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that of classical and modern verse, relying merely upon antiphony, alliteration, and parallelism. Technical abandon, allied with directness of conception and faithful revelation of human life, makes for universality-makes his office of imaginative creation. His great of the Hebrew Scriptures a Bible, a world's book that can be translated into all tongues with surpassing effect, notably into a language almost as direct and elemental as its own, that of our Anglo-Saxon in its Jacobean strength and clarity.

Advancing further, you perceive that where a work survives as an exception to the inherent temper of a people, it is likely to exhibit greatness. The sublimest poem of antiquity is impersonal, yet written in the Hebrew tongue. The book of Job, the life-drama of the Man of Uz, towers with no peak near it; its authorship lost, but its fable associated in mind with the post-Noachian age, the time when God discoursed with men and the stars hung low in the empyrean. It is both epic and dramatic, yet embodies the whole wisdom of the patriarchal race. Who composed it? Who carved the Sphinx, or set the angles of the Pyramids? The shadow of his name was taken, lest he should fall by pride, like Eblis. The narrative prelude to Job has the direct epic simplicity a Cyclopean porch to the temple, but within are Heaven, the Angels, the plumed Lord of Evil, before the throne of a judicial God. The personages of the dialogue beyond are firmly distinguished: Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, Elihu,to whom the inspiration of the Almighty gave understanding, and the smitten protagonist himself, majestic in ashes and desolation. Each outvies the other in grandeur of language, imagination, worship. Can there be a height above these lofty utterances? Yes; only in this poem has God answered out of the whirlwind, his voice made audible, as if an added range of hearing for a space enabled us to comprehend the reverberations of a superhuman tone. I speak not now of the motive, the inspiration, of the symphonic masterpiece; it is still a mortal creation, though maintaining an impersonality so absolute as to confirm our sense of mystery and awe.

It has been said of the Hebrew language that its every word is a poem; and there are books of the Old Testament, neither lyrical nor prophetic, so exquisite in kind that I call them models of impersonal art. Considered thus, the purely narrative idyls of Esther and Ruth have so much significance that I shall have occasion to recur to them with reference to poetic beauty and construction.

TURNING from Semitic literature to the Aryan in its Hellenic development, we at once enter a naturally artistic atmosphere. Until after his

Attic prime, the Greek, with no trick of introspection, concerned himself very little about his individual pathology, being far too much absorbed with an inborn sense of beauty, and with lyrical poets-Alcæus, Simonides, Pindarrehearsed, as I have said, the spirit of a people rather than of themselves. As with the Hebrews, but conversely, the few exceptions to this usage were very notable, else they could not have arisen at all. One extremity of passion for which, in their sunlit life, they found expression compulsive, was that of love; and among those who sang its delights, or lamented its incompleteness, we have the world's accepted type in Love's priestess of Mitylene, the “violet-crowned, pure, sweetly smiling Sappho." The pity of it is that we have only the glory of her name, celebrated by her contemporaries and successors, and justified to us by two lyrics in the stanzaic measure of her invention, and by a few fragments of verse more lasting than the tablets of the Parthenon. But the "Hymn to Aphrodite" and the Paiverát pot vos are enough to assure us that no other singer has so united the intensity of passion with charm of melody and form. A panting, living woman, a radiant artist, are immanent in every verse. After twenty-five centuries, Sappho leads the choir of poets that have sung their love; and from her time to that of Elizabeth Browning no woman has so distinguished her sex. The Christian sibyl moved in a more ethereal zone of feeling, but could not equal her Ægean prototype in unerring art, although, by the law of true expression, most artistic where she is most intense.

The note which we call modern is frequent in the dramas of Euripides, and in those of his satirist, Aristophanes; it drifts, in minor waves of feeling, with the lovely Grecian epitaphs and tributes to the dead-that feeling, the breath of personal art, which Mahaffy illustrates from the bas-reliefs and mortuary emblems which beautify the tombs west of Athens. The Greek anthology is rich with sentiment of this cast, so pathetic-and so human. As an instance of what I mean, let me repeat Cory's imitation of the elegiacs of Callimachus on his friend Heracleitus:

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But I quote no more of this melody, since you can find it, in a certain romance of "Cleopatra," shining by contrast with much of that story like the "jewel in an Ethiope's ear." Others of Mr. Lang's elusive, exquisite renderings, done as it seems by the first touch, are incomparable with any lyrical exploits of their kind since "Music's wing" was folded in the dust of Shelley.

