antomette, 176, 392.
Marie-Th^rese, Queen, 330.
Marim, Adonic, 541, 61 1.
Marius the democrat, 672, 700.
Marius the Epicurean, 464-5, 516.
Mark Antony, 152, 197-8, 21 1, 212-
13, 245, 442, 621.
mark of the beast, the, 484.
Marlborough College, 492.
Marlowe, Christopher, knowledge of
the classics, 199, 215. works, The Passionate Shepherd to
His Love, 172, 613 ; plays generally,
129, 180, 260; tr, Lucan i, ii6j tr.
Ovids Loves, 125.
Marot, Cldment, 69, 116, 124, 125,
171, 233, 247, 635.
Marquand, J. P., The Late George
Apley, 513, 698.
Mars, 195, 605, 606.
marshals, Napoleons, 522.
Marston, John, Scourge of Villainy,
3II*
Martial, 306, 316, 382, 557; imitated
and read, 189, 191, 306, 382, 629,
642, 667; translated, 125.
Martianus Capella, The Marriage of
Philology and Mercury, 570.
Martin, Jean, 171.
Martyrs Mount (= Montmartre),
439-
Marullus, 234.
Marvell, Andrew, Upon CromwelVs
Return from Ireland, 248.
Marx, Karl, Capital, 106.
Mary Magdalen, 279, (454).
Mary Queen of Scots, 425.
Mary the Virgin, 43, 57, 69, 91, 330,
365, 579, 581, 608.
Masca^i, Rustic Chivalry {Cavalleria
Rusticana), 175,
masques, 139, 171, 175.
Mass, 3, 40; mass-books, 558; Bach
Masses, 335.
mass-production, 257, 470.
materialism, 377, 432-41 43^, 437"
40, 444, 449, 453, 467, 500, 514,
533, 543, 547, 552, 676.
mathematics, 407, 573.
Matthew, see St. Matthew.
May, T., 116,
Mayas, 694.
Maynard, 280.
Medea, 206, 373, 527, 702.
Medici family, 118, 284; Catherine
de, 133; Cosimo de, 17; Lorenzo
de, 17, ios,i 78, 425; the Venus,
415, 677- .
medicine, i, 265, 282, 459, 490-1;
Greek and modem, 45, 180-2,
264-5, 552; Renaissance, 180-1.
medieval, see Middle Ages.
Mediterranean area, 27, 73, 164, 366,
378, 388, 413; civilization, 371,
478-9; Sea, 337, 378, 423, 521,
S4SMedwin,
419, 421, 678.
Meigret, 117, 123.
melancholy, 179, 325-6, 427.
Melanchthon, 587.
Meleager, 458.
melic poetry, 627.
melodrama, 504, 598,
Memmius, 328, 655.
Memnon, 23, 236.
Manage, Dictionnaire iStymologique,
646.
Menander, 131, 192.
Mdnard, Louis, 363, 456-7, 522, 688,
701. works, Euphorion, 688; Hellenic
Polytheism, 456, 522; PromethSe
debzre, 688
Menelaus, 151, 387.
Menippean satires, see satire.
Menippean Satire, The {La Satyre
Menippee), 3 1 1
.
Menippus, 41, 303, 615.
Mentor, 338, 657.
Mephistopheles, 386, (390).
Mercian dialect, 47.
Mercier, S6bastien, 683.
Mercury, 149, 195, 336, 605-6, 626.
Meredith, George, Lucifer in Star--
light, (44)*
Meres, Francis, Palladis Tamia, 203.
M6rim6e, Prosper, Carmen, 459.
Merlin, 153.
Merope, 451.
Merrygreek, Matthew, 138, 600.
messengers in drama, 137, 599.
M^siah, in Spitteier, 529.
Messianic writings, 73, 75; and see
Vergil, Bucolics, 4.
Messidor, 396.
Messina, 618.
metal, discovery of, 522; cf. 527.
Metamorphoseos, 96.
Metamorphoses, see Ovid,
metamorphosis described, 604-5.
Metastasio, 290, 293, 295, 297, 425,
670.
742 INDEX
Metre, 19, 37, 112, 321. Anglo-Saxon, 29, 33, 562; English,
33, 131, 137, 300, 598; French, 144,
300, 405, 673; Greek, 13 1; Italian,
1 12, 1 15, 131, i36t Latin, 33, 37,
1 12, 13 1, 591; Proven9al, 76, 90;
Romance, 33; Spanish, 244. Homer, 49, 480-1, 486, 488, 562;
Horace, 225, 246, 378; Pindar,
2224, 225, 251; Seneca, 134, 591,
598. Alcaic, 225, 247-8, 628; blank
verse, 112, 115, 131, 136-7, 146-7,
309, 311, 425, 429, 487, 598; cancion,
634; canzoni, 236-7, 245, 433,
629 ; classical, in modem languages,
246, 381-2, 443, 635, 667-8. couplets, 220, 225, 235.
Alexandrine, 56, 137, 317, 529,
604; decasyllabic French, 115, 137,
144, 601; elegiac, 316, 380-2, 700;
fourteener^*, 205 ; heroic (stopped),
33, 1 15, 300-1, 316-17; octosyllabic,
49, 60, 62, 137. dramatic, 131, 134, 208; free verse,
239-40, 25X, 254, 700; hendecasyllables,
686; hexameter, 49, 97,
1 12, 116, 246, 303, 316, 375, 381-2,
404, 480, 485-7, 667-8, 672 ; iambic
trimeter, 112, 131, 591; lyre^, 244;
lyric, 131, 136, 137, 230, 246, 249,
538, 598, 628, 633; madrigal, 239;
ottava rima, 90, 124, 136, 230, 598,
602-3; Sapphic, 225, 246-7, 249,
638; sonnet, 223; stanzas, 115, 220,
222-5, 230, 234-8, 250-2, 378;
terzini, 76, 87, 598 ; tragic, 1 3 1 , 300-1
,
538.
Meun, Jean de, 62-9, 313, 571, 581.
Meyer, Eduard, History of the Ancient
World, 478.
Michael, archangel, 148-9, 153.
Michel, Guillaume, 125.
Michelangelo, 428.
Micyllus, 118.
Midas, 546.
Middle Ages: art, 21, 31, 67, 71,
128, 291 ; classical knowledge and
education, viii, 11-14, 20, 45, 48,
53-7> 57-^9 80, 8x, 84-5,
105, 106-11, 126, 184, 230, 244,
255, 292, 305-6, 546, 552, 554, 555,
^58, 569, 570, 571, 576, 577-'8,
582-3, 601, 634; folk-lore, 55-7, 148,
182, 196-7, 358, 455, 576; languages,
see languages, European;
literature, i-i3, 19, 31, 47, 48-103,
105, 126, 127, 128, 130, 144, 145,
150, 182, 184, 196, 219-20, 305-6,
309-10, 315, 355, 358, 390, 438,
446, 533, 54h 546, 552, 57L 577-8,
601; philosophy, 11-12, 21, 43, 48,
55, 57 58, 62-4, 66, 70, 361, 455,
522, 542, 546, 552, 560, 571, 578-9,
669, 682; political history, 48, 57,
93-4, 194, 265, 355-6, 358, 442,
686-7; religion, ii, 21, 31-2, 43,
48, 53, 66, 81, 92-3, 150, 292, 364-^5,
455, 542, 560, 601, 682, 687; social
and moral ideals, 12, 14, 31, 43,
48-9, 53, 57-8, 62-3, 64, 66, 81,
92-3, 127, 147, 183, 310, 355-6,
361, 384, 438, 448, 578-9, 687.
middle class, 180, 226, 340-1, 390,
425, 444-5, 461.
Mignon, 365.
Milan, 5, 129, 680.
militarism, 534.
Milton, John, character, ideas, attitude
to literature, 29, 83, 94, no, 126,
196, 200, 294, 311, 408-9, 447, 521,
604, 641; contemporaries, 278, 368;
know'Iedge and use of classical literature,
85, 124, 156-7, 200, 215, 228,
232, 263, 279, 294-5, 420, 485, 518,
549, 595, 605, 609-11, 621, 632,
636 ; later influence and reputation,
241, 249, 284-5, 358, 400, 404-S,
408, 410, 418, 518, 621, 645, 677;
style, 32, 158-61, 200, 249, 325,
408-9, 485, 609-11. works, Areopagitica, 126, 295; At
a Solemn Musk, 240, 633; Comus,
139, 175; II Penseroso, 172-3, 613; UAllegro, 172-3, 6n, 613; Latin
writings, 3, 446, 641, Naturam non
pati senium, 641 ; Lycidas, 173-4,
418, 420, 705; On the Morning of
Christ's Nativity, 237-8, 239; On
Time, 633; Paradise Lost, 104, 146-
7, 149-53, 155-6, 159-^0, 263,
279, 284-5, 293, 294, 314, 345,
358, 418, 421, 604, 606, 636, 701;
Paradise Regained, 71, 146-7,
150-1, 159, 263, 521; Samson
Agonistes, 293, 294-5, 418, 648,
687; sonnets, 249, 636; tr, Horace,
124, 249, 636.
mimes, 445.
Minerva, 638, and see Athene.
Minoan script, 576. **
^
Minos, 78, 99, 510, 586.
minstrels, 48, 385, 578.
Mintumo, Arte Poetica, 619.
Minucius Felix, Octaums, 559.
miracle-plays, 130.
miracles, 524, S745-
misogyny, 66, 68-9, 582-3.
missions, Irish, 38; Roman Catholic,
36-7, 39, 40, 568.
INDEX 743
mistletoe, 698.
mistranslations, 96-7, 118, 558, 626-^,
692, 700.
Mithridates, 306-7.
Mnemosyne^ 471.
mock-keroic literature, $ee parody.
Modena, 270.
Mohacs field, battle of, 259.
Mohanamedanism, 269, 352, 448, 603.
Mohican dialect, 400.
Moliere, Jean-Baptiste (Poquelin),
education, 277, 292, 543. works, 128, 137, 178, 280, 290, 297,
312, 318, 704; as a synthesis of
classical and national art, 128, 232,
276-7, 302, 318; UAvarCf 704; The
Misanthrope^ 276-7, 644; Tartuffe,
704; tr. Lucretius, 277.
Molinet, 69.
Mommsen, Theodor, career and ideas,
474-7, 555, 672, 690, 691; quoted,
27, 498, 669-70. works. Corpus Inscriptionum
Latinarumy 469, 474; Geschichte des
romischen Miinzzoesens, (474) , Roman
Constitutional Law {Romisches
Staatsrecht)y 474, 476, 672, 691;
Roman History^ 474, 669-70, 691;
Romisches Strafrecht, (474).
Monarch, the Clement, 647.
Monarch, the Grand, 289; and see
Louis XIV.
monarchies, the age of, 255, 356; and
see baroque.
monarchy, 123, 195, 242, 298, 321,
538. 356. 39i> 392-3, 400, 42s, 4S6,
476, 647, 672, 681.
monastic orders and monks, 8, ii,
90-2, los, 181-2, 30S, 3 S2, 435,
45S, 456, 461, 472, 496, 571, 590,
615. .
Mondot, 125.
Monet, Claude, 502, 503-4, 518;
Cathedral of Rouen, 504.
monk, 109.
monks, see monastic orders.
monologues, 102, 381, 503, 504, 507-9.
monostrophic poems, 222, 631.
monotheism, 44, 456, 573.
Montaigne, Michel de, and Shakespeare,
^17, 622; character, philosophy,
and psychological outlook,
83, 181, 186-7, 190, 312, 315, 352,
641 ; education and knowledge of
the classics, 117, 126, 135, 185-93,
210, 360, 394, 543, 596, 616-17,
622, 671, 699-700; reputation and
influence, 185, 279, 368, 394, 424;
style, 190-2, 3^5-
' works, Essays generally, 18 1, 187-
93, 616-17, De la solitude, 617; On
the Cannibals, 193.
Montausier, Comte de, 639.
Monte Cassino, 91-2.
Montemayor, j|prge de, 168, 172;
Diana, 168, 169, 172.
Montespan, Mme de, 289, 320.
Montesquieu, Secondat de, education
and knowledge of the classics, 543,
671 ; reputation and influence, 424,
426; style, 345-6, works, Considerations on the Causes
of the Greatness of the Romans and
of Their Decadence, 345-6, 349, 659
;
On the Spirit of the Laws, 345, 671,
680; Persian Letters, 339, 345.
Monteverdi, Claudio, 142, 290;
Orpheus, 142.
Montfort-lAmaury, 396.
Montherlant, Henry de, 58.
Monti, Vincenzo, 427.
Monticello, 401.
Montmartre, 439.
**
Montparnasse, 439.
Montpellier University, ii, 180.
moon, in poetry, 430, 441-2, 450,
502-3, 676; voyage to, 304-5.
Moore, E., Studies in Dante, 77, 79-80,
585*6, 599.
morality and the arts, including literature,
21, 32, 42S> 62, 69, 124, 249,
320, 328, 338-9, 361, 370, 391,
409-11, 426-7, 444-6, 685.
morality-plays, 134, 232.
More, Sir Thomas, Utopia, 185.
Mormonism, 268,
Momay, Philippe de, 118.
Morpheus, 604.
Morns, William, 489.
Moschus, 430, 603; and see Bion,
Lament for,
Moscow, 561.
Moses, 394.
Moslems, 573; and see^ Mohammedanism.
mouchoir, 274.
Mountain party, 402.
mountains, 378,408,413,423,439,443,
459, 486, 527-8, 530i 607, 633.
Moussorgsky, Modest, Boris Godunov,
fso.
moving pictures, 130, 143, 256, 386.
545, 598. ^ ^
Moyle, J. B., Essay on the Constitution
of the Roman Government, 35 1
.
