HANOVER BROWSING
I HAD EXPECTED this month to browse in the close-cropped fields of modern short stories and poetry. A number of books of a varied nature seemed to invite me to something like a Dionysiac celebration. However, I soon found out that was not to be. I started with Hemingway's WinnerTake Nothing, and I was so disappointed in the volume that I felt like escaping to a different world.
My start in poetry was also unpropitious. I thought I would like to sample Horace Gregory's No Retreat. I had enjoyed some of his former poetry, and I hoped I might be able to follow him and say "not to retreat and not to die." But somehow I could not get into the mood of poetry of this kind.
Rather than give up my plan I dipped into Aldington's The Eaten Heart, and into the more revolutionary poems of some of the younger rebellious English poets, like Auden and Day Lewis and Spender. I had followed their work from afar since my introduction to them in Oxford Poetryfor 1927. Since then The Magnetic Mountain of Lewis and the New Signatures of the group had appealed to me, and enticed by old memories and young hopes I thought a journey into The New Country (An Anthology—Hogarth Press) would put me in a responsive mood, so that rebel could call to rebel and find more than a mere echo. But Michael Roberts' introduction with its declaration of faith and unfaith was a little too much for me. I did not want to be overwhelmed by too much propaganda poetry. Neither did I feel like sampling the over-intellectual poetry of the followers of T. S. Eliot.
WHAT THEN WAS I to do? Like one of the children of despair I drifted dejectedly into the basement of the Baker Memorial Library, and there in front of me was the latest panel of Orozco's work. Facing me were a variegated lot of skullcapped academicians and other mysterious but cadaverous emblems of dead learning. I had already escaped from Hemingway's collection of corpses and now I was carried back to the world of Rabelais and Voltaire's "Who cares for grammarians." Not knowing what to do I peered closely at the panel and tried to discover either my friends or myself among those berobed individuals. While engaged in this innocent art it flashed into my mind that here was the field for my browsing this month. I would enter boldly the world of dead learning, knowing in my heart that no learning is dead. Learners and teachers may be dead, but learning never. But this oft abused world of dead learning is rather spacious, and many doors lead into it. But what door should I take? Musing over this rather practical problem I remembered a provoking book which I had read last summer, and which had challenged me in many ways. This was Burton Rascoe's Titans of Literature. I had enjoyed this book but at the same time found many of its arguments unconvincing. Here then was the door. And so by a peculiar combination of chance experiences I am going to write this month on Greek literature. Most of it will be on Greek epics and dramas.
But before I get into the interpretative section let me say something about the best of the books I read about Greek culture. I started reading some of them when Rascoe's Titans challenged me in the early summer. I had reacted critically to some of his impressionistic judgments of the Homeric poems and the Greek dramatists. His discussion of Dante, Milton, Shelley and other Titans had also provoked me. So I decided to re-read the works of these writers. I am grateful to Rascoe for setting me off in this manner. That is a compliment to the book. Since then I have managed to re-read the Iliad and the Odyssey and most of the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides and the comedies of Aristophanes. I am now rereading the dialogues of Plato and Dante, and I have really enjoyed this re-reading. These old classics stand it remarkably well. They even improve in the act, for it is characteristic of them that they suggest more than they say. Many modern books tend to be too expansive. They say everything and suggest little or nothing. They have no reserve. The passion for nakedness and the confessional urge of some modern writers contrast markedly with many of the old classics. Not that I want to imply that some of the ancient Greeks were not occasionally noisy and bombastic and dull and even stupid. A re-reading brought that home to me. They were not above writing and thinking nonsense, but the proportion of sense and nonsense was better balanced. Of course the winnowing of time has removed a lot of the inferior work.
LET ME LIST, then, the best of the books that found their way to my study.
1. Homer and Mycenae. M. P. Nilsson. Methuen and Co. 1933.
This is the most recent book on the Mycenean background of the Homeric poems. The opening chapter contains a good statement of the point of view and the methods followed by different students in their efforts to analyse the sources and development of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Due place is given to the positions of the Separatists and the Unitarians in relation to Homer. The author thinks that the myths and legends and characters in the poems are drawn from Mycenean Culture. He uses discreetly recent archeological additions to our knowledge of Minoan and Mycenean civilizations. The more we learn about the historic and semi-historic cultures of the Egyptians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, Phoenicians and other related cultures in that area of the world the more clearly do we understand their mutual interrelationships and borrowings. Classical Greek civilization developed late in relation to these other cultures, and inherited many of their cultural traits. Nilsson supports the unitary view of the Homeric poems in the main. A worth-while book.
