Ancient rhetoric and poetic

The classical practise of poetic in the two modes distinguished by Aristotle, dramatic and narrative, has a twofold significance. It has the claim of all great art for its own beauty; and it reveals certain fundamentals of literary form and literary influence. Classical influences on later art have been defined sometimes vaguely, sometimes amiss, for lack of clear grasp of classical practise. Yet the vitality of classical poetic art is hardly more proverbial than its definiteness. Without circumscribing in formulas its creative variety, we can discern quite clearly its artistic habits in these two enduring modes.

Into such a survey recent questions as to literary forms need not enter. How far a literary form may be modified or extended without losing its character, how suggestive a recognized form is to the composing imagination, are questions important rather for those modern times in which the artist is much concerned with individual self-expression than for the centuries in which he was more the spokesman of a community. Even if Brunetière’s transference of the word genre from biology to literature be only analogy, even if Croce’s denial that a literary form is directive of the artist be justified, we must still use the terms drama and epic. From Aristotle down, criticism has used them not only for convenience, but because in fact there were two typical ways of extensive imaginative composition in words, varying in detail but constant essentially, and always sharply distinct. Whether these should rather be called types or modes than forms is a question for later consideration. For the purposes of the present review the terms drama and epic connote only habits of composition universally recognized.

The two discussed by Aristotle as types are in fact seen as types to persist. The habits of drama have remained typically distinct from those of narrative, and have changed far less. To add Senecan tragedy to its Greek prototype, and to mark the distinctive traits of Latin comedy, will both fill out Aristotle’s summary and show in what forms classical influences came first to modern drama. Narrative in the ancient world developed along few lines. Its poetic art long remained epic. This art was at once followed by Vergil and recreated. The Æneid is the great exemplar of all that is fruitful in literary influence. The Hellenistic art that Vergil rejected was cultivated by Apuleius and ran to seed in the Greek prose romances. Meantime it was practised with facile brilliancy by the Latin poet whom the middle ages knew better even than they knew Vergil—Ovid. Setting aside, then, all minor forms, and in the two major forms all but what is typical, we may venture to survey ancient poetic, first in Greek tragedy, with Senecan tragedy for contrast and Latin comedy for supplement, then in Vergilian epic, with Ovidian narrative for contrast and Apuleius for divergence.

I. DRAMA

A. Greek Tragedy[1]

At first glance Greek tragedy strikes the modern student as finished. Its historical period is definite. It grew; it matured; it died. Its strictly dramatic influence appears to be sharply limited. Inoperative as a mode of representation, indeed almost unknown, in the middle ages and the early Renaissance, it seems at first to have been revived in modern times only for archæological reproduction, as the models of Greek architecture in museums. Even if such a view were just—and it is not—Greek tragedy would compel attention by sheer artistic eminence. It can no more be ignored than Gothic architecture. It is one of the great artistic achievements of the human spirit. But no such artistic achievement is ever finished in the sense of being relegated to a museum. Its eminence constitutes a presumption of vitality. Gothic architecture, though held in abeyance and even forgotten for centuries, is again operative. It compels attention to-day not only in reproductions, but in creation. Greek tragedy has profoundly influenced modern playwriting. Its increasing reappearance to-day in revivals, and the distinction of certain imitations such as Samson Agonistes, are less important than its influence on modern dramaturgy, as in Racine and again in Ibsen and finally in certain striking plays of our own time. This vitality implies that the Greek experience, in especially happy conditions of stage and audience, through a period of extraordinary artistic competition, was fruitful not merely in skilful adaptation to those conditions, but in dramatic principles.

(1). Theater and Audience

The emotions that are enhanced by representation before a crowd are typically such as are best felt by the crowd together, such as are communal.[2] Greek drama began, according to tradition, in the rites celebrated by the whole village to honor Dionysus, the god of fertility and enthusiasm. In the shouting, singing chorus there were at first no actors in the modern sense; but that was because in a broader sense all were actors. There was rude, impromptu mimic action. There was probably a good deal of improvised verse by individuals, and probably a good deal of recurring refrain by the whole crowd. Out of this communal impersonation of the story of Dionysus grew very naturally individual impersonations of the god and of his more prominent mythical attendants, the crowd responding with impromptu variations of the familiar refrain. Every crowd produces a leader. The leader of the Greek chorus became an actor in the modern sense of taking, a fixed part. In time other fixed parts were assigned to individuals, till the mimic action had a definite dialogue; but the chorus persisted as representative of the whole community.

Then, as always, came the individual genius to discern the capacity of what had grown up among the people, to reveal and enlarge that capacity, and to fix a great form of art. The shaping of drama by Æschylus and its development by Sophocles and by Euripides expressed, indeed, individual genius; but no less they expressed the ideals of the Greek race and remained answerable to the original popular impulse. The Greek audience during the great period of drama felt not only that the chorus chanting in the orchestra was its representative, but that it was itself as a body assisting at a communal celebration. Always the enacting of legend or history known to every spectator by heart, the drama was always judged sternly not only by its poetic beauty, but by its faithfulness to communal beliefs and feelings. Its success was measured by the feeling of the community.

