By reason of that curious law, which forbids literary genius to appear sporadically (as in the
exceptional
case of Dante), but rather in clusters (as in the Periclean, Elizabethan, and Napoleonic epochs), we have as a great rival and contemporary of Herodotus the historian Thucydides.
Universal Anthology - v02
.
.
Mrs.
Barbauld .
. . . . ^sBattle of the Frogs and Mice . . . <i Wb Final Translation of Homer Possible .
. . . . Butcher and Lang . . 229 Andrew Lang . . . 232 Tr. by Butcher and Lang . 232 TV. by Butcher and Lang . 245
Greeks and Trojans
I Two Royal Mistresses
Shakespeare
V The Odyssey
J Calypso : Odyssey
Hausicaa : Odyssey S Glaucus and Circe
The Strayed Reveler .
Circe's Palace
^ The Longing of Circe
. . . .
^ Prayer of the Swine to Circe AFantasia on the Odyssey
*•» Odysseus in Hades : Odyssey
*V The Women of Homer .
$ Odysseus and Polyphemus : Odyssey .
^. Ulysses
.
John Keats
Matthew Arnold . . Nathaniel Bawthorne .
274 . 280 . 287 . 312 . 313 . 316 . 320 . 326 . 340 . 352
.
William Morris Euripides
John Keats
62 77 89 93 99
. . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . .
. . . .
29 Nathaniel Hawthorne . . 31
. . .
. . . . . .
TV. by P. S. Worsley J. A. Symonds .
W. E. Gladstone
J. P. Mahaffy
Pindar 113
TV. by Pope
Tr. by W. E. Aytoun .
115 . 131 . 134 . 138 . 146 . 170 . 175 . 175 . 176 . 181 Alfred Tennyson . . . 183 Lucian 190 Andrew Lang . . . 193 194 . . 213
.
.
. Tr. by J. G. Lockhart .
Lord Byron . .
Unknown
217
. .
Cameron Mann . Austin Dobson . . . . Ludvig Holberg .
. . . . .
TV. by Butcher and Lang Alfred Tennyson . .
680128
vii
.
viii TABLE OF CONTENTS.
Nature and Man in Greece
Ernst Curtius . .
Why Rome became Greece and Rome Legends of Early Rome Virginia
. . .
Great
. . . 366 368
. . . . . . . .
MM . 354 Theodor Mommsen . . 359
. . . .
387
P. B. Shelley Livy
T. B. Macaulay
JOHN PENTLAND MAHAFFY DEATH MASK OF KEATS
A READING FROM HOMER CASSANDRA
CIRCE'S PALACE
THE ABDUCTION OF HELEN
.
.
. „ .
.
.
Frontispiece
riam 89
133 175 287 327
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. volume n.
THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY
By Professor Mahaffy
It is seldom fully appreciated, what a very large share of the world's literature is history of some sort. The primitive savage is probably the only kind of man who takes no interest in it ; except it be that the memory of the dead is often carefully obliterated by him, and the names, or even words suggesting the names, of his fathers, tabooed from his speech. But as soon as a spark of civilisation illumines this primitive darkness, men begin to take an interest in other men, not only beyond their own immediate surroundings, but beyond the limits of their own generation. Interest in the past and provision for the future are perhaps the essential mental differences between the civilised man and the savage.
According as this care for the past and the future increases, all literature divides itself into that which concerns the forces of nature and that which concerns the history of man. Almost all the literature of imagination starts from this latter. Epic poems profess to tell the history of heroes. Tragic poems profess to analyse their emotions at some great crisis of their lives. Lyric poems are of interest, chiefly as giving us the history of the poet's souL Even the modern novel, which is avowedly fictitious, must base itself upon the history of ordinary men, and borrows most of its plots from actual occurrences in their lives. The historical novel is a manifest bridge between the actual occurrences of past time, and the desire to know more of the motives, of the colour, of the character of the actors, than has been handed down in contem porary documents. This kind of novel, if professorial, like the
sii THE LITERATURE OP HISTORY
Egyptian books of Ebers, may approach the tamest record of the facts ; if artistic, like those of Walter Scott, it may be almost a work of pure imagination. But the historical interest is always there, and it may be doubted whether the story of any invented being, formally divorced from the annals of known men, will ever excite the keen and permanent interest which the history of such a man as Alexander of Macedon or Napoleon will always command. The mass of fiction which gathered round the name of the former all pretends to be history ; the vast libraries of Napoleonic books contain plenty of fiction ; but the fiction is of little interest in comparison with the real history of that wonderful life.