Mozart, 670, 702. works, Die Entfuhrung aus dem
Serail, 647; Don Giovanni, 141,
(368), 664, La clemenza dt Tito,
647; Le nozze di Figaro, 664.
744 INDEX
muflismey 461, 689.
Mulciber (Vulcan), 600, 605, 701.
Miiller, Max, 522.
Mulligan, Buck, 506, 696.
Munich, 130, 368; tie agreement, 39.
murder m drama, 133, 137, 198, 209,
376, 623, 703; in pdetry, 448.
Muret, Marc-Antoine, 187, 235-6,
616, 624, 635.
Murner, T., 115.
Murray, Gilbert, 489, 490.
Muses, 65, 96, 130, 155-^, 163, 234,
236, 250, 254, 263, 275, 404, 428,
429, 439, 443, 542, 582, 595, 632,
633, 643, 652, 670.
Museum, British, 342, 413.
music, and drama, 130, 139, 141-2,
236, 256, 297, 392^ 532, 542; and
lyric poetry, 48, 219, 220-1, 225-7,
240-1, 246, 254, 3^; and myth,
535, 677; and nationalism, 275, 435
;
and pastoi;^! poetr}^, 139, 162-3, 166,
175-7, 611-12; and romantic love,
57-8; baroque music, 161, 175,
240-1, 246, 290-1, 296, 368-9, 392,
647, 654; Boethius on, 570, 592;
compared with literature generally,
140, 159, 161, 173, 296-7, 327, 331,
445, 502, 519, 530-1, 587; Greek
and Hebrew, 263 ; Greek and
modem, i, 280; in the Renaissance,
21 ; Italian, 240, 297, 366, 368.
musical comedy, 130, 256.
Mussato, Albertino, Eccerinis, 134-5,
599-
Mussolini, 268, 527.
Mycenae, 468.
Myers, Ernest, tr. Iliads 485.
Myro, 430.
Myrrha, 91, 426.
mystery-plays, 129, 182, 232, 615-
mystery religions, 268; the Mysteries,
523, ^98.
mysticism, 337, 445, 518-19, 529, 53i,
579, 701.
Myth (in Spitteler), 529,
mythological handbooks, loi, 552, 581,
603.
myths and legends, 54, 136, 256, 271,
356-7, 448, 451, 510, 520-5, 533,
701-2; Babylonian, 698; Christian,
147, 238, 250, 689; Egyptian, 32;
oGaelic or Celtic, 22, 26, 27, 204,
518, 698, and see Arthur; Greek and
Roman, 10, 20-1, 32, 41, 47, 53,
62, 67, 78, 94, 102, 104, 131, I47"8,
150-1, 161, 173, 195-7, 199, 203-4,
207, 218, 230, 232, 234, 236, 238,
241, 244, 251, 264, 271, 292, 293,
356-7, 359, 363, 371, 376, 380,
414-15, 416, 426, 433, 442, 449,
451, 456, 501-19, 520-40, 546, 551,
552, 573, 580-1, 600, 602, 604, 618,
620, 632, 661, 667, 677, 690 ; Hindu,
448 ; Icelandic, 22 ; Irish, 22
;
medieval, 18, 78, 387; Nos-se, 22,
485 ; Persian, 485 ; Trojan, see Troy;
Welsh, 22.
Naevius, Punic War, 563.
naiads, 174.
names, Greek and Roman, 396-400,
572.
Namur, 243, 633.
Naples, 56, 88-9, 125, 167, 681.
Napoleon I, 51, 328, 356, 392, 396,
397, 403, 425, 427-8, 431, 522, 542,
555, 597-
Napoleon III, 406, 461.
narcissism, 523.
Narcissus, 62, 68, 501, 509, 523-4,
526, 580-1.
Nashe, Thomas, 198, 619.
Natalis Comes, Mythologiae, 603.
National Guard, 397.
nationalism, 9, 13, 40, 48, 82, 105-6,
igs, 232, 275-6, 292, 409-10, 427,
431, 435, 472. 477, 478-9, 546-7,
551, 554, 644, 662-3, 669-70, 692.
naturalism in literature, 276-7.
Nature, admiration and love for, 162-
77, 198, 358, 363-6, 408-12, 436,
439; cruelty of, 432-3; descriptions
and images of, 152, 241, 410,
485-6, 507, 530-1, 564; domination
over, 265; permanence of, 269;
processes of, 520, 522-3, 678;
spirits of, 152, 1 62-3, 169, 173-4,
241, 377-8, 436-7, 456, 676, 681.
Nature in the soul, 375, 392? 533.
Nausicaa, 272-3, 374, 487, 505, (512),
698.
Navaho dialect, 13.
Naxos, 536-7.
Neapolitans and their dialect, 13, 135;
and see Naples,
negroes, 155, 165, 358, 405.
Nemesianus, 167.
Nemesis and Nemesio, 536, 605.
neologisms, 319, 330.
*
Neoplatonism, 44, 58, 430, 432, 456,
570, 579, 600, 675-6, 701.
Nepos, Cornelius, 51, 190.
Neptune, 206, 209, 521.
Nereids, 152, 212-13.
Nereus, 245.
Nero, 131, 207, 273, 304, 403, 451,
463, 537, 548, 598, 643, 649.
Nestor, 128, 273.
INDEX
Neue yahrhucher fur das klassiscke
Altertum^ 471.
neuroses, 178, 523.
New England, 526.
New Orleans, 13, 459.
New 'Testament, s, 28, 31, 345, 385,
558.
New York City, 130, 491, (512), 702;
State, 400.
Newman, F. W,, tr. Iliads 479-83,
490, 692; Reply, 483.
newspapers, 393, 400, 461, 545.
Newton, Isaac, 3.
Newton, Thomas, 119-20.
Nicander, Thenaca, 631.
Niccoli, N1CC0I6, 589.
Nicholas V, Pope, ly-iS.
Nichols, Thomas, 117.
Nicolaus Cusanus, 599.
Nicoll, Allardyce, The Development of
the Theatre, 129, 139, 598.
Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, and Leopardi,
430, 690; ideas, 473-4, 690;
influence, 448, 464, 473-4, 477-8,
669, 690-1; learning, 467; method,
472-3, 669; tr. Demosthenes, 328,
655*
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and
Flaubert, 461, 689; and Spitteler,
529-31, 703; anti-Judaism, 460;
career, 389, 459, 688-9; hatred of
Germany, 366; love of Greece,
459-60, 462; misquotation, 614;
on Dionysus and Apollo, 388, 459;
paganism, 93, 460-1 ; pessimism,
432, 530.
nightingale, 61, 356-7, 53C3-i4 5i6-
17, 519, 70s.
Nijinsky, 176.
Nimes, 401.
Nimrod, 78.
Niobe, 78.
Nisard, D^sir6, Contre la litterature
facile, 683 ; Poetes latins de la deca^
dence, 441.
Njdla, 25.
No plays, 130.
noblemen (nobility, aristocracy), 127,
140, 170, 171, 17s. 180, 19s, 198,
226, 242, 274, 3ZI, 356, 358,
369. 383^307, 389, 390. 392, 402.
405, 406, 415, 42s, 476. 478, 493,
,633, 67s, 689. .
vofios HvOlkos, 141, 601.
Norman-French, 18, 19, 109-10.
Normans and the Norman Conquest,
47, 93, 109-10, 389*
North, Thomas, tr. Plutarch, 117, 126,
210, 211-14, 619, 623-4.
Northmen, 29, 39, 47, 353, 545* 573-
Northumbria and its dialects, 37, 47.
Norton, Gorboduc, 137.
Norway, 424, 569; its literature, 22.
Notker Labeo, 22, 571.
Notre-Dame cathedral, 60, 67, 363.
novel* miscellaneous classical influences
on, 5o-i, 335 337-8; miscellaneous
examples, 89-91, 256,
281, 290, 428, 435, 551, 682; on
ChristianiP ?rd na"?nisrn, 462-5. origms: clia; ic-c'-sKctc-'.s, 192;
essays, 192; Greek educational
ideals, 336, 339, 341; Greek and
Roman epics, 335, 338, 339, 341,
343-4, 487; Greek romances, 170,
335-8, 339-40, 34i 343-4; satire,
308; stones of contemporary life,
89-91, 169, 340. realistic, 533-4, 691, 696;
romantic, 440, 442.
novus ordo seclorum, 399.
Numa, 336, 395. f
numbers, mystic, 524.
numismatics, 474, 691.
Nuttall, 123.
nymphs, 21, 86, 139-40, 153, 162,
163, 165-8, 176, 356-7, 416, 442-3,
456, 507, 541, 697.
Nythart, Hans, 121.
Oberon, 196, (204).
Obey, Andr6, Le Viol de Lucrece, 704.
OBrien, Justin, ix, 704.
obscenity, 299, 304-S, 5^2, 537, 642.
occultism, 518.
Ochakov, 328.
Octavia, 13 1.
Octavian, see Augustus,
ode, classical form, 291, 309, 546; definition,
239 ; meaning of the name,
219, 221, 230, 233, 236-7, 240. t^es: Anacreontic, 221, 228-9,
233, 235, 247, 430-1, 632; Greek,
430-1 ; Horatian, 225-8, 230, 238
41, 244-50, 252-3, 413, 414, ^3,
631, 633, 634-6, 637, 678, 680;
Pindanc, 221-5, 225-8, 230-44,
250*^, 254, 376-8, 4II-3C2, 54L
627-38; subordinate types, 240-3,
24s.
odelette, 632.
Odysseus (Ulysses), his name, 400,
696; at Troy, 197, 534, 575, 6od;
619; character, 74, 273, 449, 524,
534, 575 ; damnation, 79; murder,
50, 534; palace, 272; return and
conflict with suitors, 273, 506, 512-
13; son Telegonus, 50, S3, 534; sop
Telemachus, 336-9, 506, 534; visit
to hell, (vii), 510, 514.
746 INDEX
Odysseus, wanderings, 1 51, 273, 337,
338, 449, 505-6, 511-12, 534, 580,
620; Circe, 139, 505, 510, 512;
Cyclops, 153, 273, 505-6.
Oedipus, the myth m general, vii, 56,
524-5,536; and the Sphinx, 535-
6, 539-40; and Tlresias, 514-15;
blinding, 373, 515, 525, 537, 539;
complex, 533-5; incest, 426, 523,
539, 704; sons, 56, 137, 535, 704.
Oenone, 450.
Oeser, 379.
Og, 315, 318.
Ohio, 399-400.
Ohthere, 41.
Oisin, 26 ; and see Ossian.
Old Testament, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 37,
46, 1 12, 149, 345, 385, 558, 594-5-
oligarchs, 424, 460 ; and see nobility.
Olympians, 150-1, 169, 362, 512,
529-30, 532, 605, 662; and see gods,
pagan, e
Olympic games, 233.
Olympic Theatre, 129.
Olympus, Mount, 529-30.
omens, 538.
ONeill, Eugene, Mourning becomes
Electra^ 526.
Onerio, 149, 605.
opera, 133, 140, 143; and Greek drama,
128, 133, 135, 139-40, 141-3, 336,
39*. 542; and tragedy, 128, 135,
141-3, 236, 297, 392, 532, 542;
baroque, 141-2, 175, 236, 240-1,
290, 293, 296-7, 368, 392; English,
240, 175-6; German, 58, 141, 368-9,
542; Italian, 58, 128, '133, 135, 366;
nmeteenth-centur>% 58, 175, 448,
542; pastoral, 135, 139-40, 175-6;
revolutionary, 175, 392; sacred, 175;
twentieth-century, 175-6, 532, 699.
Opera buildings, 130, 598.
Ophelia, 177, 208, 216.
Oppian, 189.
optimispa, 308, 424.
oracles, 209, 234.
oral poetry, 564,
Oratoire, order of the, 393,
oratorio, 241.
oratory, 227; Greco-Roman, 1% 19,
I 05, 122-3, 267, 280-1, 323-6,
333^5* 348, 397-^8, 552, 582;
modern, based on Greco-Roman,
19-^0, 122, 290-1, 32a"-3S, 390,
396, 397**9 657; modem, not based
on Greco-Roman, 267, 280, 332;
modern, in Latin, 12, 122, 657.
orchestral music, 240-1, 290. 383, 392.
Orcus, 148, 566.
Oresme, Nicole, 107, 109, 119, 525.
Orestes, 532, 538, 539.
organ, 296.
Orientalism, 435, 454, 457, 502-3,
688; and see East.
Origen, 640.
Orlando, 145.
Orontes, 152.
Orosius, History against the Pagans^
40-1, 572, 578.
Orpheus, I356, 139, I74, 357, 402-3,
452, 51 1, 535, 580, 586.
Orphism, 77.
Ortelius atlas, 625.
orthodoxy, 326.
Osiris, 523.
Osier, Sir William, on education,
490-1, 494, 694.
osmosis, 202, 389, 615.
Osric, 195*
Ossian, 26, 350, 356, 375, 435, 668.
Ostrogoths, 41, 54, 146, 346, 557.
Othello, 57, 125, 358, 538, 614.
Our Town (Wilder), 130.
Ovid, and Vergil, 59, 67, 82, 587;
career, character, and exile, 59, 98,
199; imitations and influence, 55-6,
57-62, 63, 65-7, 156, 167, 186, 189,
203-7, 214-15, 240, 316, 380-1, 393,
400, 402, 511, 514, 551, 579~8i,
582, 620-2, 650, 667, 673, 675,
699-700. works: The Art of Love^ 59, 60, 62,
65-6, 99, 205, 581, 667; Cures for
LovBj 65, 99; Fastis 99, 204, 581,
620; HeroideSy 62^ 79, 98-9, 102,
I2S, 205-6, 433, 537, 580, 581,-593.
