Livingstone, On the Ancient Greek Literature

Page 24

To those who would maintain that Dickens or Hardy give an accurate picture of the world, there are two answers. First, their world is not the world as Shakespeare or Meredith sees it; this for many persons will be a sufficient disproof of its reality. Second, the history of English and French literatures has been for the last 150 years a history of successive reactions. The classical school was followed by the romantics, the romantics by the realists; each was a protest and a reaction against its predecessor. These swerving movements must have a cause. Now there are no reactions in literature unless there is some excess to provoke them. The existence of a reaction is a symptom of disease, and not only would it never take place apart from disease, but there is always a chance that it may go too far; for as in the body, so in the world of letters, a balance once disturbed is difficult to restore. But Greek literature, unlike our own and unlike French, at no stage developed by reaction. Its epic poets are followed by the lyrists and these by the tragedians: tragedy passes into the New Comedy, which is followed by the learned and artistic poetry of Alexandria. In prose the unperiodic style of Herodotus is succeeded by the style of Thucydides; while Plato and the various orators develop different types of writing. None of these styles, however, and none of these writers, are in reaction against one another. Some traces of reaction against the Homeric outlook of Sophocles may perhaps be found in Euripides. But this contrast lies between two individual writers and not between two literary schools, and has no analogy with the relation of the romantic to the classical or to the realist movements. It is far less marked, for instance, than the contrast between Voltaire and Victor Hugo or that between Victor Hugo and Flaubert. There is no reaction in the development of Greek literature, because at no stage is there any excess to react from; and there is no excess, because the Greek writers are direct and objective, because they are mirrors that reflect life, not imperfect lenses that distort it each according to its own imperfection.

The literature of the Elizabethans here resembles Greek. It is indeed more wayward, more fanciful, more personal, more luxuriant than the Greek; but it is on the whole more disinterested, freer from any didactic bent, more inclined to contemplate life for its own sake than the literature of any succeeding epoch in England. Since the Puritans a didactic strain has continually appeared in our writers. We have had revolts and protests, and then, by reaction, more protests and revolts. However admirable in morals, this Protestantism is injurious in literature, for, like all rebellions, it ends in excess and destroys the even-balanced temper which is essential to the creation of the greatest literature. This didactic temper, often disguised as realism, has never been stronger than in our own age, when many who might have found their profession in the Churches are diverted to other paths and seek in literature an outlet that in the past would have been found in the pulpit. Messrs. Wells, Shaw, Galsworthy—to mention no others—are parsons manqués, who were designed by nature to write not plays or novels but sermons. Or rather they are dual personalities: clergyman and creative writer have been combined in them and the clergyman has corrupted the poet. The unsatisfied appetite for preaching which a hundred years ago would have been quieted by writing an evangelical tract, to-day issues in a novel or a play. The moral differs, the form changes, the intention and temper are the same.

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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