Livingstone, On the Ancient Greek Literature

Page 5

If a reader turned from Milton to Homer, from Shakespeare to Sophocles, from Plato or Aristotle to some modern work on ethics, politics, or literary criticism, he would find one point of difference between the earlier and the later writers in the greater simplicity of the former. They are briefer: the Oedipus Tyrannus has 1530 lines while the first two acts of Hamlet alone have more than 1600, and Greek histories and philosophical writings are correspondingly shorter than their modern counterparts. The whole of Thucydides could be printed in a twenty-four page issue of The Times, and leave room to spare; the essay of Aristotle on Poetry, which for generations dictated the principles of dramatic writing, has forty-five short pages; the Republic of Plato, which has influenced thought more than any other philosophic work, has a little over three hundred. Brevity indeed is not always simplicity, and it is possible to be at once simple and lengthy. But any one who examines these Greek writers will find that they are brief, because, avoiding bypaths and by-plots, elaboration or minute detail, they strike out the central features of their picture with an effortless economy of line. Their writing has a double quality. It shows a firm hold on the central and fundamental things: and it presents them unmixed with and unconfused by minor issues, so that they stand out like forest trees which no undergrowth of brushwood masks. It is important to make this distinction, for all great literature has the first of these qualities; the second is largely an accident of time. As civilization moves further from its origin, it cannot but receive a thousand tributaries that continually augment its volume, and colour and confuse its streams: at the sources it flows clear and untroubled. The interests of an early age are the primal and essential interests of human nature and the literature of such an age presents them unalloyed and uncomplicated by lesser issues. In the thinkers the main and fundamental problems stand clearly out, and Plato and Thucydides take us straight to them. The poets make their poetry from emotions and interests that are as old as man, and have none of the refinements and complications which education and a long inheritance of culture superadd to the essential stuff of human nature. 'You Greeks are always children,' said the Egyptian priest to Solon; and he spoke the truth in a sense which he did not mean. The Greeks' feelings were not dulled or sophisticated by the damnosa hereditas of the past. Neither their life nor their mental atmosphere was complicated. They had not 'thought themselves into weariness'. They were the children of the world, and they united the startling acuteness, directness, and simplicity of children to the intellects of men.

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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