620, 621; Loves
y
60, 96, 125, 204,
636, 651; MedeOy 59; Metamorphoses
y 59-62, 68, 79, 91, 96, 98,
102, 116, 141, 149, 153, t86, 203-7,
419, 510-H, 580-1, 59, 601, 603,
604-5, 619-22, 679, 699-700 ; Tristia
{Laments from the Black Sea), 125,
435-
Ovid Moralized, 62, 69, 124, 522, 581,
597-
Oxford Classical Texts, 470, 498.
j
Oxford English Dictionary, 469, 646.
j Oxford University, ii, 82, 136, 283,
2595, (327), 34L 344, .363, 418-19,
490, 494-5 518, 639, 456.
Oxus, 486.
oxymoron, 165,
Ozell, 315, 652.
Padua, 95, 134, 618.
Paganini, Niccolo, 432.
pagans and paganism, Greco-Roman,
40, 70, 72, 263-4, 353, 449, 453, 455,
456-7, 462, 464-5, 547, 575, 640,
INDEX 747 '
676; modem, 85, 88, 89-90, 91,
92-3, 169, 2478, 354, 362-3, 377,
404, 429, 439, 449, 453, 455'62,
464, 547, S6i, 589, 676, 680;
Mohammedan, 49, 148-9, 150, 154,
351, 607 ; others, 455 ; and see barbarians,
savages,
pageants, religious, 601.
paideiUy 395, 410, 552.
painting, 227, 269, 280, 417, 493, 663;
baroque, 176, 269, 290-1, 512, 614;
Greco-Roman, 373; medieval, 10;
modern, 176, 448, 502-4, 518,
531-2; oriental, 502-3; Renaissance,
15, 21, 140, 366.
palaces, 290-1, 366, 368.
palaeography, (468-9), 576.
Palamedes, 53, 575.
Paleario, Aomo, 639.
Palestine, 5, 36, 104, 403, 454, 556;
and see Judea,
palimpsest, 681.
Palladio, angel, 605; architect, 129,
366-7.
Pallas, see Athene.
Pamela, 340-1, 342, 658.
Pan, 139-40, 152, 163, 169, 171, 174,
450, 521, 611-12, 697.
Panaetius, 665.
Pandarus (Pandaros), 55, 100, 150,
195, 197, 577, 593-
Pandemonium, 150, 152, 605, 606,
701.
Pandora, 528.
panem et ctrcenses
^
306.
Pantagruel, exploits, 182-3; meeting
with the Limousin student, 108;
name, 182; voyage, 57.
Panthagruel, 182, 615.
Pantheon, 401 ; Pantheon, 397.
Pantisocracy, 389.
Pantops, 401.
Panurge, 183, 185, 615.
Paolo and Francesca, 79.
Papiamento, 13.
papyri, 52, 468, 517* 556, 660.
Paradise, 33, 149, 152, 160, 438, 571,
paradoxes, 304, 323, 41 1.
paragraph-structure, 19, 102, 323, 325,
332-4-
.
.
parallelisms, 202, 328, 399, 657.
parasites, 138, 600,
Parca and Farque^ 508.
parens patriae^ 672.
Parini, Giuseppe, 428; The Day,
315-16, 653; odes, 315.
Paris, city, 62, 82, 89, 129, 144, 152,
318, 320, 391, 396, 401, 439, 578,
648; Opera, 130; University, ii,
182, 231, 439, (644).
Paris, prince of Troy, 99, 144, 273,
537, 580, 649, 704.
parks, 296, 369.
Parliament, 116, 328-9, 492.
Parnasse contemp'brain, Le, 439.
Parnassians, 439-53, 454, 5i8, 522,
683, 695, 697*
Parnassus, 254, 439-53, 490.
parody and mock-heroic writing,
216, 303, 517; of epic, 270, 277,
281, 285, 307, 309, 314-15, 320,
342-3, 600, 646, 651-2; of Greek
mythology, 414; of Pindaric lyric,
633, 638; of religious rites, 303-4,
308 ; of romances of love and
heroism, 58, 290, 307, 342-3, 512,
659; of ?C4.
Paros and s'' 684.
Pars, Antiquities of Ionia, 370.
Parthenias, 584.
Parthenon, 361, 413, 416, 677.
Pascal, Blaise, 261, 281, 325, 326, 641.
Pasiphae, 527.
pastor, 173.
Pastoral Poetry, Drama, ani>
Romance, definition and origin,
162-3; function, 165-6; Greco-
Roman pastoral, 86, 162-3, 244-5,
280, 309, 534, 611-13; pastoral
drama and opera, 128, 133, 135,
139-40, 166, 174-6, 599, 601, 618-
19; pastoral life, 162, 166, 176,
612, 614; pastoral music and ballet,
176-7, 508 ; pastoral painting, 176-7
;
pastoral romance, 166-70, 337, 612;
pastoral songs, 177, 688.
pastourelles, 166, 601, 612.
Pater, Walter, 445, 446, 461, 525, 685;
Marius the Epicurean, 464-5, 516;
Studies in the History of the Renaissance,
445.
pater patriae, 399.
Patemo, Lodovico, 309,
patois, see dialects.
patriarch of Constantinople, 6-
patriotism, 394-5, 418, 425, 549, 681.
Patroclus, 23, 320.
patronage, 309.
Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll, Real-Encychp^
ie, 498.
Pausanias, 184.
Paynell, T., 117. ^
pearl as symbol of baroque, 289, 35^
peasants, 164, 166, 171, 35^, 394> 409
473-4, 478.
Pecksniff, Mr., 444.
pedantry, in the Battle of the Books,
zBt, 284-6, 288; in Browning,
686: in the French languag:e,
330, 655-6; in Milton, 159-61; in
748 INDEX
Rabelais, io8, 178, 199, 595; in
Shakespeares characters, 171, 199,
218; in teaching and scholarship,
407, 481, 490-3, 494-6, 693-4; m
the use of classi^l allusions, 158,
302, 448. ^
Peele, 121.
Pegasus, 316, 604.
Pelagius, 36.
Peletier du Mans, Jacques, tr. Horace,
125, 247; tr. Odyssey, i~2, 114.
Peloponnese, 163.
Pembroke College, Oxford, 295.
Penelope, 505, 511, 534 620.
Penthesilea, 155, 607.
Perdita, 195.
P^r^s, J. B., How Napoleon never
existed, 522.
Perez de Oliva, Feman, 120, 134.
Peri, 141, 601.
periodicals, 471, 685.
peripeteia, 459.
periphrases, 234, 404, 632, 643.
Perizonius, Animadversiones htstoricae,
690.
Perrault, Charles, 269, 376-7,
379-81, 282, 287, 291, 296, 645;
The Age of Louts the Great, 280;
fairy-tales, 276; Les Murs de Troye,
641; Parallel betzveen the Ancients
and the Moderns, 271, 280-1.
Perrault, Claude, Les Murs de Troye,
641,
Perrault, Pierre, tr. La secchia rapita,
645.
Persephone, 523.
Perseus, 153.
Persia and the Persians, 137, 371, 397,
423, 43i 455. 548.
Persius, editions, 309, 639, 650; influence
and imitations, 84, 189, 316,
309, 310-11, 315, 603, 650; translations,
125 ; work and style, 303, 311,
319..
personifications, 63-4, 149, 376, 432,
573, 637.
perspective, stage, 129; or see historical
perspective.
pessimism, 207-8, 316, 434, 431-3,
486, 530, 683, 703.
Peter the Great, 296,
^etit de Julleville, L., Histoire de la
langue et de la Uttiratme franfaise,
553f 578^ 580, 594. 595. 598, 650,
bSi, bss, 662, 665, 674, 691, 695.
Petrarch, career, character, and ideas,
81-3. 85-7, 88-9, 587-9; friendships
and influence, 82-3, 86-7, 89,
91 -Zf 95. lib, 1 18, 152, 431 . 433.
589; knowledge and love of th#
classics, 83-6, 97, loi, 244, 555,
588, 593; love of Greek, 16, 84, 91,
588.
Petrarch, works, 93 ; Africa, 84-6, 87,
144, 147, 588; Canzoniere, 87, 244;
De ignorantia, 85, 588; Ecldgues, 86,
173, 588; letters, 82-4, 87, 588;
Rerum memorandarum lihri, 588-9;
Secret, 85, 86-7, 588; Triumphs, 84,
87. 433.
Petronius, character and title of
Satirica, 89, 304, 649; manuscripts
of the book, 8, 189, 258, 304, 559;
quoted, 515, 602, 684, 699; read
and adapted, 189, 304, 463, 651,
689.
Peyre, Plenri, Bihliographie critique de
rHellenisme en France de 1843 d
i8yo, 683, 686, 701; Le Classicisme
frangais, (302), 647-8, 649; LUnfluence
des littiratures antiques sur la
litterature frangaise moderne, 553;
Louis Menard, 686, 688, 701.
Pforta, 459.
Phaedra, (291), 53b-7, (538).
Phaedrus, 459.
Phaer, 115, 626.
Phaethon, 34, 199. 524-
Phalaris, his Epistles, 262, 383-4, 384.
Pharaoh, 334, 564.
pharmacopoeia, 206, 267.
Pharsalus, battle of, 578.
Ph^dre, 538; and see Racine,
Phelps, William Lyon, Autobiography
with Letters, 491-2, 494.
Philesius, M. Ringmann, 117.
Philip of Macedon, 338, 361, 597, 655.
Philip II of Spain, 122, 597.
Phillips, Edward, 633.
Philoctetes, 538.
Philologus, 471.
'
philology, 495, 522, 554. 694*
Philomela (Philomel), 61, 357, 377,
514, 546, 699*
Philomena, 61, 580, 698.
philosopher-kings, 181, 183.
philosophy, 85, 493; and literature,
173,182-3,306,353,359,468,519;
and nationalism, 435, 682; and progress,
261, 265, 274. *283; Arabic,
579- Greco-Roman, in itself, 43-4, 388,
394. 439. 459. 472, Soi , 547"9. 5S2
558, 570; and Christianity, 9, 40,
404, 464-5, 558, 560, 570, 640; and
satire, 303-4, 308; its influence on
modem thought and literature, 2,
9. 11. 20. 41-6, 5. 57. 66, 67, 84-5,
109, 139. 167. 183-S, 188-93, 20s,
376, 380-1, 304-s, 348, 361, 369,
INDEX 749
388, 3945, 409-12, 417, 420, 439,

477, 492, 499, SOI, 522, 541-2, 543,

546-9, 570, 577, 600, 604, 671, 680;
translations of, 109, 118-20, 122-3.
philosojjhy, medieval, ii, 50, 66, 72,
124, 361.
Philosophy personified, 42-3, 45-6,
64-5, 86.
Philostratus, vii {Drink to me only is
from Ep. 24, 30-1), 416, 574-6.
Philoxenus, 612.
Phocion, 395.
Phocylides, 30.
Phoebus, see Apollo.
Phoenicia, 371, 448, 574.
Phoenician characters^ 53.
phoenix, 32-5, 567.
Phoenix^ 32-5, 565.
Phrygians, 51.
Phyllis, Aristotles, (57), 578; Demophoons,
580; the name, 177, 409.
physics, 359, 493.
Piave, Forza del Destino^ 308.
picaresque tales, 169, 304, 307.
Picasso, Pablo, 256, 444; Joy of Life,
176.
Piccolomini, Alessandro, 604.
Pickwick, Samuel, Esq., P.P.M.P.C.,
638.
Picrochole, 183-5, 615.
Piedmontese dialect, 424.
Piers Plowman, 43, 63, 103,
Pilate, Pontius, 454.
Pilatus, Leontius, 16, 91.
Pindar, career and works, 220, 221-5,
22*6-8, 253-4, 627-8; imitations
and adaptations, 226, 228, 231-44,
247, 249, 250-2, 254, 286, 291, 376,
378, 386, 602, 628-33, 637-8, 676;
Imowledge and admiration of him,
245, 254, 271-2, 295, 364; translated,
245, 271-2.
Pindar, Peter, 638.
Pindaric odes, see odes,
Pindemonte, Ippolito, Epistle to Foscolo,
429.
Pirckheimer, W., 123.
Pisistratus, 384-5,
Piso, the brothers, 598.
Pistol, Ancient, 198.
Pitt, the younger, 328, 329, 397, 543.
6S4-5-
pity and terror, 136, 538, 583, 599.
Pius IX, 4SS, 687.
plagues, 89, 93, 191, 269, 351, 538.
Planudes, Maximus, 571.
plaster casts (or mirror copies, or
Chinese copies), 85-6, 144, 235,
239, 278, 288, 443, 485.
Plato, 52; his dialogue form, 41, 86,
(279, 336), 371, 525 ; his influence on
the modern world, 42, 58, 84-5, 100,
139, 183-4, 188-9, 202-3, 267, 324,
336, 367, 369-70, 375, 395, 410,
411-12, 419-26, 423, 501-2, 525,
545, 549, S7% 586, 588, 603, 615,
639, 655, 670, 675-6, 678, 696;
manuscripts, 84, 556 ; his philosophy
(excludmg its modem influence),
42-4, 77, 21 1, 264, 270, 304, 394,
410, 424, 501-2, 545, 547; translations,
118, 139, 419, 570, 670,
676. works : (.?) Axiochus, 1 1 8 ; Crito, 1 1 8
;
Defence of Socrates, 118; Gorgias,
42-3, (460), 689; Hipparchus, 118;
Ion, u8, 419; Laws, 189; lovepoems,
419; Lysis, 1 18; Menexenus,
419; Phaedo, 42-3, 118; Phaedrus,
459; Republic, 42, 118, 183, 419-20,
(460), 559. 574, 584, 689; Sympo-
Stum, 89, 1 1 8, 419, 42b; Ttmaeus,
43, 1 18.