So the great open-air Greek theater was made for the community. It superseded the unfurnished hillside as the community passed more and more from participants to spectators; but it remained, to a degree rarely realized in modern times, communal. For Greek tragedy, even at its height, never lost its reminiscences of ritual. Every representation being an act of religion, the theater crowd, united by a common rite, was the more sensitive to common sympathies. That the theater is for the crowd, not for the individual, has been realized by playwrights of every age; but the first great age of drama opened this peculiar opportunity of dramaturgy widest because its crowd was unified. The communal sense of tradition was focused by religion.

(2). Diction

Remembrance of this fact has led many modern readers who have never seen a Greek play to conceive Greek tragedy as formal and rigid. This is much the same error as supposes Greek architecture and statuary to have been white. It is an illusion of time. Greek buildings and statues became white when no hands were left to restore their colors. Greek tragedies became formal and rigid when they passed from the stage to the closet, when they lost the rhythms of dance and of phrase. With every revival of them upon the modern stage the illusion is dispelled. Indeed, it can be broken by merely reading them aloud.

Nevertheless, though they show to an exceptional degree that larger movement which Aristotle found to be a dramatic essential, they were stately in gesture and in lines. Even without the associations of religion, the very size of the theater would have precluded the facial play that is a main reliance of modern acting, and induced in the open air a delivery sometimes oratorical and always large. The tragic mask and cothurnus were adaptations to a great open-air space. To the same physical conditions were adapted the rendition and the lines themselves.[3]

The diction of Greek tragedy, though varying widely of course from poet to poet, has certain recognizable constants. It is generally sonorous, sententious, and, to a degree never surpassed, direct. It realizes fully the emotional appeal of rhythm; for though its dialogue has less rhythmical variety than Shakspere’s, it rarely lapses into monotony, and it is relieved by the abundant imagery and metrical variety of the chorus. Greek tragic dialogue is typically austere. It rarely amplifies, for it is poetry, not oratory;[4] but it makes every word count dramatically. The ideal of economy is felt even in the diction. Passages of narrative, such as those of messengers, are made dramatically effective not only by situation, but by variations of tone and tempo. Effects of style may seem to have preoccupied criticism too much unless we remember that the Athenian audience was habitually sensitive to rhythm, and that it was never distracted by novelty of story from attention to the dramatist’s art. That the final touch of this art was the rhythmical finishing of the lines there can be no doubt.

Nor is dramatic verse a mere traditional convention.[5] Obviously it is appropriate to historical dignity; but beyond this we become aware, even from reading, much more from hearing, that the verse subtly and constantly enhances the emotion by enriching the connotation. It is not merely rhythm added to force, though how much rhythm, even in prose, is worth dramatically every good actor knows. It is not even poetry added to drama. It is an element permeating and integral. Good dramatic verse, to say nothing of the best, is not a lyrical addition, not a decoration, but as truly a dramatic means as the other means of characterization. That is why the tradition of every great stage, such as the Comédie Française, lays distinct stress on rhythmical rendition; and that is why the dramatic rhythms of Greek tragedy are still inspiring.

Nor is even this the final value of verse in Greek tragedy. Such verse enhances the characterization not only in detail by widening the opportunity of the actor to convey mood and emotion, but generally by enhancing the poetry. The typical method of Greek tragic characterization is to idealize. The mighty figures of the past, remote from the urgencies of our confusing present, confirm our faith that man may dominate and direct his world for good, or, when they too fail, reveal with larger truth the tragic flaws of humanity and the hope of its regeneration. Modern history plays, as well as ancient, are poetic in diction ultimately because they are poetic in conception, as Greek drama was at once tradition and poetry. The word audience, which in its etymological suggestions has seemed inappropriate to a modern crowd gathered rather for seeing than for hearing, is entirely appropriate to the Greek theater. The visual values of representation were, indeed, realized in gesture and pose, though less in scenery and spectacle; they were realized as never, perhaps, since in group movements; but the auditory values, the sounding line, the phrase harmony of the chant, always enhanced representation by strong rhythmical suggestion. A Greek tragedy was in a real sense, though its music was simply melodic, a symphony.

(3). Chorus

The symbol of the communal import of Greek tragedy and of its characteristic form is the chorus. From being almost the whole the chorus dwindled dramatically to a subordinate part. The inference, however, that it was outgrown, that except for historical study it is negligible, is unwarranted. Even Euripides used the chorus dramatically; and Aristotle urges, not that it be abolished, but that it be made an integral part, one of the actors. Nor were the practise and the theory mere concession to Greek convention. The chorus was in fact dramatic.[6] Too readily conceiving it in terms of our meager modern experience, as in opera, critics often seem to have forgotten that the Greek chorus furnished not primarily tableau or grouping or even pageantry in a wider sense, but chanting and dancing. That dancing may be highly dramatic we have but recently rediscovered. Aristotle[7] knew dance as compassing the whole range of bodily expression. Far from being merely a lyric interlude, the chorus offered distinct dramatic possibilities.