Follow the twilight path of elegiac verse to the Alexandrian epoch, and you find the clear Athenian strain succeeded by a compound of artifice and nature, so full of sentiment withal as to seem the forerunner of Christian art-in some respects the prototype of our own idyllic poetry. The studiously impassioned lament of Moschus for Bion is nearer than the poetry of his dead master, and of that master's master, Theocritus (always excepting the latter's "Thalysia "), to our own modes of feeling and treatment. It set the key for our great English elegies, from Spenser's " Astrophel" and Milton's "Lycidas" to Shelley's "Adonais" and Arnold's lament for Clough. The subjectivity of the Greek idyllists is thus demonstrated. They were influenced largely by the Oriental feeling, alike by its sensuousness and its solemnity, and at times they borrowed from its poets as in the transfer by Moschus of a passage from Job into his Dorian hexameters, of which I will read my own version: Even the mallows-alas! alas! when once in

the garden

66

They, or the pale-green parsley and crisp-growing anise, have perished, Afterward they will live and flourish again at their

season;

We, the great and brave, and the wise, when death has benumbed us,

Deaf in the hollow ground a silent, infinite slumber Sleep forever we lie in the trance that knoweth no waking.

We pass with something like indifference to the Latin poets, because their talent, in spite of many noble legacies bequeathed us, so lacked the freedom, the originality, the inimitable po

etic subtilties which animated everything that was Grecian. Hellas was creative of beauty and inspiration; Italia, too, was a creative soil, but of government, empire, law. Her poetry, as it was less an impulse and more a purpose, belongs largely to the mixed class. In its most objective portions there is an air of authorship and self-expression. I will not speak now of Lucretius, who sends out the one dauntless ray of contemplative splendor between the Hebraic sages and the seers of our new dispensation. But Vergil is a typical example of the poet whose style is so unmistakable that every verse overflows with personal quality-a style that endures, establishes a pupilage. Vergil borrowed fire from Greece to light the altars of beauty in a ruder land. The Iliad and Odyssey kindled the invention and supplied the construction of his Æneids; the Georgics, his sturdiest cantos, took their motive from Hesiod; the Eclogues are a paraphrase upon Theocritus. But the Mantuan's style is preeminently his own-the limpid, liquid, sweet, steadfast Vergilian intonation on which monarchs and statesmen hung enchanted, and which was confessedly the parent-voice of many an after bard. Tennyson, in point of a style whose quality is the more distinct for its diffusiveness,- whose potency, to borrow the homeopathic term, is the greater for its perfect trituration,—has been the English Vergil of our day. Browning's trade-mark is, plainly, the antithesis of what I here mean by style. Our own Longfellow furnishes the New World counterpart of Vergil. In the ascetic and prosaic America of his early days he excited a feeling for the beautiful, borrowing over sea and from all lands the romance-forms that charmed his countrymen and guided them to taste and invention. His originality lay in the specific tone that made whatever Longfellow's sweet verse rehearsed a new song, and in this wise his own. Mentioning these leaders of to-day only to strengthen my reference to Vergil,—and as illustrating Schlegel's point that "what we borrow from others, to assume a true poetical shape, must be born again within us," I may add that there is a good deal of personal feeling and expression in the Latin epigrammatists and lyrists. We have Ovid with his Tristia of exile, and Catullus with his Sapphic grace and glow, and a Latin anthology of which the tenderest numbers are eloquent of grief for lover and friend gone down to the nebulous them most were those of the young and dear, under-world. The deaths that touched pagan cut off with their lives unlived, their promise of grace and glory brought to naught. Both the Greeks and the Latins, in their joy of life, strongly felt the pathos of this earthly infruition. That famous touch of Vergil's, in the sixth Æneid, was not all artifice: the passage in which

Æneas sees a throng of shades awaiting their draught of Lethe and reincarnation in the upper world and among them the beauteous youthful spirit that in time will become Marcellus, son of the Emperor's sister Octavia, and heir to the throne of the Cæsars.