Plautus, adaptations and translations,
133-4, I37'8, 141, 203, 214-15,
374, 599-600, 624-5 J ^ standard
and stimulus, 126, 128, 132, 135,
203, 374, 666; knowledge of his
work, 84, 132, 189, 191; translations,
lai, 133-4, 215, 374, 624-5,
666. works, 105, 131 ; Amphitryon, 121,
134, 138, 214-15, 624; The Bacchides,
121; The Boastful Soldier,
i34j 138, 600, 624; The Brothers
Menaechmus, 121, 133-4, 214-15,
624-5; Casket Comedy, 136;
The Ghost Comedy, 136, 625; The
Little Carthaginian, 136; The Pot
Comedy, 121; The Prisoners, 136,
666; Stichus, 121.
players, strolling, 140.
plebeians, 197, 402, 460.
Pleiad of Alexandria, 630.
P16iade, 123, 134, 171, 231-2, 233,
235-6, 247, 599, 630.
Pleningen, Dietrich von, 117, lao.
Pliny the elder, Natural History, 125,
184, 189, 217, 421, 569, 603, 665.
Pliny*the younger, 9, 189, 400-1, 568.
Plotinus, 430, 432.
Plutarch, read and adapted, 184,,
188-9, 191, i97 ^03, 2x0-14, 356,
368, 393-5 401-2, 408, 4241 596,
600, 603, 617, 623, 650, 670-1, 680;
translated, 117, 119, 126, 210-14,
619, 650.
Pluto, 148, (152), 580.
Pluviose, 396.
Bodsnap, Mr., 340, 444.
750 INDEX
Poe, Edgar Allan, 433, 440-1, 507. works: The Gold-Bug
^
(97); MS.
found in a Bottle^ 52, 97 ; The Raven,
628-9; Helen, y, 440-1.
poeme, 109, 595.
poHe, S9S
poetry, no.
poetry, as release from life, 519;
classical v. romantic, 227; difficulty
of, 479; helplessness of poet, 515;
high functions and ideals, 127, 130,
177, 21 1, 439, 527, 545, 680; looking
back to past, 35, 447; in m3^h,
532-3 ; oriental, 379, 435 ; primitive,
364, 375, 544; prose, 35, 230, 256,
301, 342, 355, 403-4, 485.
Poggio Braccioiim, 15, 593, 599.
Poland, history and culture, 6, 257,
259, 427, 463, 545, 689; languages,
6, III, 556; literature, 19, ill, 135,
435, 463,.541.
Politian (Angelo Ambrogini), 1 71, 244,
295, 599; Orpheus, 135-6, 139, 174,
598-9, 601.
political action, 275, 477, 519, 543;
experience and wisdom, 9-10, 262,
265-6, 346, 550; institutions, 390,
477; literature and propaganda,
35-6, 39-41, 45-6, 134, 328, 372,
409-10, 534, 597, 662; philosophy,
388, 390, 467, 479, 493, 520, 681.
politics, words dealing with, 109.
Pollux, 520.
Polo, hlarco, 48.
Polonms, 128, 132, 217.
Pob-bius, 611-12.
Polynices, 56, (536), 580.
Polyphemus, 505, 698 ; andsee Cyclops,
polytheism, 456.
Polyxena, 52-3, 575-
Pompeii, 462, 468.
Pompey, 476, 546, 578, 584, 627.
Pomponius Laetus, 639.
poor in spirit, the, 484.
pope, the, 6, (10), 36, 88, 149, 455-6,
587, 589; rival popes, 48; temporal
power, 356, 615.
Pope, Alexander, 159, 239, 284, 290-1,
316, 321, 355, 412-13, 677. works: The Dunciad, 281, 284^ 286,
3^5, 493, 652; Epistles, 290, 315,
658; Essays, 315; hnitatwns of
Horace, 290-1, 315, 652; The
Messiah, 295; Ode on St. Cecilia's
Bay, 170S, 633; Ode on Solitude,
249 ; The Rape of the Lock, 270, 315,
652; satires, 104, 286, 290-x, 314,
315, 31:6, 317-21, 654; tr. Homer,
2S6, 416, 479-80, 652.
Pope, Governor, 400.
population increase, 255.
Porphyry, 430, 432, 676, 701.
Person, Richard, 467.
Portia, 198.
portraits in the classical mapner, 396,
664.
Port-Royal, 294. ,
Portugal and the Portuguese, 424,
459; history, 144, 15 1-2, 602; language,
6, 158-9, 289, 661; literature,
20, 134, 144, 15 1-2, 158-9,
168, 633; and see Camoens.
Poseidon, 371 ; and see Neptune.
Poulenc, Francois, 699.
Pound, Ezra, work and influence,
501-3, 518, 700. works: Cantos, 256, 501, 503, 511,
698; Homage to Sextus Propertius,
700; How to Read, 700; Lustra,
699; Papyrus, 517, 699; Personae of
Ezra Pound, 501, 516; Polite Essays,
700.
Poussin, Nicolas, 290, 614, 665, 670.
Praeneste, 96, 590-1.
praetorian guards, 350.
Prague University, ii.
prelude as a musical form, 290.
Premierfait, Laurent, 119.
Pre-Raphaelites, 445.
Priam, 50, 52, 151, 204, 261, 575, 580,
620.
Priapea, 651, 667.
priests, 173, 182, 309, 347, 564-5, 573,
578, 662, 688, 701.
primitives, 166, 192, 268, 273, 523.
printing, 17, 21, Ii3~i4, S^i, (668).
Prior, Matthew, parody of Boileau,
633.
Prioress, her motto, 592.
Proclus, 675-6, 701.
Procne, 61, 514, 699.
programmes, 690.
progress, the idea of, 3, 265-6, 279-80,
281-3, 288, 43, 455--6, 493, 552,
671, 681, 688.
projections of wishes, 523-4.
Prometheus, 357, 415, 512, 521-2,
526, 528-9, 530, 535, 538, 671, 677,
703.
propaganda, 267; educational, 498,
554; political, geopolitical; religious
and moral, 444, 559, 574-5, 594-5,
701.
Propertius, 68, 496, 694; read and
adapted, 189, 316, 380, 402, 433,
651, 667; translated, 375, 700.
property, 255, 395-
prophecy, 73.
prophets, Greek, 509, 514, 515-16;
Hebrew, 263.
INDEX 751
Propylaea, 664.
prose, 242, 322, 323, 479, 48s, 546;
English, 35-6, 40-1, 45-7, 59, 110,
415 ; French, 330-1, 657; Greek and
Latin^ 89, 242, 332-54 57; Italian,
89, 657 ;v. poetry, 35, 230, 256, 301,
34-2, 355, 403-4, 485; see
baroque.
prosody, 490, 497, 635.
Prospero, 201, 206, 301, 621.
Protesilaus, 574-5.
Protestantism, 36, 179, 187, 257, 259,
263-4, 352, 614, 701.
Proteus, 1 5 1, 437, 676.
Proust, Marcel, 66, 326, 535.
Provence, 48; language, 6, 518; literature
and culture, 48, 60, 61-2, 76,
93-4, 166, 219, 229, 533-4, 571,
580-1, 585.
proverbs, 310, 544.
provmcialisms, 330.
Prudentius, 80, 340, 569; Soul-battle,
64.
Prufrock, Mr., 515.
Prussia, 296, 394, 557.
Psalms, the, 247, 263, 545, 635,
649.
pseudomorphosis, 293.
Psyche, (453), 524, 661.
psychical blocks, 414; forces, 523-5.
psychoanalysis and psychology, 45,
192-3, 202, 264, 267, 315, 329, 359,
380, 467, 493, 503, 523-5, 532,
535-6, 54X, 584*
Ptolemaic astronomy, 203.
Ptolemy Philadelphus, 594.
Publicola, 400.
Puccini, 448.
Puck, 325, 621.
Pulci, Bernardo, 124.
Pulci, Luigi, Morgante, 182, 615.
Pulcinella, 141.
Punch, Mr., 141.
puns, 308, 622, 626, 704.
puppet shows, 140.
Purcell, Henry, 178, 290; Dido and
Aeneas, 291 ; King Arthur, 297; Ode
for St. Cecilia^s Day, 240.
purgatory, 44, 72, 75-6, 78, 87, 263,
585, 586. *
Puss in Boots* 276.
Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre-C^cile,
442, 518.
Pygmalion, 62, 68, 207, 582.
Pyramus and Thisbe, 60-1, 91, (207),
546, 579-80; the poem, 60, 580.
Pyrrho, 615.
Pyrrhus of Epirus, 615, 671.
Pythagoras, 203, 205.
Python, 141, 148, 530.
quadrivium, 570.
quantitative scansion, 246.
Quarles, Francis, Shepherds^ Oracles,
613*
Quasimodo, (440), 674.
Quellenforschung, (469), 499, 695.
Querelle, see Battle of the Books.
quests, 64, 196, 506.
Quickly, Mistress, 196.
Quinault, 298.
Quintilian, 189, 682.
Quintus Fabius Maximus, 154.
Quintus Smymaeus, 673.
Quixote, see Don (juixote.
quotations from Greco-Roman literature,
the art of quoting, 157-9, 408-
1 1 ; as a decoration in poetry, 60, 78-
9 85-6, 99, loi, 199-200, 204, 216-
17, 248, 310-11, 41X, 5x^6, 519, 571,
585-6, 609-10, 651 ; as a decoration
in prose, 44, 167, 184-5, 188-91,
295, 308, 329, 360, 397^, 424, 492,
505, 510, S7I, 577, 579; collections
of quotations, loi, 184, 192, 394,
579> 673; quotations of lost poets,
220.
Rabelais, Frangois, character and
career, 178-85, 192-3, 196, 3XO) 3x i,
320, 470, 615; humour, 132, 178,
182-3, 185, 614-15; knowledge and
use of the classics, 57, 105, 132, 183,
184-S, 188, 199, 304, 31 1, 368, 599,
615-16. works : Gargantua and Pantagruel,
181, 182, 183-5, 307, 615; tr. Herodotus,
1 1 6.
Racan, Honor6, 280; Vie de Malherbe
quoted, 224, 627.
Racine, Jean, education and attitude
to the classics, 277, 281, 294, 362,
402-3, 447, 642; influence and
reputation, 280-1, 298, 302, 375,
405, 407, 425-6, 628, 674; synthesis
of classical, Christian, and modem
elements, 104, 128, 232, 279, 291,
293~4i 302, 345, 362; 380, 405,
425. works, 66, 200, 279, 290, 297-8,
3ocf, 380, 402-3, 447, 643; Androniaque,
648; Athalie, 279; commentaries
on Pindar and Homer,.
295, 642 , Esther, 279 ; Iphtgeme, 279,
294, 298; letters, 642; Phkdre, 279,
(291), 293-4, 538, 648.
radio as a medium of drama, 143, 256,
265.
Ramolds, John, 656.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 603-4.
Bamus, Petrus, 617, 639.
752 INDEX
Ramuz, C. F., i66.
Ranc6, Father, 264.
Rank, Otto, 702.
Ranke, Leopold (later von Ranke),
473-4. 477. 690-2.
Raphael, archangel, 249; artist, 16,
702.
Rastell, John, tr. Lucian, 124.
Rastell, William, tr. Caesar, 117.
Ravel, Maurice, 502; Daphnis and
Chloe^ 176.
Readers Digests, 98, 100, 184, 216,
569, 592, 634. ,
realism, 303-S, SOQ-xo, 316, 319-20,
444, 532.
Reason personified, 64, 363.
Reformation, 93, 257, 367, 455-
Regnier, Mathurin, reputation, 280,
318, 653 ; work, 312-13, 320, 650-1.
Reik, Theodor, 702.
religion, and literature, 543; freedom
and oppression in, 352-3, 423, 437,
462-3, 678; history of, 477-8, 521,
524; Greco-Roman, 423, 456-7,
469, 477-8, 520-2, 698, 701 ; and see
Christianity, paganism.
reminiscence, doctrine of, 44, 412.
Remiremont, Council of, (60), 579.
Remus, 10, 155, (667).
Renaissance, general meaning, 2, 4,
II, 14-15, 81, 105, 178-9, 182, 193,
255, 257-60, 289, 359-60, 367-9,
389-90, 434; art, 15, 16, 21, 179,
289; Carohngian, 38, 592; culture
and education, viii, 2, 4, 21, 54,
80-1, 83, 88, 91-2, 95, loi, 105,
107, 109, 111-12, 1 18, 126, 129,
183-4, 186-91, 194-6, 216-18, 228,
231-2, 262, 264-5, 276, 287, 306,
32X, 324, 330, 333, 346, 348, 360,
375. 470, 490, 498, 543, 546, 552,
554, 569, 578, 587, 591, 595-6, 601,
604, 616, 641; literature, 15-21, 47,
85*^, 104, 1 13-14, 104-218 (especially
104-6, 126, 127-33,
147, 156-8, 161, i66^z, 178-81,
183-4, 187-93, 200-3), 229-30,
231-2, 346, 270, 299-301, 306, 309- I
13. 315. 321, 324. 328, 333, 433,
5x3, 54X. 546, 55X. 599, 624t 646,
650; religion, 93, 179-80, 187, 362;
'
social and political life, 21, 58, 178-
81, 198, 207-8, 296, 376, 442, 448,
'
598, 599*
Renan, Ernest, and France, 687 ; anti-
Judaism, 454; style, 498, 695. works: Les Religions de Iantiquit6*,
701 ; The Origins of Christia- '
nity^ 454; Frayer on the Acropolis
,
454, 687.
Renaudot, Theophraste, 640.
reproduction, processes of, 523.
republic
j
398, 546.
Republic, First French, 361, 396, 398;
Second, 449.
republicanism, Greco-Roman impulses
in, 356, 361-2, 390-1, 392-5

427. 456, 475-7, 546.