2. The Earlier Religion of Greece in theLight of Cretan Discoveries: Sir Arthur Evans. Macmillan and Co. 1931.
A simple and interesting treatment of this subject. The author is well known for his work on Minoan and Mycenean culture, and this Frazer lecture continues the story. This work with Nilsson's volumes on Minoan-Mycqnean Religion and TheMycenean Original of Greek Mythology give proper recognition to the Mycenean sources of the Homeric heroic and religious mythology. On the general question of Greek religion I know of no better book than Zielinski's Religion of Ancient Greece.
3. Did Homer Live? Victor Berard. Translated from the French by Brian Rhys. E. P. Dutton. 1931.
The main emphasis of this popular discussion is on the Phoenician elements in the Homeric poems, or more especially in the Odyssey. This also is a very debatable question. The sea-coast and mercantile civilization of the Phoenicians undoubtedly was an important conditioning influence on early Greek history, but whether it was as significant as Berard assumes is questionable. He argues that many of the tales and legends and descriptions—geograpical and physical—and materials which found embodiment in the Odyssey were derived from Phoenician sources. That it was one of the sources can hardly be doubted.
4. A History of Greek Public Finance: A. M. Andreades. Translated from modern Greek by G. N. Brown. Harvard University Press. 1933.
An excellent and valuable book on this subject. It will fill a real gap in our knowledge of the finances of the Greek city states. Economic historians will find it indispensable. So will all students of Greek civilization. The notes are very helpful.
5. The Odyssey of Homer. A New Translation by T. E. Shaw (Colonel Law- rence of the Revolt of the Desert). Oxford University Press. 1933.
I can recommend this very heartily. To anyone who has not yet had the pleasure of reading this famous Homeric poem I am confident he will find this volume as enjoyable as any modern novel. The translation itself is straightforward although somewhat free in sections. But it has the merit of being readable, even at the loss of some of the poetry of the original. The author of the Odyssey is pictured as a bookish, house-bred man, a landlubber, driven by the age he lived in to legend. His work is regarded as smelling of a "literary coterie." It is interesting to find him saying that "However scholars may question the text in detail, writers .... cannot but see in the Odyssey a single, authentic, unedited work of art, integrally preserved." That is the characteristic reaction of poets and creative writers to both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Read this by all means.
6. Ancient Greek Literature: C. M. Bowra. Home University Library. 1933.
A simple but excellent little volume on Greek literature in general. Worth reading.
7. The Socratic Problem: A. K. Rogers. Yale University Press. 1933.
I liked this short volume even better than the recent brief book of A. E. Taylor on Socrates. One gets a slightly different picture of Socrates and his teaching. Both draw heavily on Burnet's work and researches. The tendency of Taylor is to make Socrates too much like Plato. But then this is the Socratic problem. Rogers is inclined to view him as concerned primarily from the beginning of his "gadfly" activities with man and his problems.
8. What Plato Said: Paul Shorey. University of Chicago Press. 1933.
Professor Shorey may be a litle pugnacious in his claims but he is a scholar and knows what he is writing about. Whether one agrees or disagrees with all his interpretations of the dialogues of Plato one cannot but admire his critical sanity and his exactitude of knowledge. I think he tends to unify Plato overmuch. He gives us Plato a little too neat. But he never loses sight of the poet and the philosopher and the practical critic in Plato. Neither does he exaggerate the mystical and minimise the scientific aspects of his teaching. What a contrast one finds between Shorey and a more subjective critic like Rascoe.
9. And while I am on this subject let me recommend his rather popular book: Titans of Literature: From Homer ToThe Present. Burton Rascoe. G. P. Putnam, 1932.
It has many excellent features. It has the merits of freshness and vitality and gusto. I like its rollicking irreverence (literary) and breezy independence. He has pungent likes and dislikes. At the same time too many of his judgments are unduly impressionistic and subjective. He is sometimes more concerned with novelty than with sober weighing of evidence. In his treatment of the Greeks he uses tradition when it is to his advantage and he ignores it when it goes against his own positions. Witness his remarks on Pisistratos, Beta, Aristotle and tragedy. The same weakness comes out in many sections of the book.