As history in the widest sense therefore embraces the greater part of literature, we must here confine ourselves to what is strictly such — the efforts made by many writers in many nations for the last 3000 years either to ascertain the history of men who lived before them, who live away from them, or else to give us a picture of the society in which they themselves have lived.
So long as the belief in a golden age, in a heroic past, dominated the imagination of men, so long both epic poems and annals were occupied with the uncertain and legendary past. The history of Herodotus is justly regarded as the masterpiece in a new line, the attempt to narrate a great struggle which was still in the memory of old men, and also to show how the earlier conditions of Greece and of Asia led up to this struggle. And here for the first time the literary side of such a work was made important in contrast to the dry annals or mere enumeration of events, which was the earlier method of escaping from the fables of the romancers into the domain of real facts. The antagonism to the ornamental or poetical treatment was too strong in these annals. Sober men then made the mistake which sober men do now ; they imagined that if we could only ascertain the bare facts, we should have before us the true history of the past. Such a notion is chimerical ; unless we have living men reproduced with their passions and
the logic of their feeling, we have no real human history. The historical novel gives us a far closer approximation to the whole truth than the chronological table. Hence the genius of Herodotus,
THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY xiii
like the genius of the Old Testament historians, hit upon the great truth that every worthy portrait is a character-portrait, and
that the perfection of such a portrait depends as much upon the painter as upon the subject of the painting. Herodotus' individual men and women, nay, his individual city-states, live in our imagina tion. He has done most of all men to make the history of Greece a subject of eternal interest. Plutarch is his only rival in this respect. Had these two authors been lost, the educated public in all the European nations would long since have lost touch with the Greeks, and the interest in Greek things might have been confined to the lesser audience of artists and scholars.
If it be felt that Herodotus has still the obscure feeling of making history an epic poem, that he has too many digressions and halting-places — yet how precious they are ! — the Greeks have supplied us with a strong antidote.
By reason of that curious law, which forbids literary genius to appear sporadically (as in the exceptional case of Dante), but rather in clusters (as in the Periclean, Elizabethan, and Napoleonic epochs), we have as a great rival and contemporary of Herodotus the historian Thucydides. In deliber ate antagonism to the free and easy gossiping of the old school traveller, who often delays the great march of his immortal epic by refreshing his readers with posies from the flowery fields of anecdote, this other literary genius lets us know clearly, without condescending to say it oftener than in one brief sentence, that the permanent value of history (in his opinion) lies not in the social or artistic side, but in the progress of political movements, in the conflicts of great principles, which mould the character and condition of nations. To him the war between Athens and Sparta, even down to its petty and monotonous raids, is far more important than the sculpture of Phidias, the poetry of Sophocles, the buildings of Ictinus and Mnesicles. With him, as with a great school of modern historians, from Macchiavelli to
Seeley, politics dominate the world, and therefore political history exceeds all other in value and in interest.
But is it possible for any thoughtful man, living and taking part in the political controversies of his day, to give us an objective
xiv THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY
record of his own time ? This is what Thucydides professes to do ; and so well has he concealed his partialities by his seriousness and his affected accuracy, that his literary genius has imposed upon the world of scholars from that day up to the present critical age. We know now that his subjectivity was no less dominating than that of Herodotus. But it was disguised, as the subjectivity of a great painter is disguised from the vulgar by the accuracy of the likeness he paints. The contemporaries of Eembrandt may have insisted upon the fidelity with which he reproduced his Burgo masters, his old women, and his Jews. We now value his portraits not as likenesses, but as expressions of the painter's genius ; and that is the real value of the history of Thucydides. If Herodotus be the Vandyck who gives us a gallery of the grandees of Hellas and of Asia, Thucydides is the Eembrandt who expresses his own people, be they coarse or even ugly, with the force and spirit of his gloomy genius.
These are the two immortal types, even among our masters the Greeks, for all their successors seem weak beside them. Xenophon has all the technique of a historical artist, but he wants the strong character, the subjectivity which produces the harmony of a great work. Polybius has the subjectivity, the strong character of a historian, but he is so deficient in the technique that he is neglected by the world.
It cannot but be interesting to inquire how far these eternal contrasts are manifested in the great writers who have kept alive the torch of artistic history in modern times, but the subject is too vast to allow us here more than some general reflections. The solidarity of Europe, the myriad relations of great kingdoms in constant communication, have made the task so vast that no human mind can fill the whole canvas of contemporary history with an adequate and harmonious picture. Thus Alison's Europe must have been a failure as a great work of art, nor would it have been attempted by any true historical genius. The subject was too vast, and the events too close to the writer to admit of his pro ducing a K-nj/Mi «s det. The only contemporary history which can claim a high place in art is in the form of memoirs such as those
THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY XT
of St. Simon, or of Boswell, which reflect the surface of an inter esting society from day to day. The men who have shown a true genius for history in modern times have selected epochs from past centuries, in which the characters and the events were of such importance that they maintained their interest in the minds of civilised men.