Heu, miserande puer! si qua fata aspera rumpas, Tu Marcellus eris. Manibus date lilia plenis, Purpureos spargam flores.1

Every school-boy, from the poet's day to the present, knows how this touch of nature made Vergil and his imperial listeners kin. Its consecrating beauty, in a new world and after nineteen centuries, supplies the legend-Manibus date lilia plenis—of our American hymn for Decoration Day. Out of the death of a youth as noble and gracious,2 in whom centered limitless hopes of future strength and joy, the spirit of poetry well may spring and declare-as from yonder tablet in this very place- that his little life was not fruitless, and that its harvest shall be perennial.

A passing reference may be made at this point to a class of verse elegantly produced in various times of culture and refinement: the hearty overflow of the taste, philosophy, good-fellowship, especially of the temperament, of its immediate maker. Thus old Anacreon started off, that Parisian of Teos. When you come to the Latin Horace, who like Vergil took his models from the Greek, you have, above all, the man himself before you: the progenitor of an endless succession, in English verse, of our Swifts and Priors and Cannings and Dobsons, of our own inimitable Holmes. There are feeling and fancy, and everything wise and witty and charming, in the individuality of these Horatii; they give us delightful verse, and human character in sunny and wholesome moods. One secret of their attractiveness is their apt measurement of limitations; they have made no claim to rank with the great imaginative poets who supply our loftier models and illustrations.

RETURN for a moment to that creative art which is found in early narrative poetry and the true drama. The former escapes the pale cast of thought through the conditions of its formation and rehearsal. Primitive ballads have a straightforward felicity; many of them a conjuring melody, as befits verse and music born together. Their gold is virgin, from the rock strata, and none the better for refining and burnishing. No language is richer in them than

1 "Ah, dear lamented boy! if thou canst break fate's harsh decrees, thou wilt be our own Marcellus. Bring lilies in handfuls; let me strew the purple flowers!"

2 Percy Græme Turnbull: born May 28, 1878; died February 12, 1887.

the English. Our traditional ballads, such as "Clerk Saunders," "Burd Ellen," "Sir Patrick Spens," "Chevy-Chace," " Edward! Edward!" usually are better poetry than those of known authorship. Not until you come to Drayton's "Agincourt" do you find much to rival them. What I say applies to the primitive ballads of all nations. Touch them with our ratiocination, and their charm vanishes. The epos evolved from such folk-songs has the same directness. The rhythm of its imagery and narrative, swift and strong and ceaseless as a great river, would be sadly ruffled by the four winds of a minstrel's self-expression - its current all set back by his emotional tides,

The hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love.

The modern temper is not quick to apprehend a work of simple beauty and invention. It presupposes, judging from itself, underlying motives even for the legends and matutinal carols of a young people. Age forgets, and fails to understand, the heart of childhood: we "ancients of the earth" misconceive its youth. We even class together the literatures of races utterly opposed in genius and disposition. Some would put the Homeric epos on the same footing with the philosophical drama of Job, the end of which is avowedly "to justify the ways of God to men." Professor Snider, who has exploited well the ethical scheme of "Faust," would similarly deal with the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer, he thinks, had in mind a grand exposition of Providence, divine rule, the nature of good and evil, and so forth, in relation to which the narrative and poetry of those epics are subordinate and allegorical. But why should we reason too curiously? Both instinct and common sense are against it. Whether the Homeric epos was a growth, or an originally synthetic creation, I believe that the legends of the glorious Ionian verse were recited for the delight of telling and hearing; that the unresting, untiring, billowy hexameters were intoned with the unction of the bard; that they do convey the ancestral reverence, the religion, the ethics, of those adventurous dædal Greeks, but simply as a consequence of their spontaneous truth and vitality. Their poets sang with no more casuistic purpose than did the nightingales in the grove of Colonos. Hence their directness, and their unconscious transmission of the Hellenic system of government and worship. If you wish instruction, everything is essentially natural and true. A perfect transcript of life- the best of teachers-is before us. In the narrative books of the Bible the good and bad appear without disguise. All is set forth with the