*
research, 467, 470-1, 495-6, 499.
Residenz, 130.
Reuchlm, Johann, 114.
revenge in drama, 132, 198, 207.
Revett, Nicholas, Antiquities of Athens
and Antiquities of loniay 370.
revolution, age of, 93, 176, 244, 250,
252, 254, 276, 289, 292, 355-436
(especially 355-6o, 434-6), 44o,
464, 466, 473, 480, 498, 528, 541,
662-3, 677, 681, 688.
revolutions, industrial, 255; political,
358, 543 ; religious, 521 ; Roman, 88
;
and see America, French Revolution.
revue, 303.
Reynard the Fox, 181, 306.
rhapsodes, 385.
rhapsodies, poetic, 173, 420, 633.
Rhemisches Museuniy 471.
rhetoric, Greco-Roman, 19-20, 59, 96,
102, 1 12-13, 163, 184, 218, 267,
323-4. 332-4. 337. 348, 421, 430,
469, 480, 483, 485 ; modern, 59*, 184,
322-35, 348, 397-8, 425;
oratory.
Rhodes, 372, 665.
rhyme, 219, 220, 223, 235-6, *238,
300, 317.
Riccius, Stephen, 124.
Richard of Cirencester, 577.
Richard I, 618.
Richard III, 132.
Richard IEv^que, 641.
Richardson, Samuel, 340-1. works: Clarissa Harlowey 341;
Pamelay 335-6, 340-1, 342, 658;
Sir Charles Grandisony 341.
Richelieu, 278, 655.
ridentem dicere ueruniy 305.
Rienzo, Cola di, 88, 589.
Rilke, Rainer Maria, ^6, 518.
Rimbaud, Arthur, 438.
Rinaldo, 153, 608.
Ringmann (Philesius), M., 117,
Rinuccinj, Ottavio, Daphne, 141, 175,
60X.
Rio de Janeiro, 9, 459.
Rippe, Guillaume, 121.
ritual, patterns of, 524, 701-2.
roads, Roman, 291, 548, 555.
Robert, King, 88-9.
INDEX 753
Robespierre, Maximilien, 393, 397-8,
401-2.
Robin and Marion^ 166.
Robin Hood, 175, 612.
Robinson, Crabb, 685.
Robortelli, 125, 142.
rococo ^art and literature, 287, 315,
360, 396, 522, 581, 652, 697.
Rodgers, Richard, Oklahoma!, xy6.
Rodomonte, 154-5.
Roger of Blois, 641; of Lille, 578.
Rohan, Mgr ie Due de, 321.
Roland, The Song of, (28), 4S-9, 154,
563, 607.
Roland, Mme, 393, 3 95-
Roland the hero, 28, 49, 145, 154, 196,
603 ; the revolutionary, 397.
Romaic language, 6, 661.
roman, 573.
Roman Catholic church, see Christianity,
Church.
Romance, i62~70, 337, 339, 355;
meaning of the word, 49, 163,
343, 355, 573, 612, 661; plot, 64,
97, 164, 165, 343-4; style and
structure, 50, 53, 164, 165, 167, 343,
582. groups: English, 94; European,
22; French, 48-69, 90, 302, 615;
Greek, vii, 51-3, 56-7, 94, 124,
IS5, 163-5, 166, 169-70, 214, 309,
3357, 341, 343-4, 372, 533, 5^5,
589, 612, 618; late Latin, 56;
modem, 612; Spanish, 169. types: of chivalry, 48-56, 90, 146,
169, 307, 337, 544, 612, 615; of
love, 60-9, 91, 302, 309, 322, 337,
340-1, 341-4, 658; picaresque, 304,
307; of travel and adventure, 56,
335-40.
Romance of Aeneas, 55-6, (197).
Romance of Alexander, 56, 578.
Romance of the Rose, 58, 62-9, 94, 98,
99, 147, 30s, 573, 651.
Romance of Thebes, 56, 578, 589.
Romance of Troy, 50-5, 56, 197.
Romance languages, 6, 12, 18, 19, 49,
59, 107, no, 661.
Romansch dialect, 6, 13.
romantic*, meaning of the word,
227-8, 355r9, 573, 612; contrast
with ckssicar, 375, 390, 392,
441-2, 551, 628, 682, 702; movement,
369, 389, 440 441-2, 690;
poets, 157, 412, 514, 573*
Rome, army, 346, 350-1, 396; city,
9-10, 16, 36, 38, 46, 52, 53, 62, 73,
88, 90, 96, 132, 135, 176, 232, 259,
268, 291, 312-13, 345, 352, 363,
366-7, 370, 380, 391, 399, 403,
5076
422-3, 463, 527, 595, 606, 639, 660,
665, 667, 680, 684, 690, 700; culture,
3-6, 27, 37, 60, 70, 75, 88, los, 130,
163, 165, 184-5, 232, 265, 275, 280,
291-2, 304, 323, 335, 337, 346, 348,
353, 371, 3891^396, 408, 438, 441,
448, 477, 492, 533, 544"5, 547-9,
550, 553, 55^, 568, 602, 670, 675,
677, 689; emperors, 351, 356, 362,
393, 475, 520-1, 578, 691, 703.
Rome, empire, 7, 9-10, 74-5, 194, 291,
329, 344-54, 361, 435, 454, 462-5,
474-8, 544-S, 547-9, 557-8, 568,
584, 618; division of, 5, 6, 14, 27,
81, 105, 348-9, 544-5, 557, 560;
eastern, 5-6, 16, 27, 347, 348-53^,
462, 545, 548, 560, 618, 661 ; fall of,
vii, I, 3-4, 7, 9-10, 22, 27-8, 37,
40-1, 129, 296, 344-54, 404, 462,
471-2, 546, 548, 557-8, 560, 568,
588, 660-1; Holy Roman, 46, 74-
5, 310, 694; western, 5, 22, 27,
48, 105, 348-9, 462, 5.^5, 548, 556,
560. law, see law; literature, see Latin,
classical; Roman nation, 24, 54,
197-8, 225, 253, 279, 294, 390-1,
395, 415, 431, 456, 461, 516, 563,
566, 572, 600, 667, 671, 700; as
heirs of the Trojans, 51-4, 144, 154,
372, 511, 576, 665; republic, 88,
137, 194, 197-8, 326, 356, 361-2,
390, 391, 393, 394, 395, 398, 399,
401, 406, 414, 473-5, 546, 572, 618,
670, 691 ; triumphs, 87, 346.
Rome, the estate, 399-400.
Romulus, 5, 10, 155, 336, 346, 400,
520, (667), 672.
Romulus Augustulus, 5.
Rondibilis, 614.
Ronsard, Pierre de, character, career,
and friends, 83, 231-3, 246, 247-8,
312, 629, 635-6; influence and
reputation, 235-7, 541, 632; knowledge
and use of the classics, 190,
200, 228, 231-5, 600^ 601-2, 629-32,
635, 641. works, 238, 245; ^Eclogues*, 17 1,
613; Folastries, 635; The Franciad,
54, 86, 144, 147, (161, 190), 235, 588,
66>i-2, 633 ; Hymns, 630; Odes, 228,
232, 233-5, 247, 601-2, 629, 631-2,
636; tr. Aristophanes, 12 1, 597;
sonnets, 635.
Roosevelt, Franklin D., {113), 335-
Ros, Sir Richard, La Belle Dame sans
mercie, 416.
Rosalind, 195, 198, 237.
Rose, 62-3, 66, 69, 581.
rose-wmdows, 31, 64.

754 INDEX
Rostandj Edmond, Cyrano de Bergerac
and The Distant Princess^ 58.
Rostovtzeff, Michael, 351.
Rotrou, 280.
Rouen Cathedral, 504.
Rousseau, Jean-Jac(!;^ues, ideas and
reading, 170, 350, 392, 393-5i 670-
I ; influence and Mends, 170, 191,
392, 424.
works: Daphnis and Chloe, 175;
Discours sur les sciences et les arts,
395, 670-1 ; Discourse on Inequality,
394-5; The Social Contract, 395; tr,
Livy, 672; The Village SooJisayer,
175.
Royal Society, 276; R.S.P.C.A., 638.
Rubens, 152, 178, 269, 290.
Ruceliai, Giovanni, The Bees, 124.
Rue de Brutus; de Fabius; de Scaevola,
396.
Ruggiero, 151, iS34> 606.
Ruin, The, 556, 564.
ruins, 366, 536, 564, 677.
Rule of St. Benedict, 7.
rules m poetry, 137-8, 142-3, 146,
292, 298, 301-2, 357-8, 361, 375,
4056, 442-3, 604; and see unities.
Rumania and its language, 6, 59, 661.
runes, 3-4, 30-1, 194, 384, 556, 567.
Rushworth Gospels, 47.
Russia, art, music, and architecture,
130, 435, 448, 664; Christianity, 6,
349, 545 557, S^i; country and
people, 12, 191, 424, 431, 527, 528,
545, 664; Greco-Roman influence
on its culture, 6, 19, 349, 545;
languages, 5, 6, 19, 106, 328, 545,
557; literature, 19, 22, 51, 542; politics,
6, 51, 328, 351, 390-1,431, 463,
561, 662.
Ruthweli Cross, 31.
Sacadas, 601.
Sachs, Hans, 368.
Sackviile, Gorboduc, 137,
Sacre-CcEur, church of, 439.
sacre rappresentazioni, 601.
agas, 22, 25, 26.
saints and sainthood, 26, 33, 36, 268,
279, 290, 36s, 396, 472, f7S;
statues of saints, 374, 397, 440.
St. Ambrose, Hexaemeron, 32, 567.
Sc. Andrews University, ix, ii.
St. Antony, 185, 461-2.
St. Augustine of Canterbury, 36, 40,
568.
St. Augustine of Hippo, attitude to
Greco-Roman culture, 9, 10, 40, 73,
a63-4 557, S^; influence, 85-7,
188, 462, 592, 655-6; religious
doctrines, 36; style, 655-6.
St. Augustine of Hippo, works : City
of God, 10, 40, 188, 578; Commentary
on the Psalms, 681 ; Confessions,
9, 672.
St. Bartholomew, massacre of, 259,
639-
St. Benedict, 7, 576, 590.
St. Bernard, 48.
St. Cecilia, 240.
St. Columba, 36.
St. Cyril, 353, 557*
St. Evremond, Charles de Marguetel
de Saint-Denis, Seigneur de, 282,
645,
St. Francis, 181.
St. Gallen, 593.
Saint-Gelais, Octovien de, 115, 596.
St. George, 607-8.
St. Gregory Nazianzen, 656.
St. Helena, 30-1.
St. Ignatius Loyola, 259.
St. Jamess Library, 283-4; Square,
370.
St. Jerome. 264, 555, 557, 560, $69,
;.(S2 -3. 6jo
St. Jo'nn ilu^ Baptist, 455,
St. John Chrysostom, 655.
St. John the Divine, 145.
St. John the Evangelist, 579.
St. Julian the Hospitaller, 689.
St. Juliana, 30, 567.
Saint-Just, 393, 397, 399.
St. Louis, mystery of, 615.
St. Matthews Gospel, 8.
St. Maur, 53, 576.
St. Methodius, 353.
St. Patrick, 26, 36.
St. Paul, 9, 78, 454, 463 ; his epistles,
26, 545-
St. Pauls Cathedral, 345. f
St. Pauls School, 623-5,
St. Peter, 173, (456), 463.
St, Peters Church, 606.
St. Petersburg, 296.
Saint-Pierre, Bemardin de, Paul and
Virginia^ 170.
Saint-Simon, due et pair, 320, 336, 647.
Saint-Sorlin, see Desmarets.
St. Stephens Green, sqp-
St. Theresa, Conceptos del amor de
Dios, 259.
St. Thomas Aquinag, 14, 77, 79-80,
569, 696, 699.
Sainte-Beuve, 185, 346, 683.
Sainte-Maure, see Benoit.
Salamanca University, ii,
Salel, Hugues, 114.
Salerno University, ii.
INDEX 7SS
Saliat, Pierre, ii6, 189.
Sallust, read and quoted, 189, 393,
578, 655, 679; translated, ii7-i8.
Salutati, Coluccio de*, 18, 83.
Samson, 295, 510, 524, 648.
Samuel,*Book of, 24.
Samxon, Jean, 1 14.
San^he2, F., 617.
Sandford, James, 124.
Sannazaro, Jacopo, Arcadia^ I67-8,
169-70, 171, 172, 337*
Sanskrit, 478.
Santillana, Marques de, (iii), 596, 635.
Sapphic stanza, see metre.
Sappho, 220, 225-6,415,432,458,517.
Saracens, 49, 145, 346.
Sardinia: dialect, 6; king, 425.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Flies, 532, 538,
539; Nausea, 58.
Satan, 29, 74, 87, 150-1, iS57> I59,
(i73)> 364, 455, 521, (580); and see
Devil.
Satie, Erik, Gymnopedies, 532.
satire: form, 20, 67, 303, 305-6, 309,
546; meanmg of name, 303, 649;
metre, 316-17; purpose, 304-5, 421,
428; subjects, 304, 320-1; vocabulary,
318-20^ types: baroque, 290-1, 308, 313-
21, 322, 333, 339, 652; English, 104,
309-11, 313, 314-IS, 321, 652;
French, 281, 319-21, 650-
i; Greco-Roman, or classical*, 20,
66, 68, 184, 192-3, 281, 299, 303-S>
306, 307, 310-20, 322, 549, 649-52;
Italian, 309-10, 315-16, 425, 681;
medieval, 12, 50, 305"6, 31a, 438;
Menippean, 41, 303-4, 3ii, 57
J
miscellaneous, 182, 281, 339, 561,
in drama, 136, 627, in pastoral, 173,
613; philosophical, 183, 33"'4*
Satyre Menippee, 3 1 1
.
satyric plays, 309, 419.
satyrs, i39'"4o, 148, 162, 174, 303, 521,
591, 697.
