The Common Reader
use of metaphor he will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but
the reverberation and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing
has made; close enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough
to heighten, enlarge, and make splendid.
For none of these dramatists had the license which belongs to the
novelist, and, in some degree, to all writers of printed books, of
modelling their meaning with an infinity of slight touches which can
only be properly applied by reading quietly, carefully, and sometimes
two or three times over. Every sentence had to explode on striking the
ear, however slowly and beautifully the words might then descend, and
however enigmatic might their final purport be. No splendour or richness
of metaphor could have saved the _Agamemnon_ if either images or
allusions of the subtlest or most decorative had got between us and the
naked cry
ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶ. ὢ ’πολλον, ὢ ’πολλον.
Dramatic they had to be at whatever cost.
But winter fell on these villages, darkness and extreme cold descended
on the hillside. There must have been some place indoors where men
could retire, both in the depths of winter and in the summer heats,
where they could sit and drink, where they could lie stretched at their
ease, where they could talk. It is Plato, of course, who reveals the
life indoors, and describes how, when a party of friends met and had
eaten not at all luxuriously and drunk a little wine, some handsome boy
ventured a question, or quoted an opinion, and Socrates took it up,
fingered it, turned it round, looked at it this way and that, swiftly
stripped it of its inconsistencies and falsities and brought the whole
company by degrees to gaze with him at the truth. It is an exhausting
process; to contract painfully upon the exact meaning of words; to judge
what each admission involves; to follow intently, yet critically, the
dwindling and changing of opinion as it hardens and intensifies into
truth. Are pleasure and good the same? Can virtue be taught? Is virtue
knowledge? The tired or feeble mind may easily lapse as the remorseless
questioning proceeds; but no one, however weak, can fail, even if he
does not learn more from Plato, to love knowledge better. For as the
argument mounts from step to step, Protagoras yielding, Socrates pushing
on, what matters is not so much the end we reach as our manner of
reaching it. That all can feel—the indomitable honesty, the courage,
the love of truth which draw Socrates and us in his wake to the summit
where, if we too may stand for a moment, it is to enjoy the greatest
felicity of which we are capable.
Yet such an expression seems ill fitted to describe the state of mind of
a student to whom, after painful argument, the truth has been revealed.
But truth is various; truth comes to us in different disguises; it is
not with the intellect alone that we perceive it. It is a winter’s
night; the tables are spread at Agathon’s house; the girl is playing the
flute; Socrates has washed himself and put on sandals; he has stopped in
the hall; he refuses to move when they send for him. Now Socrates has
done; he is bantering Alcibiades; Alcibiades takes a fillet and binds it
round “this wonderful fellow’s head”. He praises Socrates. “For he cares
not for mere beauty, but despises more than any one can imagine all
external possessions, whether it be beauty or wealth or glory, or any
other thing for which the multitude felicitates the possessor. He
esteems these things and us who honour them, as nothing, and lives among
men, making all the objects of their admiration the playthings of his
irony. But I know not if any one of you has ever seen the divine images
which are within, when he has been opened and is serious. I have seen
them, and they are so supremely beautiful, so golden, divine, and
wonderful, that everything which Socrates commands surely ought to be
obeyed even like the voice of a God.” All this flows over the arguments
of Plato—laughter and movement; people getting up and going out; the
hour changing; tempers being lost; jokes cracked; the dawn rising.
Truth, it seems, is various; Truth is to be pursued with all our
faculties. Are we to rule out the amusements, the tendernesses, the
frivolities of friendship because we love truth? Will truth be quicker
found because we stop our ears to music and drink no wine, and sleep
instead of talking through the long winter’s night? It is not to the
cloistered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude that we are to
turn, but to the well-sunned nature, the man who practises the art of
living to the best advantage, so that nothing is stunted but some things
are permanently more valuable than others.
So in these dialogues we are made to seek truth with every part of us.
For Plato, of course, had the dramatic genius. It is by means of that,
by an art which conveys in a sentence or two the setting and the
atmosphere, and then with perfect adroitness insinuates itself into the
coils of the argument without losing its liveliness and grace, and then
contracts to bare statement, and then, mounting, expands and soars in
that higher air which is generally reached only by the more extreme
measures of poetry—it is this art which plays upon us in so many ways
at once and brings us to an exultation of mind which can only be reached
when all the powers are called upon to contribute their energy to the
whole.
But we must beware. Socrates did not care for “mere beauty”, by which he
meant, perhaps, beauty as ornament. A people who judged as much as the
Athenians did by ear, sitting out-of-doors at the play or listening to
argument in the market-place, were far less apt than we are to break off
sentences and appreciate them apart from the context. For them there
were no Beauties of Hardy, Beauties of Meredith, Sayings from George
Eliot. The writer had to think more of the whole and less of the detail.
Naturally, living in the open, it was not the lip or the eye that struck
them, but the carriage of the body and the proportions of its parts.