To begin with, the combination of choral dance and chanting has a direct appeal to the simpler emotions that are communal; and in Greek drama it enhances the idealizing of communal fears and beliefs and aspirations. The idealism of Greek tragedy is conveyed largely by the chorus. Then the chorus is used to enhance the emotion of a preceding scene by iterating it sympathetically, or by recoiling in protest, or by reflecting on it sub specie æternitatis. Thus are achieved the relief of variety and also an intermediary effect, the effect of spectators of the action itself interpreting to the spectators of the play. The variety brought about by the choral throng was the more marked because the actors were few. In the chorus were many opportunities for representation of the human world about these isolated individuals, and for dramatic symbolism through the group movements of the dance. The choral dance, always symbolic, had been developed from simple, primitive forms to a fine art. The preliminary to every dramatic production was the public granting of a chorus; and the training of this chorus by the dramatist himself was a main part of rehearsal. The chorus is associated in every one’s thought of Greek tragedy inevitably and fitly. It is not merely an archaic convention; it is not merely a lyric accessory to drama; it has dramatic possibilities which may yet, if large open-air theaters win again a place in communal life, be revived.

(4). Themes and Personæ

The rhythmical effects of diction and of choral dance are hardly more characteristic of Greek tragedy than its unvarying use of legendary themes and persons. Euripides is thought to have chafed within these confines, to have been hampered by the conventional prescription of old bottles for his new wine. In any age the playwright who insists on ideas in advance of his crowd thereby sacrifices something of the communal appeal. But even Euripides kept outwardly the unwritten law, and Aristotle[8] accepted it as part of his theory. It is evident that such themes and such persons were a tragic convention; but the convention was still recognized in the middle ages;[9] it was accepted by the Renaissance; it was formally adopted by the French seventeenth century; and its being a convention does not prove it any the less dramatic. Without disparaging the gain to modern tragedy from the widening of the tragic field we may take account of the typical values of the field of tradition.

The field of tradition is ipso facto the field of communal memories and aspirations and, even in modern times, of myth. Though the re-creation of myth may be artificial and remote, that it need not be so, that it may on the contrary originally express both the poet and the conceptions of his audience, has been proved many times, and very convincingly in our own time by William Vaughn Moody’s Fire-bringer. The fire of Prometheus is there seen, even after Æschylus, even after Shelley, to be undying. The modern science of anthropology, indeed, gives good ground for thinking both that myth is constantly human and that by its very persistence, as of a primitive trait, it opens opportunities for drama.

The modern study of folklore, by recovering some lost echoes in Greek tragedy, has enhanced its significance. Folk superstitions, though they retire from public gaze before more sophisticated conventions, are slow to die. Those which have become mere curious lore are of course dead dramatically; but those which express persistent human yearnings may be all the more vital dramatically because they are primitive. Such, for instance, is the folk-tale of the fairy mistress, the woman of unearthly beauty who has the magic to enrich the man she loves with joy and power. Widespread over western Europe in the middle ages, it has roots in remote antiquity. Euripides made it, not as the medieval writers the story of the delusion of the man, but the tragedy of the woman. In varying forms it has recurred again and again. In Walter Map’s amazing tale of Gerbert[10] it concludes upon penance and renunciation. In Fouqué’s Undine its native force is dissipated in sentiment. A dead superstition, on the other hand, has no dramatic appeal. Though we admire the steadfast piety that agonizes over the unburied body of a brother, we can no longer appreciate the situation of Antigone as fully tragic; for we have lost irrevocably the ancient superstition from which it springs. But Medea with her power to bless and ban her lover, and with her unearthly capacity for suffering, who will venture to say that she is dead? That she is primitive gives her only the more power to walk the stage to-morrow.

Mythical idealizing is readily symbolic. But in Greek tragedy direct symbolism, except in the chorus, is not common. Rather than as symbolical, the legendary figures appear as typical. It is as typical that the “illustrious persons” are recommended by Aristotle and represented by the dramatists that he expounds. Prometheus, Heracles, Agamemnon, Medea, are chosen as eminent not in rank, as some French dramatists are accused of thinking, but in typically human traits. They show grandly and conspicuously what obscurely is suffered by us all. “There you and I and all of us fell down.” They are race heroes; we communally feel in them the race ghost. And the more mythical they are, the more we can feel the struggle of all human kind. For the very limitations on themes sets Greek tragedy in sharper relief against modern as exhibiting the dramatic vitality of legend.

