Livingstone, On the Ancient Greek Literature

Page 28

Turn from this to some parallel poem in English literature, such as Oenone or Tithonus. Beautiful as Tennyson is, the Greek has a better beauty, a beauty not of words or metaphors or highly-wrought art, but simpler, more spontaneous and more instinctive, as though not man but nature herself was speaking. Two writers, who are qualified to judge by being themselves among the great poets of the world, and who knew and appreciated other literatures, but speak in this way about Greek alone, have testified to the uniqueness of this beauty. Goethe says stiffly but precisely: 'in the presence of antiquity the mind feels itself placed in the most ideal state of nature; and even to this day the Homeric hymns have the power of freeing us, at any rate, for moments, from the terrible burden which the tradition of many hundreds of years has rolled upon us.' In these words Goethe has touched on the simplicity and the naturalness of Greek beauty, in contrast to the more exotic and elaborate beauty of which mediaeval and modern art and literature are full. Keats writing about the Grecian urn also had in his mind the liberating power of Greek beauty:

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity; Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'—that is all Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

These words point to another trait of Greek beauty, which any one who has seen Greek statues must have felt: it does not provoke speculation just as it does not excite desire, because no elements are mingled with it that might stir such feelings. It has no admixture, but is mere beauty, sought for itself.

Not only is Greek beauty different in quality from our own, but it is more abundant. This surely would be the verdict of an impartial critic who compared Homer, the lyrists, the tragedians, Plato, Theocritus, the epigrammatists, with the corresponding names in modern literatures. It amounts to a different way of viewing the world; the Greeks were more sensitive to beauty than we are, just as some people are more sensitive than others to colours or sounds, to moral or intellectual issues. This is curiously illustrated in their treatment of tragic themes. There is no want of tragedy in Homer or the dramatists—their view of life is probably darker than our own—and they have been praised for a pessimism that faced and admitted the black truth. Yet the cloud of evil is continually broken by rays of beauty. Thus Homer lights up the tragic parting of Hector and Andromache by the story of the child and the nodding plumes, yet does not use the incident, as many writers would have used it, to heighten the tragedy, which indeed it neither emphasizes nor diminishes: it is merely a gratuitous touch of delight in children, as accidental and natural as the brighter moments which, in life if not in realistic novels, diversify the darkest hours. Thus too Aeschylus preludes the bloody slaughter of Salamis with the white horses of the dawn, the echoes in the cliffs, the foam whitening beneath the oars, and when he speaks of the island where the Persians are butchered, does not forget the dances in which Pan rejoiced there of old. Thus, again, one of the most tragic moments in the Hippolytus is followed by the song,

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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