Saul, 78, 425-6.
savages, noble, 350, 393, 660; and see
barbarians, pagans.
Savile, Sir Henry, 118.
Savonarola, a6^, 455.
Saxo Grammaticus, 194, 556.
Saxon dialect, 559. terms, 330.
Saxons, 35, 36, 389, 568.
Scala theatre, 129.
scales, golden, 150.
Scaliger, Joseph Justus, 639.
Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 301-2; Foetice,
642.
Scandinavia, 448, 545, 563*
Scarlatti, Alessandro and Domenico,
291.
Scarron, Paul, Typhon and Vergil
travestied, 270.
Sceptic philosophy and philosophers,
184, 189, 270, 304, 465.
Schaidenreisser, *Simon, 114, 120.
Schelling, 701.
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich,
knowledge and use of the classics,
ZSI, 359, 367. 376-7> 382, 614;
reputation and friends, 377-8, 380. works: ballads, 376; The Bride of
Messina, 376 ; The Cranes of Ibycus,
376; Dttkyrafnb, 251; The Gods of
Greece, 25 x, 376-7, 676; odes, 251,
376-7; The Ring of Folycrates, 364;
To Joy, 251, 376; Wallensteins
Lager, 308 ; Xenia, 382.
Schinkel, K. F,, 664,
Schhemann, Hemrich, 83, 468, 690-1.
Schofferlm, B., 118. *
scholarship, classical, 7-8, 11-14, 15-
19, 28, 34, 37-9 , 39-41, 45-7, 53-4,
57, 62, 67, 70-2, 79-80, 81-5, 91-2,
95-101, 104-26, X27, 135, 141-3,
157-61, 180, 181-2, 184-5, 188-91,
197-203, 2 1 6-1 8, 230-2, 237, 248,
251, 257-9, 263-4, 277, 283-s, 287-
8, 293-6, 298, 306, 308-1 X, 324,
327, 328-30, 339, 342, 345-7, 348
9, 355, 360, 364, 367-9, 369-76,
379, 3^3-6, 390-3t, 392-5, 397-9,
400-1, 407, 409, 43C3-IS, 415-17,
418-22, 425, 428, 429-3^, 446-0,
457-8, 459, 463-4, 466-500, 5^8,
520-2, 542-7, S53-4, 557-8, 560,
565, 568-9, 577-8, 590-1, 595-6,
616, 638-9, 680-1, 694-s, 705.
Schonberg, Arnold, 256.
school, 639.
schoolbooks, Latin, 46, 216, 470, 568,
592, 625-6.
schools, 8, II, 14, 37, 40, 53, 105-6,
122, 127, 13s, 186, 201, 203, 216,
248, 257, 323, 334> 369, 390, 43:5,
466, 467, 470, 484, 490, 492, 493
568, 623, 624, 639, 686, 690, 705.
Schopenhauer, 432, 53o-
Schubert, songs, 58.
Schwarzenberg, Johann, Freiherr zu,
Schwarzerd, Philip, 587.
science, 261, 262, 275-6, 280-3, 350,
359, 377, 379, 388, 39S 439, 455,
472, 479, 490, 493, 495-6, 498-9,
527, 640; abstract, 2, 15; applied, i,
14-15, 184, 255, 264-6, 496, 549;
Bolivian, 435; experimental, 468;
Greco-Roman, 2, 180, 264, 281, 348,
756 INDEX
352, 604, 640; ideals of, 443, 4956;
love-making, 58, 65; medieval, 41,
455; methods of, 468-71, 495-6;
modem, i, 264, 265, 281, 549, 604,
640-1; physical, ^6, 468, 490-1;
Renaissance, 180, 183, 264.
Scipio Africanus, 63, 84-5, 400, (548),
581; and see Cicero : Dream of Scipio.
Scotland, country and people, 23, 31,
166, 424, 464, 543, 613; culture and
education, 350, 484, 493; history,
39, 425, 568; language, 55, no,
577; literature, 24-5, 219, 577; and
see Ossian, Scott.
Scott, Sir Walter, 340, 355, 412, 488.
Scriabin, 587.
Scud^ry, Madeleine de, 302; Clelia,
C66), (332), 337, 343, 654, 658.
sculpture, 227, 380, 518, 701; Greco-
Roman, 2, 369-74, 413, .sj 16-17,
422, 435, 436, 445, 458-9, 546, 661,
665, 677, 679; modern, 2, 15, 21, 78,
280, 290, 369, 373-4, 504, 532, 579,
664.
Scylla, 148, 534.
S^billet, Thomas, 120.
Second Sophistic, 51, 56.
Seeck, Otto, 351.
Segni, Bernardo, 123, 142.
Selden, 282.
Selve, George de, 117.
Sempronius, 400.
Senate, French and Latin-American,
391; Roman, 391, 398, 399, 476,
S6i; U.S., 362, 391, 399.
senatus consultuMy 396.
Seneca, career, 131, 207, 326; read
and imitated, 42, 44, 84, loo-r, 120,
126, 128, 132-3, 134, 137, 188, 189,
191, 198, 203, 207-9, 214, 294, 324,
326, 360, 367, 374, 410-11, 426,
571 591, 593, 598-9, 617, 622-3,
650, 654, 666, 670-1, 679; translated,
120, 122, 670. works: philosophical writings, 100
I, 126, 188-9, 191-2, 324, 410, 571,
593, 617; prose style, 323-4, 326,
410, 617, 654; Pumpkinificationj or
jfoke on the Death of Claudius
^
303-4,
649, 670; tragedies, 42, 84, 105,^131,
299, 301, 451, 570, 598-9, 622-3,
666, 679; verse style, 44, 134, 208,
570, 591, 598; Agamemnonj 122;
The Madness of Hereules, 122, 209,
624; Medea^ 122, (spurious), Octa^
via, 122, 131, 679; Phaedra, 209;
Thyestes, 122; The Trojan Women,
122.
Seneca, N.Y., 400,
Septuagint, (104-5), 556, 594"5-
seraphs, 149, 238, 240.
Serbs, 24.
serfs, see feudalism.
serials, 598.
sermons, 46, 304, 306, 308, 324, 329-
30, 332-3, 364, 682.
serventese, 76, 585.
Servius Sulpicius, 677.
Seurat, Georges, 51 8.
Sextus Empiricus, 189.
sexual repression and liberty, 63-4,
182, 361,423, 445-6, 449-50, 457-9,
523-5, 526-7.
Seyssel, Claude de, 117.
Sforza, Caterina, 155.
Shadwell, 243.
Shaftesbur>% the earl of, 370, 664.
Shakespeare, John, 614, 623.
Shakespeare, William, career and
character, 179, 614; education and
use of the classics, 86, 105, 116-17,
129, 132, 194-218, 236-7, 293, 340,
368, 415-18, 447, 617, 618-27;
reputation and rank as a poet, 128,
159, 241, 260, 364, 368, 375, 407,
415, 481, 545, 628, 658, 677; style,
18-19, no, 1 14, 481. works: 194, 447; qomedies, 174;
histories, 208; tragedies,. 104, 207,
208, 210-11, 232, 417, 544, 563,
623; Alls Well, 194; Antony and
Cleopatra, 126, 157, 197-8, 205-6,
210, 212-14, 272,415,618,621,627;
As You Like It, 140, 175, 194-5,
237, 612, 618-19; Comedy of Errors,
izi, 214-15, 217, 618, 624-5;
Coriolanus, 126, 197, 210, 618;
Cymheline, 195, 207, 618; Hamlet,
128, 132-3, 179-80, 194-5, 198, 208,
21 1, 216, 274, 299, 301, 538, 605;
Henry IV, 196, 208; Henry V, 130,
196, 533; Henry VI, 208, 217;
Julius Caesar, 126, 132, 197, 210,
211-12, 618, 624; King John, 208;
King Lear, 129, 133, 180, 196, 207,
301, (536), 538, 643 ; Loves Labour s
Lost, 17 1, 194, 199-200, 216, "237;
Macbeth, (87), 132-3, 180, 197, 206,
209, 21 1, 274, 299-300, 538, 623,
643; Measure for 194;
Merchant of Venice, 203, 618,
698; Merry Wives, 194, 619; Midsummer
Nights Dream, 61, 196-7,
204, 207, 607, 618; Much Ado, 618;
Othello, 57, 125, 180, 195, 200, 274,
538, 618; The Passionate Pilgrim,
620: Pericles, 618; The Rape of
Lucrece, 203-4, 216-17, 618, 704;
Richard II, 200; Richard III, 132,
208, 301, 623; Romeo and Juliet, 58,
INDEX 757
6i, 199, 205, 618; Sonnets, 58, 179,
194, 203, 205, 621, 636; Taming of
the Shrew, 136, 204-5, 618, 625;
Tempest, 194-5, 206, 301; Timon of
Athens, 197-8, 207-8, 210, 600, 618,
623 fTitus Andromcus, 61, 133, 207-
8, 618, 623; Trotlus and Cressida,
138, 195, 197, 618, 619; Twelfth
Night, 168, 194, 648; Two Gentlemen,
168, 618; Venus and Adonis,
203, 204, 205, 415, 618; Winter*
s
Tale, 195, 618.
Shelley, career, 365, 389; education
and use of the classics, 158, 227-8,
250, 355, 360, 365, 408, 414, 418-
33, 457, 518, 677-9, 697, 703;
paganism, 93, 363, 421-3, 43i, 453,
455, 678; reputation and influence,
241, 402, 424, 426, 688. works: Adonais, 174, 418, 420-1,
678, 679; The Cenct, (360), 419; A
Defence of Poetry, 420-1; A Discourse
of the Manners of the Ancients,
See ,420 ; Epipsychtdion, 420 ; Hellas,
362, 399, 419, 422, 672, 675; Latin
epigram, 678 ; The Necessity of
Atheism, 363; Ode to Liberty, 662;
Ode to Naples, 250 ; Ode to the West
Wind, 251; Oedipus Tyrannus, 421,
678 ; Ozymandias, (407) ; Prometheus
Unbound, 355, 402, 418, 419, 421,
422, 688, 703; Queen Mab, 419,
421-2; The Revolt of Islam, 421 ; tr.
bucolic poets, 420; tr. Homeric*
hymns, The Cyclops, and The Symposium,
419; tr. Vergil, 419, 678;
The Wandering Jew, 678.
shepherds and shepherdesses, 21, 86,
I39"40, 1^2-3, 164, 165, 166, 168,
170, 171, 172, 173-7, 441, 697,
705. :
Sheridan, 397.
Sherry, R., 123.
Short, Charles, 491, 694.
Sibyl, the, 73, 5i5~3c6, 699.
Sicily, 23, 162-3, 177,383"4,338,452,
4^87, 618, 697.
Sidney, Sir Philip, knowledge of the
classics and reputation, 123, 169-70,
174, 179,
-
2^3.
^ works: Apdlogiefor Poetne, 54; The
Countess ofPembroke'sArcadia, 1 69-
70, 658; Sidney's Arcadia modernized,
341.
Sidonius Apollinaris, 189, 220, 471-2;
letters, 471-2.
Sieder, Johann, 125.
Siege of Rhodes, The, 240.
Sienkiewicz, Henryk, Quo Vadisf, 404,
463, 689.
Silius Italicus, Ilias Latina, 53, 565,
576, 593; Pumca, 360, 588.
Silone, Ignazio, 166.
similes, 102, 1 58, 358, 485-6 ; Homers,
I55 37L 373-113, 343, 358, 404, 483,
485-6; Shakespeares, 198-9, 203.
Simonides, 430?
Simpheisstmus, Der abenteurliche, 307.
sin, 78, 269, 363, 445, 540, 704.
Smai, Mount, 439,
Smdbad, 524,
singers, virtuosi, 297, 392, 633, 647.
Sirens, 516.
Sisyphus, 527-8.
Skelton, John, 310.
skunkery {muflisme), 461, 689,
slang, 54, 71, 303-4, 318-20, 533.
slaves and slavery, 256, 329, 350, 396,
4.6o 4.6'3t. ;o2-
Slavic peoples, 19, 24, 349,353* 557*
slums, 413, 437, 454, 5i2-
socialism, 255, 554, 684.*
societies, classical, 471.
Society of Jesus, 259; and see Jesuits.
Socrates, 41, 43-5, 128, 191, 279, 284,
376, 378, 391, 397, 412, 423, 45L
459, 460-1, 639.
Solomon, King, 57, 451.
Solon, 396, 400.
Song of Roland, The, (28), 48-9, 154,
563, 607.
Song of Solomon, 245, 459.
songs, vii, 20, 22, 42-3, 48, 50, 58,
126, 171-2, 177, 218-21, 225-7,
229-30, 253, 269, 290, 301, 305, 364,
380, 544, 548, 549, 561-2, 564-5,
614, 688, 697; and see folk-songs,
sonnets, 219-20, 223, 228-9, 230, 245,
249, 276, 280, 442-3.
Sophocles, read and adapted, 132,
294-5, 369, 419, 485, 549, 648, 685;
translated, 120, 378. works, 131 ; Antigone, 120, 133, 136,
378, 419, 537, 703; Electra, 120,
134; Oedipus at Colonns, 419, 433,
494, 682; Oedipus the Rule7, 373,
378, 419, 515; Philoctetes, 657;
Trachiniae, 657.
Soracte, 413.
Sosdello, 75.
sound-effects in poetry, 319, 514, 605.
Southern, John, Pandora, 237, 632*
Southey, 427, 649.