Personages so fixed do, indeed, tend to preclude both novelty and subtlety of characterization. In this regard Euripides, especially in his Medea, is sometimes exceptional. Generally the characterization of Greek tragedy is broad and simple. The personæ are taken full-blown, at some revealing crisis. But modern experience with plays and with novels confirms the impression that broad characterization is generally more effective before an audience; subtle, minute, or cumulative, with an individual reader. In this application, too, we may take Aristotle’s saying that plot is more important in drama, character in epic. But lest we separate character from plot unduly, we must remember that the movement of Greek tragedy is not merely of events, but of human will. Will is the exhibition of character in action. It is the mainspring of every tragic crisis. At once the simplest and the strongest expression of character, it animates Greek tragedy because it animates almost all tragedy.[11] Æschylus in Prometheus Bound promises the victory of heroic fortitude. Sophocles in King Œdipus conveys the agony of assertive individuality at finding the struggle for self-fulfillment vain, and brings even innocent willfulness to wreck. Euripides sees the tragic conflict of the traditional bloodwite with reverence to a mother as leading to madness. Within the compass of the few dramas left to us from the Greek stage the tragedies of human will in a few typical personages are seen to be as various as they are convincing. Even the rich variety of the great Elizabethan period does not make them seem meager.

Rather they exhibit the dramatic richness of the typical. By the very fact of being embodied in flesh and blood any “illustrious person” begins to be real. Even the allegorical figure of Everyman in the mediæval morality—and the Greek dramatis personæ were never allegorical—has held modern audiences because each spectator recognized himself with his secret foes and friends. That the persons of the Greek stage were few and familiar, then, was not of itself a disadvantage. The tragedies of a few famous families can strike pity and fear into all families who know the bitterness of hate. Moreover, the restriction to familiar themes, the exclusion of novelty from plot, focused attention upon conception and movement. Playwright and audience alike looked for originality not in subject, but in art. Comparison of play with play was readier and more specific; and the competition of the stage was almost purely artistic.

(5). Plot

Plot in Greek tragedy, the movement of the whole play, is discussed so extensively by Aristotle that little need be added. For his preoccupation with Sophocles hardly makes his exposition the less comprehensive. Later criticism has generally accepted Sophocles as historically midway between the occasional archaism of Æschylus and the occasional modernism of Euripides, as typical of Greek dramatic habits, and as the greatest Greek master of plot. Sophocles, as has been often pointed out, intensified drama by making his unit not the trilogy, but the single play, by developing a single theme with a clear conflict, and by making its interaction self-sufficient through the use of a third actor. Euripides, on the other hand, seems to care less for totality, though he achieves it in some plays, notably in the Medea. His use of a separable prologue instead of dramatic exposition within the play has been condemned as impatient;[12] and the vividness of his lines, especially in description, has been disparaged as distracting. In all this the art of Sophocles is no more eminent than it is typical. He is the shining example of Greek artistic economy.

This characteristic economy of Greek tragic art makes it permanently inspiring to playwrights. Modern audiences, being less conscious of art, may find the economy sometimes too close; but playwrights discern in it both a triumph of technic and an example. For the revolt against even the “unities” of the French classic stage spent its force long ago. Meantime the war of the romanticists against the classicists should make clear, what the greatest dramatists have always understood, that unity in drama is valuable only as a means to coherence. Its only raison d’être is to clear the way for steady movement and to lead that movement to a convincing issue. Now in this compelling force of movement Greek drama, especially in the hands of Sophocles, remains by common consent a model of tragic art. That even audiences habituated to variety and tolerant of looseness will still feel this force is suggested by revivals of increasing frequency, by the eminence, even in a period of very different dramatic habits, of such plays as Othello, and by the deliberate preference of some recent dramatists[13] for the Greek model. But whether single, steady movement through a limited time be a permanent dramatic principle or not, at least it is characteristically Greek. What one editor says of the Antigone of Sophocles might be said of Greek tragedy generally: “there is no halting in the march of the drama.”[14]

This effect is brought about technically by focusing on a single scene and a continuous critical period.[15] The whole tragedy, as has been quaintly said, is compressed within the fifth act; or, to speak in still more modern terms, the Greeks composed their tragedies as long one-act plays. Such a play differs from Henry IV or A Winter’s Tale essentially; it differs from Othello only in removable accidents. The characteristic is not brevity, nor even unity, but continuity. That the habit of continuity was fostered by Greek stage conditions, the habit of discontinuity by Elizabethan, there can be no doubt; but neither can there be any doubt that the Greek stage conditions were modified more than once by a dramatist, or that the Elizabethan stage conditions did not determine the growth of Shakspere’s art. In both great ages a dramatist took the stage as he found it, but built up his dramatic technic as he chose. The continuity of Greek tragedy is not merely a fact of archæology; it is an achievement of technic.

The limiting to a single place and time has been objected to as forcing off-stage some events that the audience would like to see, and as unnaturally crowding the action. In a word, the one-act form, for an action of some magnitude, has been called artificial. Any form may seem artificial if it is realized imperfectly; and the limits of this form impose merely a higher degree of the difficulty inherent in any dramatic form, the difficulty of focus. Even a five-act play imposes limits, prescribes selection, by the very conditions of the stage itself. The peculiar opportunity arising from the stage conditions of the Greek theater was discerned to be emotional intensity. Intensity has even been urged as the characteristic opportunity of all drama. Whether this be granted or not, undoubtedly the Greeks conceived drama so, and developed their technic accordingly. They worked for intensity. Though they were not content with two actors, they were content with one stage set and with one period of time. Not only so, but the difficulties of their form stimulated their art. In these conditions playwrights heightened intensity by a technic of progressive continuity.

