During the last fifty years the study of Greek literature has been set on a new basis. A collection of ill-digested matter no longer suffices. Greek is taught more understandingly and more deeply. First comes a patient observant study of the language; afterwards, in years of maturity, are estimated the qualities of the thought and of the style; these are set in clearer lights, and turned to a direct application. Landor is the first modern in whom this sort of study reveals its effects. His Greek devotion to classical associations, to ideal beauty, his Greek aversion to the mysterious, his love for clearness and purity of outline, appear cold to many a reader. He is too pellucid, of too delicate a preciseness, they imagine. But Landor does not displease through these qualities, which are virtues. His coldness is constitutional. However that may be, his imaginary dialogues, imitated from Plato, and the poetry of his Hellenics, show the Greek influence in a fuller form than we have met with hitherto. Since Landor’s day our literature is pervaded with Greek ideals: it aims at Greek style, and often it attains fairly to its mark. We need not deal with matter so voluminous as that of Browning, nor with a style so inconsistent. But Browning’s love of Greek is matter of fame. Has he not translated the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the Alcestis and the Heracles of Euripides? Nor need we deal with the poetry of Swinburne. It is enough to point out that the Atalanta in Calydon is in spirit intensely Greek, and that its most famous speech is a translation from Euripides.

From William Morris we have a translation of the Odyssey; he has written the Life and Death of Jason and the Earthly Paradise, and both of these owe almost everything—their matter and the charm of their manner—to the Iliad and the Odyssey, to Apollonius, and to the Greek tragedians.

To two of the best and purest poets of our age Greece has supplied the very breath of literary life. One is Matthew Arnold, the other is Tennyson. Matthew Arnold as critic, Matthew Arnold as poet, is equally Hellenic. He has been charged with “an air of aristocratic selectness and literary exclusiveness.” The art of Pheidias is open to the same objection. What really marks the style of Matthew Arnold is his reasoned simplicity of taste, his cultivated appreciation of the delicate aroma of words and the poetical atmosphere of thought. Like Tennyson, he has a true eye for beauty, grace, and congruity of effect. He compasses the “liquid clearness of an Ionian sky.” It may be that he lacks abandon. He may not feel with the poignancy, or soar with the boldness, of the greatest creators. But, artistically considered, he is as nearly perfect as it is given to man to be. His poetic style is, indeed, almost too perfect for the general. When he says

he is using the only two adjectives which the place required, and which it truthfully admits. They are exactly the two epithets which a Greek might put. Yet, no doubt, the untutored mind asks for something more assertive, something which will cut more sharply or press more heavily into the unready imagination. Than Mycerinus, than Sohrab and Rustum, than Philomela, Thyrsis, or The Strayed Reveller, one can find nothing more absolutely Greek in point of execution, though one may know Greek passages which stir profounder emotional depths.

Tennyson’s debts to classical authors have been treated by Mr. Churton Collins in a monograph. That critic is right in saying that the knowledge of a scholar is requisite to appreciate Tennyson fully, however much he may be appreciated by those who are no scholars. No man has ever been better read in previous poetry than Tennyson, and no man has known better how to assimilate what he found, or has possessed a surer tact and taste in using it. With Tennyson the Greek matter is, as with Milton, imbedded in his own, not overlaid. Greek forms of verse are moulded to his purpose. The Greek style, describing what is luminously seen in a few luminous touches, is ever conspicuous. He neither tries to disguise his borrowings, nor does he obtrude them. When he says, “for now the noonday quiet holds the hill,” he is translating Callimachus; when “the charm of married brows,” Theocritus; when “shadowy thoroughfares of thought,” Sophocles; when “sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows,” Homer. His device of making the sound answer to the sense, as in

is a common device of the Greeks. In point of form his Œnone is modelled on Theocritus; his Ulysses and his Tithonus are framed after the soliloquies in Greek plays. His Lotus-eaters gets its matter from Homer, Bion, and Moschus. Everywhere we meet hints and reminiscences of Simonides, or Pindar, or Theocritus, or Anacreon. But these are all incorporated, amalgamated in a body of work which is wholly in keeping with them in taste, in tone, in diction—in short, in style.

This age of ours, to put it briefly, has been an age of stylists, of artists who work on principles derived from their education in Greek, and their love, which every scholar feels, of that glorious and undying literature.

BRIEF CONSPECTUS OF GREEK LITERATURE.