Livingstone, On the Ancient Greek Literature

Page 23

Neither Dickens nor Hardy can be called unveracious writers; both give a picture of life that is true up to a point. Hardy, in particular, errs less by distortion than by omission; he sees one side of life, but at the expense of another side; he fails to hold the balance fairly, and lacks the large charity of the universe. Both writers are incomplete. No one could say of them, what is completely true of most Greek writers and largely true of all, that they see life steadily and see it whole. Still less can this be said of their followers, who, after the fashion of disciples, imitate and develop their defects, and oscillate between sentimental falsity, and the starkness and brutality which have been familiar in English literature during the last twenty years and in French literature for a much longer period. None of these writers, not even the best, is direct. Like Dickens, they consult their generous hearts, or, worse, ask: 'Can truth be told without making the public angry?' Or, like Hardy, they veil a didactic purpose under the name of realism, and register a bitter personal protest against the cruelty of life. In either case they narrow their view, and see the world through a mist of temperament.

This point may be illustrated by examining a famous passage from Homer, and then asking how a sentimental and a realistic writer might have treated it. Imagine the death of Hector in the hands of Dickens or Hardy. The first most probably would not have permitted it to occur, or, if he had, would have made Achilles the villain of the piece and emphasized and developed the tragedy in the manner of his death scenes, till he had wearied the reader with pathos. Confronted with such a tragedy he would have given the rein to emotion. Mr. Hardy, we may guess, would be impressed less by the pathos of the scene, than by the savagery of Achilles and the misgovernment of a universe in which such things were possible, and he would not have let these morals escape his readers. By small touches, by stressing suitable incidents, he would have made the tragedy more tragic, and the brutality more brutal. It is thus that he has treated the death of Jude. By so doing, both Dickens and Hardy in their different ways, would have been allowing their own personalities rather than the facts to speak, and, seeing only one side of the story, would have made it less complicated than life and less complete. But in the Iliad we see nothing of Homer's personality and hear no voice but that of the facts. The story tells itself without the heightening of artifice. The two men are brought before our eyes—Hector, the last hope of Troy, with his wife and child waiting for him at home—Achilles, mad with the memory of his dead friend. There is no judgement and no comment, but only the thing as it was.

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R. W. Livingstone
On the Ancient Greek Literature

Learned Freeware

R. W. Livingstone On the Ancient Greek Literature

Learned Freeware

R. W. Livingstone
On the Ancient Greek Literature