Foremost among those of English race comes Gibbon, the Herodotus of modern times in the wide range of his subject, in the clearness of his grasp, in the wealth of his imagination, but inferior to Herodotus as an artist, in that the artificial pomp of style is too prominent, and often distracts the reader's attention from the narrative ; whereas the old Greek had attained that higher stage in which art seems to be nature in its apparent simplicity and the total absence of affectation. Still Gibbon's history is a great and enduring work of art, which will never be superseded by the more pragmatic writing of modern men. He held fast to the old classical principle, that the historian must be rich in imagination, and not wanting in eloquence. Next to Gibbon's Decline and Fall, among the histories written in English, comes (in my opinion) Grote's History of Greece. Like Thucydides in his seriousness, his exclusive attention to politics, his decently veiled desire to refute the views of his predecessors, Grote was wanting in rhetorical skill, still more in that pathetic terseness which makes the narrative of Thucydides so impressive. It is in fact in paraphras ing his ancient models that Grote shows to the greatest advantage. But though his history has been called a huge political pamphlet in support of philosophical radicalism, his breadth, his learning, his thoroughness in working out his sources, make his History of Greece stand out ahead of the many shorter histories furnished by European scholars. For he was not only a scholar, but a politician ; he knew how theoretical contradictions in a constitution are avoided by practical compromises, and if he neglected art, archaeology, and, in general, the picturesqueness of his subject, he
can still be used to rectify the want of insight in politics which the professorial historians of France and Germany are wont to display.
xvi THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY
The research of Germany and the brilliancy of France have not produced any masterpieces which can rank with those of Gibbon or Grote. But they have, of course, produced many excellent and even great contributions to history. Two among the Germans impress me as greater than the rest — Mommsen's Roman History, and Histories of Mediaeval Athens, and of Rome, by Gregorovius. Both are written with far more finish of style than is usual in Germany, and both are monuments of great and accurate learning. InMommsen's book this learning is as it were disguised by an absence of foot-notes, and still more by a certain petulance of style which suggests a mind prejudiced upon certain leading political questions. The suspicion thus raised by the style of this remark able book 1 may be confirmed by careful criticism of its authorities. On the other hand, a knowledge of Mommsen's special studies shows his gigantic power in gathering the materials for history. The greatest of all the predecessors of these men, Niebuhr, though the originator of a new method, was not great enough as a writer to maintain his position against modern competition. Yet hia successors, with the exception of Mommsen, are rather respectable than great as artists. Many of them are first-rate scholars, but that is not our business here.
As might be expected from a nation that produces such excellent prose, the French have given us a whole series of eminent historians, but it is perhaps the high level of their style that has hindered any one of them from holding any primacy over his fellows. Guizot, Taine, Thiers, Eenan, Montalembert, Henri Martin, and many others, have given us brilliant expositions of sundry periods in European history, but there is seldom absent from them that subjectivity which marks a Frenchman, and which mars his authority among other nations as a judge of historical
to style, an anxiety to say brilliant things, which rather dazzle the
evidence. There is also, in most of them, an over-attention
1 The English reader is fortunate in this case to have an unusually excellent English translation (that of Dr. Dickson) to his hand. The translation of Gregorovius' History of Some, which is now in progress, is not sufficiently known to me to warrant any opinion upon it.
THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY xvii
reader than illumine the subject in hand. Possibly any of them may be superseded more easily than de Tocqueville, whose studies on Democracy are, however, examples of political philosophy rather than of history.