10. The Dawn Of Conscience: J. H. Breasted. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933-
I can confidently recommend this very recent book of Professor Breasted. It is an interesting interpreation of the moral evolution that was so essentially a part of the history of Egypt during the three or four thousand years preceding the Christian era. Jewish and Christian cultures inherited many of the ethical and spiritual ideals of the civilizations of the Nile and the Euphrates and Tigris valleys. It took the human race thousands of years to ethicize and socialize and spiritualize its moral and religious concepts and ideals and beliefs. A part of this fascinating and significant story is told in this commendable volume. I include it here because we witness the growth and influence of similar ideas in Greek literature. And the Greeks as well as the Hebrews borrowed a number of cultural elements and ideas from the Egyptians. Students of the ethical ideas in the Bible will find this work of Professor Breasted illuminating.
ii. Finally let me urge Dartmouth men who have not read the Homeric poems and some of the best of the dramas of the great Greek dramatists from Aeschylus to Aristophanes as well as some of the dialogues of Plato—including by all means his Republic— to spend a part of any leisure they may enjoy in reading these old classics. I find that many modern students have not been initiated into this ancient treasury of the race. It is really too bad. Past centuries might have made too much of them. We today certainly make too little of them.
I WOULD LIKE to write at some length on some of these old writers and their work, but space will not allow me. However I would like to say something about the best of them.
Dante in the fourth canto of the Inferno makes Virgil refer to Homer as "the sovereign poet." And the sovereign poet he has been in the estimation of nearly all poets and lovers of literature. He has always been the" poet of the poets and that in itself is a significant testimony to the place he holds in the hearts of creative artists. Sophocles said that his own plays were only "scraps from the great Homeric banquet," and we all know the lines which expressed the joy of Keats when he came to know the "deepbrowed Homer" for the first time in the translation of Chapman. And Andrew Lang in his Homer and theEpic goes so far as to say that "Homer includes in essence the sum of all Greek poetry." He has been the inspirer of the poets and the teacher of the fable-makers, and even critics and philosophers have found in him a source of unalloyed delight.
Men who are sensitive to life and its massive miseries and struggles in every age and country have found in Homer some- thing which appealed to them all alike. He had succeeded so well in humanising and anthropomorphising the older and cruder earth and nature divinities of prehistoric Greece that we today are willing to overlook their faults and squabbles and follies. His Olympian gods and goddesses are very human and for that reason understandable. Gods and goddesses after all belong to poetry if they do not belong to science and critical philosophy. Not that we today live in an Homeric world. Far from it. It is only by an act of sympathetic imagination that we can project ourselves into that old world. But it is worth the effort.
The men and women and the bombastic, brave but swash-buckling heroes of TheIliad are so thoroughly human in all that they do. They never fail to charm us even when they make themselves ridiculous and childish as they often do. Their hatreds and ambitions and fears and hopes and nobilities and meannesses were not so vastly different from those of today. There is something in Homer which appeals to the elemental in us. His robust primitivness and tumultuous energy and love of vivid and bold action endear him to our hearts. For we also have similar weaknesses. Moreover, there is nothing artificial and sophisticated in Homer. A little sadness, yes, and perhaps a slight nostalgia for a more heroic age than the one he himself lived in, but pessimism and disillusionment were alien to him. Life was good and joyous and assured to him and to his characters. They were not satisfied with high living or an over-fastidious philosophy. They were bursting with healthy animal spirits, unspoiled in their outlook on life and unstinted in their zest of living and fighting. Whatever they do, be it war or love or trade or women-capturing, they do with unfeigned delight. The stiffness and stuffiness of the drawing-room was not too inhibitive of their high spirits. The interventions of the gods troubled them now and then, but they seemed to have had a good supply of recuperative reserves. The invigorating air of a tolerably humane paganism is felt even in the horror tales of the Odyssey.
Another noticeable feature of these Homeric epics is the objectivity of the poet. We know the poem but not the poet. We understand the tales but rarely glimpse the genius who wove them together. What a difference we find between Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses. There is nothing subjective or morbid about Homer. He is too much a part of his culture and too much in love with life in all its simple beauty and pagan variety to nurse his own sick and pallid moods and fears. That is one reason among many others why it is so salutary for the modern man to read him. We are apt to think overmuch of our restless selves to really enjoy life. Homer knew the art of losing himself in his work and culture. So did the leading characters of the Iliad and the Odyssey. They were not troubled by the banalities and inanities of the modern man. They lived too near to nature and the mysteries of earth.
ONE CAN ENJOY these epics without attempting to unravel the problem of the unity and authorship of the poems. Who Homer was and when and where he lived—these are questions for the critics to answer. This of course is the Homeric problem. Many scholars (the Separatists) contend that both the Iliad and the Odyssey are of a composite origin. They are not the work of one poet but rather of many poets worked over and finally rearranged by redacteurs. Samuel Butler even propounded the theory that the Odyssey was the work of a Sicilian woman.