So much for the idea behind the objections. The particular charges seem hardly to hold. What is forced off the stage of Greek drama, or of any drama? Surely nothing that the dramatist wishes to have on-stage, or his art is imperfect. That the frequent murders are only heard, not seen, is due not to any exigencies of form, but to social convention and to the idea that dying is less tragic than death. For the rest, to put shifting human life on a fixed stage, even with liberty to represent more than one place and time, always involves foreshortening. Art cannot have the diffuseness of life. It works by selection. The Greek tragic artists chose to carry selection to the highest degree. That this event or that of the tragic story is reported by a messenger, not enacted before our eyes, is not a hindrance to the tragic march, not the makeshift conceded to an intractable form. Let the speech of a Greek messenger be read aloud, or better, let it be acted; and it will no longer be called undramatic.[16] Add its dramatic value in context, its relation to the scene that it enters; and no doubt will remain. The possibilities of narrative on the stage, though they seem to have been forgotten by many English playwrights, are clear. But the Greek dramatist did make a virtue of necessity. He sometimes used a messenger, dramatically indeed, but perforce. What we hear from a messenger we could not see without change of scene. This was the dramatist’s sacrifice, not to formalism, but to continuity. To that end he would have made even greater sacrifice.

The speeding of the action beyond the normal pace of life is not confined to this form. It is a condition of all drama. Nor does Greek drama seem either crowded or hurried. Though events may follow thick and fast, the Greek movement is typically unhurried. It has steadiness from careful preparation; it gains momentum as it advances; it culminates swiftly; it diminishes to a slow and quiet close.

That tragedy should have a full close, carrying the action through to a καταστροφή, or state of rest, must have been with the Greeks a principle; for it was an almost invariable habit. Though the tragedies of other and later nations do not always end so, they too have the full close often enough to suggest that audiences generally desire it.[17] Whether or not this is true of audiences, it seems true of playwrights in proportion as they work, as the Greeks worked, for singleness. In Greek tragedy the end crowns the work in the sense that the close completes the interpretation. The close of the action is the issue of the characterization. Characterization in Greek tragedy, more consistently than in any other, is motivation. In some Greek plays it offers hardly anything else. The characters are drawn for the play, not for themselves. The “part” is subordinated to the theme. When we see that this is true even for Medea, a “part” to be coveted by any modern actress, we realize that the significance of the whole play was habitually in the Greek conception the main object. This explains the full close as the goal of a steady movement, and as the final stage of the idealization which habitually shaped both characters and plot. And where a modern playwright has worked with the same intention, we find again and again, as in Othello, the same full close.

The ultimate technical question, then, is What is continuity worth? Euripides composed sometimes as if it were worth less than salience. He has even been called romantic; and the influence of Greek tragedy, since it was overwhelmingly his among the Romans and in the middle ages, may seem after all to be hardly the influence of Sophoclean movement. But the great influence of Euripides is largely of his poetry apart from his dramaturgy. It reigns through a time when tragedy was waning, and through a later time when there was hardly any drama at all. He is still the most interesting of Greek dramatists to read. On the other hand, those of his plays which are now most effective as stage performances have the typical Greek continuity; nor does he often depart from the type very far. That the type has a controlling idea of continuity is evident. To the Greek dramatists generally continuity seemed to be worth much technical labor and even much sacrifice. The crown of their technical skill was to carry the theme, to develop it, to fulfill it at the last.

Behind this technic is an ideal of singleness. The sacrifice to continuity springs from that ascesis which has been remarked in other fields of Greek art. It has aroused—it will always arouse—the protest of the romantics. An art of singleness, lucidity, cogency, seems to them, as perhaps it seemed already to Euripides, too far removed from life. And not the romanticists only, but after them the realists, have demanded a drama more like life itself, freer, more various, less composed. Perhaps there is no ultimate reconciliation, or perhaps the two conceptions are complementary; but the Greek tragedians seem to answer from their plays: art is not life; it is idealization.

B. Senecan Tragedy[18]

How far the Latin tragedy of the actual stage followed the great Greeks we can only speculate from a few fragments and from the references of critics. That the lost Medea of Ovid was Greek in more than name the habit of composition seen in the Heroides leaves much doubt. Certainly the tragedies of Seneca, while they revive the great names of Agamemnon, Hippolytus, and Medea, never enter the great art of Athens. Indeed, their relevance at this juncture is for contrast. A Senecan prologue is not only a separable prefix; it may be a summary of the whole plot, as the prologue of Latin comedy. Separable the Senecan chorus is always in providing lyric interludes. It would thereby interrupt the action if the tragedy had the Greek onward course; but instead Seneca’s violent scenes are themselves separable, and his dialogue is sometimes a collection of speeches. Seneca wrote tragic scenes and spaced them with lyric pauses;[19] he did not gather momentum for a total impression. He made his personæ utter their feelings; he did not make them interact. The familiar names, the familiar stories, only heighten the contrast. Senecan tragedy is like Greek tragedy only in non-essentials. The essentials of Greek dramatic composition are not here.