Spagnuoli, Baptista (s=Baptista Mantuanus),

171, 173, 21:6, 340-
Spain and the Spaniards, country and
people, 12, 167-8, 207-8, 258-9, 275
;
culture, 258-9, 557-9, 595-6, 600,
political history, 144-5, 167, 258-9,
427, 448, 55^, 597; language,
7SS INDEX
6, 12-14, 22, io6, IIO-II, 171,
289, 559, 661; literature, 20, 22,
(40), 48, 59. 87, III, 113, 114, 1 17,
ia8, 130, 138, 168-9, 171. 219, 229,
244-5. 246-7, 258*9, 309, 541, 559,
596-7, 600, 602, 61 I.
Spanish Tragedy
^
T/zfi(Kyd), 133.
Sparta, 393, 394-5, 399, 400, 43i, 671.
Specialization, 256, 495.
Spectator^ The^ 341.
Spence, Polymetis, 416.
Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the
West, 9, 170, 267-8, 293, 351, 476,
479, 682.
Spenser, Edmund, no, 482, 635;
education and knowledge of the
classics, 146, 196, 215, 232, 416,.
603-4, 678. works: Astrophel, 173-4; Daph->
naida, 173; Epithalamion, 237; The
Faerie Queene, 58, 146, 147-9, 151-
3, 155, 23, 529, 603-4, 606-7; The
Shepherd's Calendar, 171, 172-3.
spheres, music of, 202-3, 240.
Sphinx, 200, 535-6, 539-40.
spider and the bee, 285-6, 646.
Spinoza, 3.
Spitteler, Carl, 528-31, 703-4. works* Olympian Spring, 529-31,
703 ; Prometheus and Epimetheus,
528-9; Prometheus the Sufferer, 529.
aTTOvBoyeXoLOv, 305.
Spreng, Johann, 115-16.
stained glass, 31, 64, 488.
Stanyhurst, Richard, 116.
stars, 44, 189, 202-3, 231, 41 1, 448,
495, 502, 697.
Star-Spangled Banner, The, 228-9.
Statius, as a Christian, 72, 75, 79, 584;
read and adapted, 56, 79, 80, 96, 97,
100, 13s, 581, 588, 589, 592, 678-9. w^orks, 441 ; Achilleid, 593 ; Thebaid,
see under read and adapted (above),
Steinbeck, John, 166.
Stendhal, De Vamour, 66.
stichomythia, 208.
stimulus of Greco-Roman art and
thought, 113, 143, 198, 203,210-11,
ai8, 3*9-30, 357. 369, 376, 388-9, .
517-1S, 542, 565.
Stobaeus, 190.
Stoics and Stoicism, 207-8, 291, 303,
-"sab, 410-IX, 421, 465, 476, 496,
66s, 685.
Storm and Stress, 369, 375, 664.
Strachey, Lytton, Books and Charac^
ters, 293, 643.
Strasbourg, humanists, 121, 134, 310;
Oaths, 558.
Stratford--on-Avon, 195, 619, 623.
Strauss, David, Life of Jesus, 464.
Strauss, Richard, 448, 531. works: Alpine Symphony, (531);
Domestic Symphony, 383; Electra,
S26 ; Der Rosenkavalier, 581 ; Salome,
455 -
Stravinsky, Igor, Oedipus Rex, 532.
street-preachers, 304, 308. e
stress-accent, 246, 248, 381-2, 443.
strophe, 222, 234-7, 250, 636.
Strozzi, Francisco de Soldo, 117.
Stuart, Jares (Athenian), Antiquities
of Athens, &c,, 370.
Sturm und Drang, 664.
stylistic devices, vii, 19-20, 91, 102,
III, 112-13, 158-61, 165, 221, 232,
235, 256, 271, 330, 356, 404. 488,
561-2, 61 1, 682.
Suetonius, 475, 557, 643; read and
quoted, 189, 578; translated, 117.
suicide, 376, 440, 450.
Summaripa, G., 125.
sun and sun-myths, 265, 441, 508,
522-3, 527.
supernatural, in drama, 132, 196-7,
205-6, 53^; io 147-51, 270-
I, 287, 342, 485, 529-
superstition, 4S6, 524^ 555-
surrealism, 256, 539, 638, 699.
Surrey, the earl of, 115.
swallow, 38, 61, 514, 516.
swan, poet as a, 226, 235, 628.
Swan theatre, 129.
Sweden, 19, 22-3, 176, 575.
Sweeney, 504, 513, siS 5t7, 698.
sweetness and light, 286.
Swift, Jonathan, character and influence,
282, 285, 315, 318, 320,
649; education and attitude to the
classics, 261, 285-6, 304, 327. works, 291 ; The Battle offthe Books,
262, 270, 281, 285-6, 307, 644, 646
;
Cantata, 241 ; Gulliver's Travels,
304, 307; On a Young Nymph going
to Bed, 6S3 ; Pindaric odes, 286, 646
satires generally, 286 ; A Tale of a
Tub, 270, 285.
Swinburne, Algernon, education and
use of the classics, 414, 446, 451-
21, 685; paganism, 363, 457, 462,
688. works, 441, 444-6, 462, 489, 516,
687; Atalanta in Calydon, 451-2,
457, 687; Erechthms, 451-2, 687;
For the Feast of Giordano Bruno,
688; Itylus, 514, 699; The Last
Oracle, 688; Notes on Poems and
Reviews, 685; Odes, 254, 636.
Switzerland and the Swiss, 13, 166,
187, 259, 344. 345, 528-31, 694.
INDEX 759
symbolism, in literature, 32, 63-4, 66,
76, 256, 367, 386, 387, 390, 392,
401, 409, 451* 501-4, 507-19, 538-
9, 581, 661, 695-6, 699; in other
helds, 396-7, 399-400, 442, 523-5,
70I2.
Symmachus, 41, 557.
sysncimetry, classical, 129, 147, 323,
357, 367, 503, 504, 656; classicist or
baroque, 290, 301, 330-5, 368, 604,
654, 657-
symphonies, 161, 166, 223, 241, 250,
251, 376, 383, 427, 485, 587; and
445-
synonyms, 331.
syntax, 158-61, 414, 490, 494-5, 497-
Syracuse, 162, 410, 452.
Syria and the Syrians, 303-4, 454, 459,
573, 688; Syriac, 692.
Syrinx, 521, 524, 697.
Tacitus, 268, 475; manuscripts, 80,
91; studied and quoted, 189, 393,
406, 460, 491, 672, 679; style, 1 18,
268, 273, 324, 326, 348, 643 ; translated,
1 18. works: Annals
189; Dialogue on
Orators^ 36,2.
Tallien, Mme, 361.
Tantalus, 148.
tapestry, 61, 234, 514*
Tarquin, 217, 473-
Tarsus, 36, 15 1.
Tartars, 346, 353, 545-
Tasso, Bernardo, 244-5.
Tasso, Torquato, 368, 603; career
and friends, 115, 179, 431; education
and attitude to the classics,
200, 272, 279, 292, 543; fame and
influence, 366, 405, 431, 603-4,
645- :Amyntas {Aminta)^ 140, 17 1,
172, 174, 175, 596, 599; Discorsidel
poema epico, quoted, 272, 643
;
Gerusalemme Conquistafa, 146, 603
;
The Liberation of Jerusalem^ 146,
148-50, 152-6, 158, 160, 263, 603,
608, 652.
Tassoni, Alessandro, Miscellaneous
Thoughts^ 270, 277-8, 645; The
Ravishei Bucket^ 270, 277, 314-15,
64s, 652.
Tate, Nahum, 3^14.
Tatian, 640.
Taylor, Thomas, tr, Plato, 676.
Teatro Colon, 129.
Telegonus, 50, 53, 534.
Telemachus, 336-9, 506, 534.
Temple, Sir William, Essay, 282-3,
285, 640.
temples, 152, 401, 677,
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, education and
use of the classics, 83, 446, 447, 466,
487. 549. 686-7, 693- works, 447-^, 461, 481, 668; The
Eagle, 32 ; The Epic, 693 ; Hesperides,
686; Idylls of the King, 448, 487;
The Lotus-Eaters, 447, 686; Lucretius,
449-50, 451; Morte d'*Arthur,
487, 693; Oenone, 450; Sea-fairies,
686; To Vergil, (422), 446; tr.
Homer, 487.
Terence, 71, 131; read and adapted,
84, 132, 136, 138, 188-9, 318, 494,
599, 625-6, 650, 655; translated,
I2I-2.
Tereus, 61, 514.
Tertullian, 324, 330, 559, 640.
Tervagant, 49, 573.
testament, 558.
Teubner Classics, 470, 498.
Textor, Ravisius, 138. ^
textual criticism, 469, 496-7.
theatre, see drama.
theatres (the buildings), 129-30, 139,
225, 598, 705-
Theban eagle, 226, 238, 242.
Thebe, 577.
Thebes, the city, 221, 237, 238; the
myth, 47, 56, loo, 523, 525, 536,
580, 592.
Thelema, 183, 615.
Themistocles, 284, 397.
Theocritus, 140, 162-3, 17^-3, 280,
376, 402, 420, 603, 673, 695, 697;
adapted and imitated, 167, 1 71, 383,
402, 435, 697 ; originator of pastoral,
139, 162-3, 172^, 507^ 61 1, 697;
translated, 123, 375, 420.
Theodore, archbishop, 36, 568.
Theodoric, 27, 41, 54, 602.
Theognis, 460, 682, 689.
theology, 41, 72, 85, 345, 435.
Theophilus of Antioch, 640.
Theophrastus, 192, 315, 582-3.
Thersites, the man, (138), 197, 600,
Thersites, 137-8, 600.
Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, 469.
Theseus, 90, 155, 511, 513, 525,
536-^, 677, 689.
Thetis, 148.
Thomson, James, The City ofDreadful
Nighi* 432.
Thor, 39.
Thoreau, 542.
Thrace, 535.
Thrasymachus, (460), 689.
Thucydides, 188, 367, 574; translated,
117.
Tibet, 435, 496.
.760 INDEX
Tibullus, read and adapted, 68, 167,
190, 402, 667; translated, 375,
Ttepolo, 291.
Tillcmont, 345,
Timoleon, 402.
Timon of Athens, 197, 208, 623.
Timon of Phlius, T/AA^t, 651.
Timotheus, 612.
Tintagel, 439.
Tiptoft, John, earl of Worcester, 119.
Tiresias, 510, SM-xSt 516, 538, 699.
Tischbein, 670.
Titania, 204-5, 620-1.
Titans, 21, 148, 150-1, 204, 234, 236,
245, 416, 528, 681.
Tithonus, 152.
Titian, 178, 291.
Titus, emperor, 665.
Tityrus, 172, 705.
Tityus, 148.
To an Expiring Frog^ 638.
toccatas, 241# 290.
Toiomei, Claudio, 635.
Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich, 93, 542;
Anna Karenina^ 450; War and
Peace, 51, 106, 274, 344, 404.
tombs, 365, 428-9, 458, 472.
Tomi, 59.
Tooke, 416.
torture, 41, 328; in art, 372; in literature,
133, 291, 299, 538.
Tory, 124.
Tours, Michel Guillaume de, 124.
Toutain, Charles, 122.
tower, ivory, 187, 439, 683; Montaignes,
187, 616.
town-planning, 291, 296, 368.
Toynbee, A. J., A Study of History,
12, 27, 267, 351, 474-5 477-8, 479,
556, 558, 559, 584, 612, 659, 661,
691.
trade, 243, 471-2, 493, 521, 690.
tradition, 227, 261, 288, 409, 443, 482,
489* 562-
tragedy, vii, 20, 24, 71, 84, 97, 128,
130-1, 133, 165, 198, 281, 290, 291,
295, 297, 29S, 300-1, 358,
392, 443, 524-5, 532, 538, 546, 599;
meaning of the word, 583, 591;
baroque, 290, 292, 293-302, y6,
322, 374-5, 42s, 426; English,
120-1, 128-9, i323, 137, I942J:8,
^93-302, 360, 375, 419, 450-3, 526;
French, 120-1, 128, 134, 137, 232,
281, 93"-302 375, 380, 395, 401-2,
527, 533C-40, 599*^00; German,
376, 378, 380, 386-90, 526; Greco-
Roman, or classicaF in general,
293-4, 299, 300, 316, 322, 426;
Greek, general, 128, 131, 134, 136,
137, 141-2, 188, 198, 207-8, 222,
225, 230, 236, 294, 297, 300-1, 335,
337, 361, 375-6, 378-9, 380, 392,
43C9, 459, 489, 494, 533, 542, 552,
599, 648; Italian, 120-1, 127-43,
289-302, 424-7, 527; mock tragedy,
504; Polish, 541; Roman, 105, 131,
230, 281, 299, 301, 451, 570, 598;
and see Seneca.
Trajan, 347, 568, 633.
Tranio, (205), 625-6.
translation,. 40-6, 104-7, 112-14,
156-8, 329, 379, 393, 472, 479-90,
498; bogus translations, 328, 430-1,
458; inadequacy of translations,
27i-<a, 277, 282, 371, 498, 642-3,
693; and see mistranslations. {For
translations of individual authors, see
each author-entry.)
travellers tales, 56, 304-5, 307.
Trent, Council of, 259.
triadic poems, 222, 236-9, 633.
tribune, the title, 88, 396, 398.
tricolon, 112-13, 184, 334-5, 347,
561, 657.
tnlogy, 542.
Tnmalchio, 516, 689.
Tnnity College, Cambridge, 295.
Trinity College, Oxford, 136.
Tnppel, A., 664.
* Triptolemus, 521.
Trissino, Giovan Giorgio, 136, 146. works : canzoni, 629 ; The Liberation
of Italy from the Goths, 146, 149,
603, 605; Poetice, 143; Sophonisba,
136, 146, 599, 629.
Tristan and Isolde, 58, 91, 555.
Tristan, French author, 280; Leopardis
pseudonym, 432.
Tnton, 437, 676.