But whatever may have been the sources of the Homeric poems and whoever their author or authors may be, it is enough for us to respond to their vivid moving beauty and sublime power. They enshrine imperishable poetry—poetry pregnant with vitality and instinct with inspiration. The nobility and rhythmic sweep of their descriptive passages, the simplicity and economy of words, the vividness and rapidity of movement, the colorful but objective characterisation, and the vast treasures of fables and stories of very human heroes and equally human gods and goddesses make them a source of unfailing enjoyment.
The same is true of the best dramas of the great Greek dramatists. Milton styled them: "In chorus or iambic; teachers best Of moral prudence, with delight received In brief sententious precepts." In this opinion of Milton we can concur, for whatever else the Greek tragedians were, they were that at least. Greek drama was essentially drama with a moral and religious purpose. Of that there can be hardly any doubt. Burton Rascoe misinterprets it altogether when he says that "Greek drama .... is not and probably never was religious in character. It was secular in the very highest degree, expressing the very antitheses of religious feeling." I do not know what to make of this statement. It had secular elements in it, and it was meant to be entertaining. But its very texture and spirit were religious, at least in the Greek sense of that word. It was decidedly moral and religious in tone and outlook. It was much more concerned with justifying the ways of the Gods to man or of reconciling man to the Gods than any modern drama can possibly be. A remote approach to it in modern drama would be plays like St. John Ervine's John Ferguson or Ibsen's Brand. Even O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, although modelled after the Oresteian trilogy of Aeschylus, is too psychological to convey a good impression of the religious elements in Greek tragedy.
The early Greek dramatists did not deal with the frivolities of amatory intrigues. The Hippolytus of Euripides may be regarded as a love drama, but it has religious overtones. And of course Euripides was the most skeptical of the Greekdramatists. So I am compelled to say that the Greek dramatists lived, dramatically speaking, in the presence of the Gods. We must not allow our ideas of the Greek Gods to blind us to the religious element in Greek drama. Neither must we lose sight of the achievement of the dramatists in fusing together religion and art. They created real dramas out of the old myths of the race. Modern religious dramas seem to fail in this respect. So do many modern problem plays. The art is inferior to the propaganda, or else didacticism kills the drama. Aeschylus and Sophocles were always conscious of the might and grandeur of the moral universe. Their dramas were set against the background of this aweinspiring universe with its stern and irrevocable laws. The awareness of the relation between character and destiny, the sense of an over-ruling fate or the will of Zeus, the power of justice and the sufferings of the just man, the fatal inheritance of evil transmitted from generation to generation, the shame and ruin which make the way of the transgressor hard, the irrevocability of the ethical laws of the universe, the vengeance which pursues the wrongdoer, not only in this life but over the boundaries of time into the chasms of Hades, these were the themes of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the creators of the tragic muse of Greece. Great themes treated greatly with artistic and creative power and beauty, that is the secret of the greatness of the Greek tragedians.
AND NOWHERE is the Greek dramatist's passion for righteousness and reverence for the austerities of the moral law more in evidence than in the plays of Aeschylus. A great dramatist—he stands at the threshold of Greek drama. The Greek drama came to be what it was largely through the genius of Aeschylus. The origin of the drama is lost in the mists of Greek antiquity. It may have had its origin in the Dionysian rituals as many contend, or it may have arisen out of old funeral and ancestor worship rites and cults as Professor Ridgeway tried to make out. This we do not know.
One thing we are certain of, however, and that is that Aeschylus was the first real dramatist to give it a distinct form and content. He practically made the drama. He sought to interpret the ways of the Gods to the purblind sons of men. He was a dramatic champion of the Olympian gods which had displaced the cruder and more barbaric divinities of the earlier inhabitants of Hellas. His mission was to justify the ways of the Olympian gods to men, and this involved an effort to refine the current conceptions of the gods. Instead of rebelling against the unworthy ideas of the older nature and magical faith he attempts the difficult task of purifying it. He kept the old names of the deities but he gave them a new and a deeper content. He enforced vigorously the idea that Zeus cared for justice and that he governed the world according to reason and the unswerving dictates of law. Zeus is not an arbitrary god (as in PrometheusBound). His throne is based on justice and truth. Pride, insolence, arrogance, defiance and unholy ambitions lead to suffering and just punishment* This is the ever-recurring note of the dramas of Aeschylus. His choruses express this in sublime language. Even in his historical play, the Persians, the defeat of their proud armies is attributed to their impious pride. The plots of his six other extant plays are taken from the familiar fables and myths of the Homeric world. Many of the details of these old stories clashed with his more developed moral and religious conceptions. To use them he had to moralise and rationalise the conclusions he wanted to draw from them. This is evident in the three great plays in the Oresteian trilogy. It is implied also in his PrometheusBound, and if we possessed the lost plays in this trilogy we would be able to see it in a clearer manner.