What is here is not poetic, but rhetoric. That these pieces were written for recitation, not for acting, the external evidence is strong, though not conclusive,[20] but the internal evidence is abundant.[21] Most significant is the feebleness of plot. More obvious is the rhetorical method of characterization by typical traits,[22] the method of the character sketches (ἠθοποιίαι) in schools for boys as it was expanded in the schools for men under the masters of declamatio. A method essentially oratorical, it developed under the declamatores of the Empire not creative conception, but inventive ingenuity and a preoccupation rather with striking expression than with consistency. Most obvious of all, written large on every page, is the swelling rhetoric of the style. Not for nothing did this poet bear the name of Seneca.[23] To deny that such writing has a certain force is to forget what it might become in the mouth of a trained speaker and before an audience taught to admire its distinctive effects; to forget also how eagerly Seneca was appropriated fifteen centuries later; to forget finally that oratory in the theater has not yet lost all its appeal. But while we grant to rhetoric some share in the poetic art, we cannot put Senecan tragedy beside the tragedy of Athens without seeing unmistakably that such art as it has is not the distinctive art of drama.

C. Latin Comedy

The plays of Plautus and Terence keep the dramaturgy known as the New Comedy,[24] the comedy of Menander. Its figures, alike in Greek and in Latin, are types. Such individualizing as may be discerned, in the Menæchmi for instance, or the Self-tormentor, stands out as exceptional. Comedy, perhaps, tends more than tragedy to the typical. At any rate, Latin comedy has a set of personæ quite fixed:[25] two fathers, two sons in love and in debt, two daughters of romance or of pleasure, and two slaves to stir the intrigue. There might be a matron, a slave-trader, and a braggart soldier; and there would be pretty surely a parasite.

Stock figures involve conventionality also in plot. One of them may have a double,[26] and the plot may consist largely of mistaking one for the other; or the long-lost daughter, as in the declamationes and the Greek romances, may have been kidnapped by pirates. Typical is the plot of Terence’s Phormio:

In essentials this is the plot of any Latin comedy. That the Greek originals of the New Comedy were less crystallized is suggested by larger fragments recovered recently; and that Menander was a creator of plots may be inferred from the saying reported by Plutarch: “I have made my comedy; for the plan is arranged, and I have only to write verses for it.”[28] Even with so few situations as in Latin comedy there is room for variety of handling. Early commentators distinguish the modus motorius,[29] the kinetic mode, from the statarius, or static, and find that Terence, except in the Phormio, tends to the latter. But even the movement of Plautus is rather bustle and go than onward progress. Dramatic movement will hardly be compelling where motivation is so much from circumstances and so little from character. Modus motorius seems to imply rather liveliness than sequence. To the large, miscellaneous, and turbulent Roman audience, it has been plausibly suggested, there would have been little appeal in cogency of plot.

A certain dulness in the audience is suggested by the fact that Terence was reproached for combining two Greek plots in one Latin play. He protests, naturally, that this is his right; and the Phormio shows his ability to weave an intrigue clearly and attractively. The dramatic lack mistakenly ascribed to his stories is rather of salience, especially of visibly significant action before our eyes. That this can vivify even conventional characters in a conventional plot is the chief dramatic message of Plautus. He trusts the intelligence of his audience so little as to make his prologue an oral program, a catalogue raisonné, explicit to the last degree.[30] With Terence he resorts to the aside, the soliloquy, and the convention of people on the stage together who do not see each other—all these when they could be obviated by a little dramatic ingenuity. Where Plautus spends his ingenuity is on lively realism of detail, on abundance of stage “business.” He holds a scene, turning and returning a situation, until he has used its whole value. Though this is sometimes tiresome for reading, it shows good theatrical sense of the actual audience. He may have learned it from acting. Nothing is more instructive to playwrights than this filling of a simple outline. The habit is almost the opposite of the compression of Greek tragedy, and the New Comedy is doubtless inferior to tragedy in every point of plot; but none the less it vindicates clearly the value and the Plautine method of imaginative amplification.