frankness that made the heart of the Hebrew

tent-dweller the heart of the world thereafter. In Homer, the deities are dramatis personæ, very human, with sovereign yet terrestrial passions; they dwell like feudal lords, slightly above their dependents, alternating between contempt for them and interest in their affairs. But where is the healthy man or boy who reads these epics without an absorption in their poetry and narrative that is the clue to their highest value? I have little patience with the critics who would disillusionize us. What is the use of poetry? Why not, in this workaday world, yield ourselves to its enjoyment? Homer makes us forget ourselves because he is so self-forgetful. He accepts unquestioningly things as they are. The world has now grown hoary with speculation, but at times, in art as in religious faith, except ye be as children ye cannot enter into the kingdom. We go back to the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the creative romance and poesy of all literatures, as strong men wearied seek again the woods and waters of their youth, for a time renewing the dream which, in sooth, is harder to summon than to dispel. Such a renewal is worth more than any moral, when following the charmed wanderings of the son of Laertes, by isle and mainland, over the sea whose waters still are blue and many-voiced, but whose mystic nymphs and demigods have fled forever; it is worth more than a philosophy,

When the oars of Ithaca dip so
Silently into the sea
That they wake not sad Calypso,
And the hero wanders free.
He breasts the ocean furrows

At war with the words of fate,
And the blue tide's low susurrus

Comes up to the Ivory Gate.

THE dramas of the Attic prime, although equally objective with these epics, are superb poetry, with motives not only creative but distinctly religious and ethical. They recognize and illustrate the eternal law which brings a penance upon somebody for every wrong, the inscrutable Nemesis to which even the Olympian gods are subject. In this respect the "Prometheus Bound," deathless as the Titan himself, is the first and highest type of them all. The chorus, the major and minor personages, the prophetic demigod, and even the ruthless Zeus, take for granted the power of a nighteous Destiny. The wrong-doer, whether guilty by chance or by will, as in the case of the Edipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles, even pronounces and justifies his own doom. I will not now consider the grandeur of these wonderful productions. Through the supremer endurance of poetry they have come down to us, while the pictures of Zeuxis and Apelles, and the "Zeus"

and "Athene" of Pheidias, are but traditions of "the glory that was Greece." The point I make is that these are absolute dramas. They are richly freighted, like Shakspere's, with oracles and expositions; but their inspired wisdom never diverts us from the high inexorable progress of the action. It is but a relief and an adjuvant. You may learn the bent of the dramatist's genius from his work, but little of his own emotions and experiences. Nor is the wisdom so much his wisdom, as it is something residual from the history and evolution of his people. The high gods of Eschylus and Sophocles for the most part sit above the thunder: but the human element pervades these dramas; the legendary demigods, heroes, gentes, that serve as the personagesHermes, Herakles, the houses of Theseus, Atreus, Jason-all are types of humankind, repeating the Hebraic argument of transmitted tendency, virtue, and crime, and the results of crime especially, from generation to generation. The public delight in the Athenian stage was due to its strenuous dramatic action at an epoch when the nation was in extreme activity. Its religious cast was the quintessence of morals derived from history, from the ethics of the gnomic and didactic bards, from the psychological conditions following great wars and crises such as those which terminated at Salamis and Platea. Æschylus and Sophocles were inspired by their times. They soared in contemplation of the life of gods and men: no meaner flight contented them. The apparent subjectivity of Euripides is due to his relative modernness. No literature was ever so swift to run its course as the Attic drama, from the Cyclopean architecture of the "Prometheus" to the composite order of " Alcestis" and "Ion." Euripides, freed somewhat from the tyranny of the colossal myths, was almost Shaksperian in his reduction of them to every-day life with its vicissitudes and social results. His characters are often unheroic, modern, very real and emotional men and women. Aristophanes, still more various, and at times equal to the greatest of the dramatists, as a satirist necessarily enables us to judge of his own taste and temper; but in his travesties of the immediate life of Athens he is no more self-intrusive than Molière, twenty centuries later, in his portraits of Tartuffe and Harpagon and "Les Précieuses." Men create poetry, yet sometimes poetry creates a man for us - witness our ideal of the world's Homer. The hearts of the Grecian dramatists were so much in their business (to use the French expression) that they have told us nothing of themselves; but this implies no insignificance. So reverse to commonplace, so individual were they each and all, that in point of fact we know from various sources more of their respective characters, ambitions, stations, than we know

of that chief of dramatists who was buried at Stratford less than three centuries ago.