Sophocles was the middle member of the dramatic trinity. One of the most striking characteristics of Aeschylus was his objective and universal point of view. He did not seem to be particularly interested in the psychology of the characters in his dramas. They do not experience any pronounced inner change. We can hardly detect any growth in the characters of Klytaimestra of Elektra or Orestes. But it was the inner changes in the characters of men and women that interested Sophocles. Men and the subtle struggles which went on in their lives were the main object of his interest. He sought to understand the internal workings of the soul of man and illuminate its conflicting passions and darkest recesses. His characters are for this reason more human and understandable than those of Aeschylus. The Oedipus of Sophocles is a more sympathetic character than Orestes, and his Antigone is a much more attractive woman than the Klytaimestra of Aeschylus. Neither was Sophocles such a passionate religious dramatist. He took the traditional morality and religion of the Greeks in a more urbane way and evinced no overpowering desire to modify them. On the other hand he was not a rebel like Euripides. He was satisfied with the portrayal of the better aspects of both myths and men. There is no tragic villian in Sophocles—only blundering ignorance, human error, insolent pride, denseness of vision, stupidity, perversity of will and clamant passion in conflict with man's will. That is why humanists like the late Professor Babbitt of Harvard extol his capacity to see life whole and see it steadily. Yet the moral and religious outlook of Sophocles was practically the same as that of Aeschylus. But in his Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus Coloneus he emphasises also the truth that human blunders are as disastrous often as sins and crimes. The only way to offset the penalties of blunders is to learn wisdom and humility through suffering. In his Antigone he gives us a picture of a strong, fearless, and loyal woman, one of the strongest and noblest women in ancient literature. She is a rebel against the man-made laws of the tyrannical Kreon. And she defends her rebelliousness in the name of the everlasting laws of heaven. She deliberately chooses death to disloyalty to the laws of heaven and the dishonor of her dead but unburied brother. She was loyal even unto death—a courageous character.
But Sophocles has certain weaknesses. I do not like him as well as I like the frenzy of Aeschylus or the realistic rationalism of Euripides. In one sense Euripides was the Bernard Shaw of the Greeks. He chose also the ancient fables and myths for the content of his dramas. But his attitude toward them was much more critical and skeptical. He used often the traditional mythological material in order to attack the old morality and the old sanctified untruths. He has a wider outlook on life than either Aeschylus or Sophocles. Likewise he has greater sympathy with the sorrows of women (read his Meda) and those who have found life hard and grim. He is in some plays an extreme skeptic. In ophon he says "Then dare men say that there are gods in Heaven: Nay, nay, There are not. Fling the tale away, The ancient lie by human folly bred.", or, in another fragment: "Zeus, whoever Zeus may be, for only by stories do I know of him." He describes fate as "a capering idiot." But there are many other sides to Euripides.
LET ME QUOTE three statements from these I three great but different types of thinkers, all expressing their highest understanding of Greek religion. The first is the statement of Aeschylus in the Agamemnon:
Zeus—if to the UnknownThat name of many names seem good;Zeus, upon thee I call:Through the mind's every roadI passed, but vain are all,Save that which names thee Zeus, theHighest One.
The second comes from the Oedipus of Sophocles:
Fair Aigeus' son, only to gods in heavenComes no old age nor death of anything;All else is turmoiled by our master Time.The earth's strength fades and manhood'sglory fades,Faith dies, and unfaith blossoms like aflower.And who shall find in the open streets ofmenOr secret places of his heart's loveOne wind blow true for ever?
The third is expressive of the rare philosophic sayings of Euripides:
O Throne of earth, by earth upheld,whosoe'er Thou art,beyond the reaches of our knowledgeZeus, or the law ofNature, or the mind of man, to thee do Iaddress my prayer;for moving along Thy soundless pathThou dost guide all mortallife with justice (in the Troades).
In Aristophanes' comedy The Frogs, Euripides is contrasted with Aeschylus. One is said to be clever and the other clear, and Dio gives the advice to Euripides to "Be clear, and not so clever." We are reminded of the story about Sir William Archer, the English dramatist. He had the reputation of being always good and never clever, so his friends advised him on one occasion in a parody of the old line: "Be good, sweet maid" to try to "BE clever, sweet William, and let who will be good." One can see differences of this kind in the dramas of the Greeks. This only adds to the joy of the reader.
When we crave a holiday for our minds and spirits I know of no better way of getting it than to transport oneself into the world of the Homeric poems and the Greek dramas. Try it.
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