II. NARRATIVE

A. The ÆNEID

(1). Epic

Epic is now often divided into “primitive,” “authentic,” or “popular” epic, such as the Iliad, and “artistic,” or “literary” epic, such as the Æneid. Of the former the great example is Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey remain, for us as for the ancients, supreme. Meantime the western European nations emerging in the early middle age expressed themselves in epics of original native force: the Roland, the Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, and some of the Norse sagas. To put these beside Homer is to become aware of specific differences within a general likeness. Homer is both more ample and more finished. Primitive he certainly is not in any sense now recognized by anthropology. Even the word popular has for us implications quite inapplicable to the circulation of his day. The classification of certain epics as primitive, authentic, or popular is based on the idea that these are characteristically communal, expressing more the emotions of a whole homogeneous community, less those of the individual poet. It has even been held[1] that such epic began in aggregation of tribal lays, and that even the form in which it has come down to us is less the creation of any individual than the final artistic shaping of successive anonymous versions. The theory of communal composition, in this literal and extreme sense, has been sharply challenged. Without denying the use of traditional material and form, one may remain convinced that the Iliad or the Odyssey is the work of a single man, whom we may as well continue to call Homer, and that he was not merely the mouthpiece of a community, but a conscious and skilful artist. That his art was not wasted on his community, that this community was far from primitive, there is ample evidence in the remains of its other arts.

The same direction of study leads to a similar conclusion for the later epics of this class. The more we know of the middle ages, the less warrant we find for calling these epics primitive. True, they are less finished than the Iliad; true, they show clearer traces of old war-songs; but neither their art nor the society for which it was shaped can accurately be called primitive. Alike the literary conventions of the poems themselves and the social conventions of their times rule such a characterization out. The “Gothic night” fancied by supercilious eighteenth-century critics, the “dark ages” of imperfect historians, are found to have had considerable illumination.

Nevertheless the twofold classification of epic, in spite of the inaccuracy of its terms, has some significance. Earlier epic, what we might call primary epic, is in fact more directly answerable to a homogeneous community. Its unknown poets evidently felt themselves to be spokesmen of communal emotions and achievements; and the world that they saw they expressed with less intervention. As if they were transmitters rather than creators, they expressed not themselves so much as their people. This people, too, was in that stage of civilization in which foray and warfare by small groups brought out individual heroes and kept life precarious and simple. Booty and food, a fine sword and a fine web, still had immediate appeal; and the physical sensations of battle-strain and sweat, of ceaseless surf and darkening deep, were still common experience. Thus primary epic, communal and objective, has the directness of immediacy. Arising from those simpler emotions which we all feel together, primitive perhaps in that sense, and expressing them in terms of familiar physical sensations, it has its own inimitable flavor.

Later, or secondary, epic is not the transmission of legends still active, but the re-creation of a past already remote. Still appealing to a communal sense of the heroic, it adapts the old epic mode to an audience more sophisticated not only in life, but in poetic art. The poet is thus at once more imitative and more original. He binds himself by traditions of subject-matter, of form, and of style; but within this recognized mode he composes with more individual freedom and to a more definite end. Relying less on scenes in a series, he selects and manipulates toward more artistic sequence. Since his descriptions must be less immediate, he develops the art of narrative. Endeavoring to remain the spokesman of his people—for otherwise he must forfeit the communal mainspring of epic—he interprets their past by his own message for their future. Thus he may be all the more a poet, or maker. He cannot hope for the fresh immediacy of primary epic; but in compensation he has greater opportunity to move his people by his own vision. Milton’s conception, vast as is its scope, is essentially the same. He interprets the Bible as the epic of mankind in terms of a Puritan theocracy. Tasso re-creates a departed chivalry to animate a vision of devotion and redemption. Vergil, the great example of secondary epic, makes of the Trojan story, of Roman legend, of myth and cult and drama and history, of all that enriched the Roman past, a progressive vision of Roman destiny.

Primary epic and secondary epic, though thus distinguishable, are both epic. They are complementary. They reveal different capacities of a single artistic mode. Epic is constant. It was; it was again; it is; for aught that we can see, it will be. Extended poetic narrative of great deeds for communal inspiration, though it has never been common, has never been extinct. Primary epic seems inevitable. The minstrel in the hall of Hrothgar is poetically identical with the minstrel in the hall of Alcinous.[2] Both hint to us of what epic was made, and how; both show us its constancy. This primary form of epic can never, of course, recur. It has been civilized away. But meantime it has established a poetic art that is permanent. The word epic still connotes a distinct mode. To this Vergil deliberately conformed, and Milton. Secondary epic is still epic.

What, then, are seen to be in ancient practise the essentials of epic? First, its inspiration and its appeal are communal. By contrast the modern novel, which is also extended narrative and also within Aristotle’s definition of poetic, is seen to be individual; or, where in exceptional cases it is broader and simpler,[3] is often distinguished by criticism as having epic appeal. Then, epic is in style objective. It narrates habitually without interposition, by images visual, auditory, motor. Its scenery is merely the background of heroic activity. Its speeches are in primary epic for characterization, not for plot. There is no plot in the dramatic sense for the whole; and such as there is for component parts is only to bring out persons. The object of epic being persons, its commonest descriptive details are of personal activity: attitude, movement, speech, gesture. The method is to suggest that heroic life by its physical sensations, to make the characters, as Aristotle says,[4] reveal themselves. Epic gives few reflections. It does not comment even on Helen’s coming to the Scæan gates, or on Hector’s parting from Andromache; it merely describes. This objectivity is a main means of epic directness.