But I well may hesitate to discourse upon the Greek and Latin poets to the pupils of an admired expounder of the classical literatures; and I use the word "literatures" advisedly, since, with all his philological learning, it is perhaps his greatest distinction to have led our return to sympathetic comprehension of the style and spirit of the antique masters-to have applied, I may say, his genius not only to the materials in which they worked, but to the grace and power and plenitude of the structures wrought from those materials. With less hesitation, then, I change, in quest of strictly dramatic triumphs, from the time of Pericles to the period of Calderon, of Molière, of Shakspere and his Elizabethan satellites. Lowell says that Pope and Dryden together made a man of genius. Terence and Plautus between them perhaps display the constituents of a master-playwright, but not, I think, of a strongly imaginative poet.

I have alluded to the process by which the epic and dramatic chieftains appear to reach their creative independence. As a preliminary, or at certain intervals of life, they seem to rid themselves of self-consciousness by its expression in lyrics, sonnets, and canzonets. Of this the minor works of Dante, Tasso, Boccaccio, Michelangelo, Cervantes, Calderon, Camoëns, Shakspere are eminent examples. But nothing so indicates the unparalleled success of the last-named poet in this regard, as the fact that, unambiguous as are his style and method, and also his moral, civic, and social creeds, we gather so little of the man's inner and outer life from his plays alone: except as we seem to find all lives, all mankind, within himself— all experiences,

All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame;

and Coleridge, when he called him the myriad-minded, should have added, "because the myriad-lived."

THE grand drama, then, like the epic, gives us that "feigned history" which is truer than history as written, because it does not attempt to set things right. Its strength must be in ratio to its impersonality. It follows the method of life itself, which to the unthinking so often seems blind chance, so often unjust; and of which philosophers, reviewing the past, are scarcely able to form an ethical theory, and quite helpless to predicate a future. Scientifically, they doubt not - they must not doubt that

1 Professor Basil L. Gildersleeve.

Through the ages one increasing purpose

runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.

Right prevails in the end; crime brings punishment, though often to the innocent. We have seen that, if poets, they deal with phenomena, with the shows of things, and, as they see and faithfully portray these, the chances of life seem much at haphazard. Hamlet, for all his intellect and resolve, is the sport of circumstance. Rain still falls upon the just and the unjust. The natural law appears the wind of destiny. Man, in his conflicts with the elements, with tyranny, with superstition, with society, most of all with his own passions, is still frequently overthrown. It seems as if the good were not necessarily rewarded except by their own virtue, or, if self-respecting, except by their own pride, holding to the last; the evil are not cast down, unless by their own self-contempt, and the very evil flourish without conscience or remorse. The pull of the universe is upon us, physically as well as morally. When all goes well, and a fair ending is promised,

then

Comes the blind Fury with the abhorrèd shears, And slits the thin-spun life.

Thus Nature, in her drama, has no temporary pity, no regret. She sets before us the plots of life, and its characters, just as they are. The plots may or may not be laid bare; the characters often reveal themselves in speech and action. As the stream rises no higher than its fount, the ideal dramatist is not more learned than his teacher. He may know no more than you of his personages' secrets. Thackeray confessed, you remember, that Miss Sharp was too deep for him.

Tragedy, according to Aristotle and in Dryden's English, is "an imitation of one entire, great, and probable action, not told but represented, which, by moving in us fear and pity, is conducive to the purging of those two passions in our minds." And so its reading of the book of life, even with our poor vision, is more disciplinary, more instructive in ethics and the conduct of life, than any theoretic preachment. The latter will be colored, more or less, by the temper of the preacher. Besides, through the exaltation to which we are lifted by the poet's large utterance, our vision is quickened: we see, however unconsciously, that earthly tragedies are of passing import-phenomenal, formative experiences in the measureless progress of the human soul; that life itself is a drama in which we are both spectators and participators; that, when the curtain falls, we may wake as from a dream, and enter upon a life beyond

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