Thus when we quote and extract we do the Greeks more damage than we do
the English. There is a bareness and abruptness in their literature
which grates upon a taste accustomed to the intricacy and finish of
printed books. We have to stretch our minds to grasp a whole devoid of
the prettiness of detail or the emphasis of eloquence. Accustomed to
look directly and largely rather than minutely and aslant, it was safe
for them to step into the thick of emotions which blind and bewilder an
age like our own. In the vast catastrophe of the European war our
emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before
we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction. The only
poets who spoke to the purpose spoke in the sidelong, satiric manner of
Wilfrid Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. It was not possible for them to be
direct without being clumsy; or to speak simply of emotion without being
sentimental. But the Greeks could say, as if for the first time, “Yet
being dead they have not died”. They could say, “If to die nobly is the
chief part of excellence, to us out of all men Fortune gave this lot;
for hastening to set a crown of freedom on Greece we lie possessed of
praise that grows not old”. They could march straight up, with their
eyes open; and thus fearlessly approached, emotions stand still and
suffer themselves to be looked at.
But again (the question comes back and back), Are we reading Greek as it
was written when we say this? When we read these few words cut on a
tombstone, a stanza in a chorus, the end or the opening of a dialogue of
Plato’s, a fragment of Sappho, when we bruise our minds upon some
tremendous metaphor in the _Agamemnon_ instead of stripping the branch
of its flowers instantly as we do in reading _Lear_—are we not reading
wrongly? losing our sharp sight in the haze of associations? reading
into Greek poetry not what they have but what we lack? Does not the
whole of Greece heap itself behind every line of its literature? They
admit us to a vision of the earth unravaged, the sea unpolluted, the
maturity, tried but unbroken, of mankind. Every word is reinforced by a
vigour which pours out of olive-tree and temple and the bodies of the
young. The nightingale has only to be named by Sophocles and she sings;
the grove has only to be called ἄβατον, “untrodden”, and we
imagine the twisted branches and the purple violets. Back and back we
are drawn to steep ourselves in what, perhaps, is only an image of the
reality, not the reality itself, a summer’s day imagined in the heart of
a northern winter. Chief among these sources of glamour and perhaps
misunderstanding is the language. We can never hope to get the whole
fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English. We cannot hear it, now
dissonant, now harmonious, tossing sound from line to line across a
page. We cannot pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals
by which a phrase is made to hint, to turn, to live. Nevertheless it is
the language that has us most in bondage; the desire for that which
perpetually lures us back. First there is the compactness of the
expression. Shelley takes twenty-one words in English to translate
thirteen words of Greek.
πᾶς γοῦν ποιητὴς γίγνεται, κἂν ἄμουσος ᾖ τὸ πρίν, οὗ ἂν Ἕρως
ἅψηται
. . . For every one, even if before he were ever so undisciplined,
becomes a poet as soon as he is touched by love.
Every ounce of fat has been pared off, leaving the flesh firm. Then,
spare and bare as it is, no language can move more quickly, dancing,
shaking, all alive, but controlled. Then there are the words themselves
which, in so many instances, we have made expressive to us of our own
emotions, _thalassa, thanatos, anthos, aster_—to take the first that
come to hand; so clear, so hard, so intense, that to speak plainly yet
fittingly without blurring the outline or clouding the depths Greek is
the only expression. It is useless, then, to read Greek in translations.
Translators can but offer us a vague equivalent; their language is
necessarily full of echoes and associations. Professor Mackail says
“wan”, and the age of Burne-Jones and Morris is at once evoked. Nor can
the subtler stress, the flight and the fall of the words, be kept even
by the most skilful of scholars—
. . . thee, who evermore weepest in thy rocky tomb
is not
ἅτ’ ἐν τάφῳ πετραίῳ,
αἰ, δακρύεις.
Further, in reckoning the doubts and difficulties there is this
important problem—Where are we to laugh in reading Greek? There is a
passage in the _Odyssey_ where laughter begins to steal upon us, but if
Homer were looking we should probably think it better to control our
merriment. To laugh instantly it is almost necessary (though
Aristophanes may supply us with an exception) to laugh in English.
Humour, after all, is closely bound up with a sense of the body. When we
laugh at the humour of Wycherley, we are laughing with the body of that
burly rustic who was our common ancestor on the village green. The
French, the Italians, the Americans, who derive physically from so
different a stock, pause, as we pause in reading Homer, to make sure
that they are laughing in the right place, and the pause is fatal. Thus
humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue, and when
we turn from Greek to Elizabethan literature it seems, after a long
silence, as if our great age were ushered in by a burst of laughter.
These are all difficulties, sources of misunderstanding, of distorted
and romantic, of servile and snobbish passion. Yet even for the
unlearned some certainties remain. Greek is the impersonal literature;
it is also the literature of masterpieces. There are no schools; no
forerunners; no heirs. We cannot trace a gradual process working in many