Troilus and Cressida, 52, 5^, 90, 94,
' (577)-
Trojan Horse, 371-2,
Trojan war, 50-2, 90, 94, 96-7, 148,
271, 283, 371-2, 385, 422, 429, 487,
526, 532, 533-4, 546, S74-5 576.
Trojans, 50-1, 54, 64, 154, 37i-2 400,
487, 564, 573; m Britain, S4> i37*
^ troubadours, 48, 60, 579-80, 585.
Troy, 23, 27, 50-1, 53> 5,5,-83, 96, 144,
151-2, 156-7, 216-17, goo, 371-2,
^ 429, (450), 468, 533-4, 546, 574-5,
600, 606, 665; the .myth, 47, 50-5,
144, 151, 156, 163, 197, 372, 533,
546, 565, 578, 580, 600, 602.
Troy, N.Y., 400.
Troynovant, 15 1.
Truth, 86, 4^.
Tsar, the title, 6; Alexander, 328;
^ Tsarist government, 351,
INDEX 761.
Tuileries, 396, 633.
Tuim, Jehan de, Li hystoire de Julius
Caesar
y
577.
Tully (= Cicero), 400.
Turberville, George, 134-5.
Turkey and the Turks, 4, 6, 12, 17,
19, 236, (259), 346, 353, 362, 3^5,
378, 405,433,435, 556, 661.
Turnebus, Adrianus, 6i6, 639.
Tumus the hero, 150, 154, 156, 609.
Tumus the satirist, 695.
Tuscany, 152; Tuscan, 424-5, 658.
Twyne, 115.
Tyard, 630.
Tydeus, 580.
Tyl Ulenspiegel, 181, 306.
types, printing, 17, 561, 589.
tyrants and tyranny, 132, 180, 326,
361-2, 378, 384, 391, 406, 421,
423, 424, 425, 426-7, 429, 436, S40.
548, 599. 680.
Tzara, Tristan, 256.
Udall, Nicholas, Ralph Roister-Doistery
138, 600, 624.
Ueberheferungsgeschichtey 695.
Ulysses: the name, 696; and see
Odysseus. ,
Underdo,wn, 124, 164, 648.
underworld, 49, 77-8, 148, 153, 291,
388, 510-14, S16, 529, 53S, 573,
607, 698.
unities, the 'laws of unity, 137, 142--3,
298, 301-2, 533; action, 142, 425,
533; time, 142, 505-6, 533; place,
^42-3, 505, 533-
universities, II, 50, 57, 66, 181, 257,
326, 368, 409, 466, 467, 492, 493,
495, 499-
University College, Dublin, 509, (518).
Urban VJII, 235.
Urfe, Honors d, 170-2; AstraeUy
170, 172, 337, 343, 658; Sylvanirey
641.
Utica, 400.
Utopia, 182-3, 615.
Val, P du, 118.
Valens and Valentinian, 5.
Valerius Elaccus, Argonautica, loi,
593- .
Valerius Maximus, loi, 190.
Val6ry, Paul-Ambroise, 501, 503-4,
50^, 518, ^96. works: Cantate du Narcissey 697;
Fragments of ^Narcissus\ 501, 504,
509, 697; Narctsse parky 697;
The Pythian Prophetess
y
501, 509,
697; The Young FatCy 501, 508-9,
697.
Valla, Lorenzo, 114, 116-17.
Vallone, Antonio, 125.
Vanbrugh, Sir Johh, 291.
Van "noted. 373.
Vand iC
Varius, 172, 613.
Varro, the scholar, 303, 570, 665; in
Shakespeare, 197.
vases, 291, 417, 677.
vassals, see feudalism.
Vatican, 312; the chancery, 18; the
library, 17-18, 328, 599; the
museum, 16.
Vaughan, 239, 633, 676.
Venice and the Venetians, 135, 230,
427-8, 477, 560, 588, 618.
Venus, 63, 91, 99, 169, 195, 212-13,
241, 420, 442, 455, 458-9, 507, 523,
563, 595, 6056, 620, 682, 704*
Venus Erycina, (507), 697; Medici,
415; of Milo, 447.
Verdi, 376, 448; La For^a del Destino,
308.
Vergil, character and career, 72-5,
172-3, 465, 477, .486, 5B4, 698;
name, 584; quotations and adaptations,
34, 37, 44, 55-6, 64, 67-8,
84-6, 90, 95, 99, 104, 144, 146-58,
160, 167-8, 171, 190, 203, 216-17,
235, 245, 247, 314, 329, 404, 406-7,
422, 435, 485-7, 525, 563-5, 571,
578, 584, 586, 588, 589, 591, 600,
620, 626, 673, 693; reputation, 59,
80, 82, 100, 128, 264, 267, 271,
324, 400, 577; study and appreciation,
49, 84, 188, 231, 264, 277, 302,
340, 360, 367, 393, 40s, 406-7, 415,
419, 421, 446. 448, 455, 490, 492,
533, 548-9. 569, 58s, 603, 643, 645,
659, 673-5, 705; style, 6, 53, los,
159, 447; teacher of Dante, 70-80,
102, 144, 153, 263, 387-8, 548,584,
585-6; translations, 115-16, 124,
245, 375, 415, 419, 67s, 678, 681.
-works: Aeneid, 25, 51, 53,54, SS-6,
64, 68, 71-4, 77, 79-80, 85-6, 90-1,
99, 115-16, 13s, 144, 147-8, is-i,
153-5, 157-8, 160, 217, 235, 245,
270, 337, 338, 342, 373, 406, 415,
.499, 5, 567, 571, 574, 584, 588-
9, 59 1 7 592, 600, 604, 665, 681,
693, 698, 704; Appendix Vergtlianay
650; Moretum, 672, 681; BucotlcSy
68, 86, 124, 139, 3c63, 167, 170-1,
172, 1734, 245, 280, 406, 525, 592,
600, 611-13, 678, 705 {Buc. 4: 8,
72~3 7S> 399i 422, 584* 67, 702);
Georgiesy 68, 74, 75> 79, 124, 188,
245 399, 406, 435, 592 597, 601,
678.
762 INDEX
Verginia, 68, 582. *
Vergniaud, 397.
Verona, 8, 83-4, 618, 690.
Veronese, 291.
Versailles, 296, 320, 345, 368, 396.
Victorianism, 272, 340, 445, 457, 480,
495, 685, 692.
Vidal de Noya, Francisco, 117.
.Vielfeld, J., 1 17.
Vienna, city, 123, 368; court, 308;
university, ii.
Vigil of Venusf They 220, 516.
Vilaragut, Antonio, 122.
villains, 460, 689.
Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 166.
villas, Roman, 400-1.
Villegas, Esteban Manuel, 246.
Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum htstorialBy
1 01, 593, 701.
Vinci, Leonardo da, 15, 178-9; The
Last Supper
y
372.
Vinciguerra, Antonio, 309.
Virgil, see Vergil.
Virgilius, 74, 584.
Virginia, 399-401.
virtues, 146, 167, 395, 41 1, 427, 604.
Visigoths, 478, 558.
Vision, of Adamnan, 584; of Er, 584;
of Jean Gerson, 69; of Tundale,
584; Visions of Wettin, 584.
Vitn, Philippe de, 166.
Vitruvius, 129, 180, 264, 598.
Vives, Juan Luis, 656.
Voiture, 280.
Voltaire, career and character, 83,
293, 321 ; education and use of the
classics, 83, 292, 327-8 37o, 374-5
541-2, 543, (555), 668; influence
and reputation, 352, 363, 374'5
424, 628; quoted, 328, 648, 656. works: Candide, 307; Commentaire
sur le livre *Des Delits et des peines\
328; Essai sur la poesie ipique^ 668;
La Henriadey 374-5, 668; tragedies,
374-5, 425-6.
Voss, Johann Heinrich, Anti'-Sym-
holikf 701; Lmsey 668; translations,
375, 69a.
Vulcan, 150, 600, 605-6, 701.
Vulgate, see Bible, translated.
^W. B.*, 125.
W. W/, 121, 624.
Wagner, Cosirna, 689.
Wagner, Richard, 437; education and
Wales, culture, 46, 568, 619; history,
568; literature, 22, 27; mines
(Ctmbri = Cymryl)^ 700.
Wallace, Lew, Ben-Hur, 340, 404,
463*
wandering scholars, 12, 438, 561, 569.
war, 243, 345, 386, 422, 465, 526, 540,
543, 574 J American Civil, 46^;
baroque, 287; of tHe bucket, 270;
of Charlemagne, 603 ; First World,
257, 268, 466-7, 471, 526^* Franco-
Prussian, 602; French-Indian, 403;
Greek and Roman, 73, 225, 422,
584; Greco-Turkish, 405; Hundred
Years, 93 ; Louis XIV^s, 243, 338-9;
of medieval and modem Europe,
generally, 57-8, 59, 93, 269, 435,
472; religious, 187, 259, of
the Roses, 473; second Punic, 154;
Second World, 471, 534 538; Seven
Years, 659; Thirty Years, 259,
368; and see Crusades, Rome, Troy.
warmongers, 51 r, 534.
Warner, \Villrain, 62-ij.
Warshcviczki, Stanisl.is, 124.
Washington, D.C., 463.
Washington, George, 399, 672.
Watson, Thomas, e/caroftTra^ta, 237;
tr. Antigoney 120.
Watts, Isaac, Day ofJudgment
,
249-50.
Webster, John, 129; The Duchess of
Malfiy 133.
Wedgv'ood, 401, 664.
Weland the Smith, 10, (346), 561.
Werfel, Franz, The Trojan Women,
526.
West, Rebecca, 166.
Westminster, Abbey, 282; School, 295.
West Saxon Gospels, 47.
Whistler, James McNeill, 502.
WLitby, Abbey, 28, 566; synftd of, 36,
568.
WHtman, Walt, 254, 542.
WTittington, R., 119, 120.
Wldsith, 28.
Wife of Bath, 12, 95, 100.
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, UlrichvSn,
458-9, 4S4-5 490, 654, 688, 691,
Wilde, Oscar, 446, 525-6,^702; The
Picture of Dorian Gtcq;/ 526, 685
;
Salome, 455> 526.
Wilder, Thornton, The Ides of March,
340; Our Town, 13Q.
William of Conches, 641.
William of Moerbeke, 595.
use of the classics, 542, 705. Whiham III, *289-90.
Wagner, operas, 141, 376, 448, 531, ^ Williams, Sir R. Vaughan, Hugh the
688; The Mastersii^ers, {368); The Drover, 175-6; Serenade for Music,
Ring of the Ntbelungs, 23-4, 141 , 271, 241
.
542, 705; Trutan md IsoMe, 5k Wilson, T., 122.
INDEX 763
Winchester, city, 46; College, ii, 623.
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim,
character and career, 365, 369-^1,
389, 661-2; education and knowledge
of the classics, 369-71, 372-4,
379, 6^1, 664; influence, 367, 374,
391, 448, 663-5. works : essays, 664-5 > ^ 'History of
among the Ancients^ 371 ; Send--
s'dneibni, 646; Thoughts on the
ImiUiiiori if Greek Works^ 369; Unpublished
Ancient Monuments
y
371.
wish-fulfllment, 165, 182, loS, 523-5.
witches and witchcraft, 133, 146, 148,
206, 208-9, 388, 455, 51 1, 584, 678.
Wittig, J., 1 1 8.
Wolcot, John, 638.
Wolf, Friedrich August, 383-4, 448,
488-9 ; Introduction to Homer
,
383-
6, 668-9, 690.
Wolf, Hugo, songs, 58, 177, 380, 614.
Wood, Grant, 166.
Wood, Robert, Essay on . HomeVy
370, 379, 383* 384, 448, 664, 668.
Worcester, John Tiptoft, earl of, 119.
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 676.
Wordsworth, i>!'ir,f}ircc*i,v)pinions,
and character, 2.^9, 3^(, 408-12,
418, 427, (434'), 516, 679; education
and use of the classics, 249, 250,
251-2, '253, 408-12, 420, 661,
675-6, 699; influence, 241; quoted,
25S, 427. works: Character of the Happy
Warrior
y
411 ; The Excursion^ 41 1
;
I wandered lonely as a Cloudy (516);
Laodamiay 412; Lines composed * . .
above Tintern Abbey
y
410; Ode
Intimations of Immortality, 251-2,
253, 411-12, 675-6; Ode to Duty,
4J.X, 637; note on Ode to Lycoris,
661, 675; Peter Bill, 382-3; The
Pre/wde, 410, 639; he Recluse 359;
sonnets, 249, 408, 410, 675, 683;
tr. Aeneidy 675; tr. Juvenal 8, 675;
unpublished Mgment, 41 1; The
World is too much with Us, 277
y
437,
439, 662, 676.
Wo.. >, W-'; i"*, 7?, i*>on An~
'0'
.t'fr. J i -'f
.
i''2-5.
Wren, Sir Christopher, 291.
writing, 3, 4, 184, 384-6, 468, 487,
589.
Wurzburg, Konrad von, 577.
Wyat, Sir Thomas, satires, 310-11,
650-1; tr. Plutarch, 119; Vixt
puelhsy 636.
Wyer, 119.
Wylkinson, J., 119.
X, signing with, 558.
Xenophon, read, 190, 369,# 490, 650;
translated, 117. works: Anabasis, 490; Memoirs,
375*
Xerxes, 68, 176.
Xylander, W., 1 19.
Yale College, 491-2.
Yeats, W. B., 5 1 1, 518, 696.
Young, Edward, Impet'mm pelagi, 243
;
Night Thoughts, 429.
zarzuelas, 130.
Zeus, 78, 1 50-1, 487, 595, 605; and
see Jupiter.
zodiac, 150, 170, 522.
Zoilus, 270, 574*
Zola, Emile, 437.