The characteristic form of epic[5] is for scope and variety. Drama is intensive; epic is extensive. It has time to give us a sense of the fulness of life; and its movement does not preclude excursions. We meet many people and see them in various aspects. We can linger over a scene for itself without being urged forward. Continuity may be but leisurely succession from scene to scene. A scene may within itself have dramatic progress; but the movement of the whole has not the dramatic causal compulsion. Drama has its characteristic force through unity. Unity in epic is neither compelling nor compulsory. In fact, to stretch the term unity over epic tends to deprive it of all force. No epic poet has ever composed more carefully than Vergil, or with keener awareness of the ways of drama. The Æneid was composed as a whole; its parts were carefully adjusted to a plan, and its plan was controlled by a single idea. Epic has never gone further toward unity; and Homer never dreamed of going so far. But even such dramatization of epic as Vergil’s has time for the funeral games, and does not sacrifice to the story of Rome the story and the person of Dido. In poetic, unity means nothing unless it means unity of form. This epic cannot have as a whole. Nor does any one regret the lack, or think it a fault. The unity of drama is for intensity; the object of epic is the realization not of a crisis, but of great persons in a long and various course.

So the style of epic is typically sonorous and high. Height of style may be attained by simplicity, and epic is simple often, but not always. To speak of epic as characteristically simple is to belie much of Homer and most of Vergil and Milton. Epic is not characteristically, nor even usually, simple. It may be very elaborate. It begins by assuming a language recognized as on a higher plane than that of ordinary speech. The epithets of the Iliad or the Beowulf are a poetical convention; and the style of epic proceeds always by conscious art. Here is the poet who, daring to sing great deeds, means to sing them greatly. That the effort may end in frigidity or bombast means only that there is bad epic as well as good; it does not mean that epic should be simple. Epic poets have never thought so. The poets of primary epic, no less than Vergil or Milton, were occupied with style. For the term epic has always implied greatness. It is a word of praise. It means a story of greatness told greatly.

Homer was for the ancient Greek world, and Vergil became for the Roman world, a Bible of style. Both were conned in school not only for the examples of their great persons, but for the study of language. That their connotation was immeasurably enriched, their “sublimity” heightened, not only by rhythm, but by verse, no one will deny. It is even possible to feel in Milton’s verse a beauty separable from that of his ideas, and greater, lifting his narrow and political theology to wider import. Aristotle[6] remarks upon the appropriateness to epic of the Greek dactylic hexameter. Dionysius[7] even finds control of rhythms to be Homer’s main poetic means. We are more inclined to admit this view for Milton; but the ultimate truth is that we should not, except for analysis, separate verse from the other elements of style. That every great epic poet has been a masterly metrist means rather that for “the height of this great argument” he felt the need of all that verse can add of suggestiveness. Though prose epic, as Aristotle admits by implication, is quite conceivable, it has to move on a lower plane. The Norse sagas are more direct even than Homer, starker in narrative force as if stripped for action, equally expressive of communal emotions, equally vivid in characterization. They have all the epic means but one. That single lack does not, indeed, relegate them to a different class; but it shows by contrast that for its full realization epic demands verse.

(2). The Conception and Scope of the Æneid

The whole poetic art of ancient epic is exhibited in the Æneid. Setting aside those interesting historical questions of epic origins, growth, and transmission which in the study of Homer can hardly be ignored, and on the other hand including the whole range of epic, secondary as well as primary, we can learn best from the great poet who devoted his mature years to conceiving, planning, and reshaping the epic of Rome. The artistic scope of the Æneid, as well as its artistic eminence, long secure beyond cavil, has been reaffirmed by recent criticism. Sainte-Beuve calls Vergil “le poète de la Latinité tout entière.”[8] Mackail, whose studies have been primarily Greek, exalts the Æneid afresh.[9] Woodberry, whose criticism has been mainly of English literature, says: “The distinctive feature of the ‘Æneid’ is the arc of time it covers, the burden of time it supports,” and again, “The ‘Æneid’ is, I think, the greatest single book written by man because of its inclusiveness of human life, of life long lived in the things of life.”[10]

The idea of Roman destiny, animating the Æneid throughout, is something larger than the nationalism of other epics. It is imperialism, and of a spirit generous enough to win the sympathy of Dante. It has not the occasional character of such a nationalist story, for instance, as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniæ. In a time of corrupt politics it is above political opportunism. Its Rome is not merely the throne of Augustus; it is the government of the world. Its Romanism is less political than religious. “Pius Æneas” is more typical than “much-enduring Odysseus” of the struggle of man for an abode of justice and peace. This, more than the personal glory that humanism centuries afterward read from the classics, is the conception of the Æneid. The destiny of Rome reveals the hope of mankind; and the Æneid has the whole epic scope. Hardly less than Milton, Vergil justifies the ways of God to man.

(3). The Narrative Movement of the Æneid[11]