But such generalities upon foreign historians are empty with out some fuller justification for the writer's impressions. Let us return to the English writers who have made the present century, and even the present generation, famous for its historical studies. There are two Americans who stand among our foremost —Motley, the historian of the great period of Dutch history, and Parkman, upon a smaller canvas, but with no inferior hand, portraying the long struggle of France and England for the possession of North America. In our own country two eminent men, who afford such marked contrasts as to invite comparison, have but lately passed from among us—Freeman and Froude. The latter was a great writer, and had moreover a brilliant imagination—that faculty which may mar a historian, though it is absolutely indispensable for his greatness. But though he has been convicted of many inaccuracies, his grasp and insight are so often true that I cannot but regard him as a far greater historian than his adversary and critic Freeman, who had greater talents for research, far greater accuracy in details, but a certain boorishness which will turn men away from him. He constantly displays his learning not only with pedantic pride, but asserts or implies the inferiority of other workers in the same field with insolence. He turns aside in his History of Greek Federations to write notes on Napoleon III. , which might have been written by V. Hugo. In spite, therefore, of his rugged learning, his large grasp of the whole world's history, his careful research, he will be forgotten when the brilliant and graceful Froude is still read, and still speaking to thousands where Freeman speaks to scores, just as the masters of the English people in history are Shakespeare and Walter Scott, rather than Bishop Stubbs or Sir John Seeley. For this is the extremest form of the contrast between the picturesque writer and the laborious investigator. It know, the rule among the students of the Research School to deny all merit or value as
VOL. II. —
2
is, I
xviii THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY
historians to imaginative writers. Nevertheless, I will maintain that ten thousand average people have got a general idea, and a true idea, of Louis XI. from Quentin Dunoard, or from N6tre Dame de Paris, for one who gets it by grubbing up the con temporary chronicles. It may be added that to interest the general public in historical reading is no small duty, and no small gain in our most modern civilisation.
Intermediate in position between Froude and Freeman, I put my two personal friends, Green and Lecky, who are probably the most popular writers of history that England has seen since the days of Gibbon. Green was carried off by disease, long before his work, under normal circumstances, would have ceased. Mr. Lecky is still a prominent figure in England, but rather as a politician than a historian, seeing that he exchanged the study for the Senate, and contemplative for practical life. He is not therefore likely to give us another book on history. His eight volumes on England in the Eighteenth Century would, however, in themselves be an ample record of his genius, even had they not been preceded by those remarkable volumes on the History of European Culture, which first made his name a household word throughout the Empire. It is indeed doubtful whether his graceful and finished style equals that of Froude, or whether his research that of Freeman ; but he combines qualities which they did not, and therefore may be classed above them by any independent critic. Perhaps it is impossible for any man to write as brilliantly as Froude, if he writes with judicial calmness, if he makes allowance for his opponents, and strives to be impartial in the midst of political controversies. Mr. Lecky's narrative is not like the rushing Aufidus, which carries away men and cattle with its sudden floods, but the peaceful Liris, wearing the banks with its quiet stream.
But though Mr. Lecky knows well the necessity of eloquence to make a history, he knows equally well how to subordinate it to his purpose. In his closing two volumes, which narrate the Irish Rebellion of 1798, his feeling that no one else was likely to go through the evidence again, made him abandon the beauty of his work, for the purpose of giving us a digest of all the most trust
THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY xix
worthy contemporary evidence in the very words of his authorities. Thus these inestimable volumes give us little more than a catalogue of extracts, gathered and set forth with modest, and therefore more admirable, skill and care. And therefore they may fairly be judged as specimens of his research, not of his style, unless it be to show that he is no slave to style, and can lay it aside for higher purposea Yet had his whole book been of the same quality, it would have been read by students only and not by men and women of the world.
John Richard Green was a brilliant man of another type, and his single volume on the growth and education of the English people, the Volksgeist of England, at once attained, and has maintained exceptional popularity. But as this book is not upon the large scale of Lecky's Eighteenth Centwry, so it shows traces of less care ful research. His accounts, for example, of military operations are manifestly perfunctory, and convey no real comprehension to the reader. He could never have described a battle as Sir G. Trevelyan (who might have stood among our foremost historians, but for the distractions of party politics) has recently described the battle of Bunker's HilL On the other hand, his accounts of popular move ments, for example the revulsion of the people from the Protec torate to the old Eoyalty, are as brilliant as anything we have in English historical literature.
There is no place in this essay given to political philosophy —to the history of ideas apart from their historical setting, such as the works of Mr. Lecky above mentioned. But I will not lay down my pen without saying that in one of them — Buckle's huge fragment of a huge conception on the civilisation of Europe —I found more stimulus, more suggestion, more incitement to think and to study than in any other book of its day ; nor do I know any work which can perfectly replace it in the spiritual education of a historian. This is but a personal confession ; other men may have been incited by other causes, to whom Buckle might not have been palatable. Green was turned to think of history, by the accident that when a boy he was shaken by the hand, in obtaining a prize, by an old President of Magdalen, who said to him : " Remember
XX THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY
that the hand you now shake, was shaken by the great Doctor Johnson. " And other men have been determined by other accidents, apparently trivial, which awoke in them a dormant faculty. If I may mention mine own case, it was the freedom from all school work, a want of sufficient occupation, and the chance of stumbling upon Grote's Greece, which set me, at the age of fourteen, to the study of classical history, and yet Grote possessed neither the imagination nor the eloquence which would impress a childish reader. Both these qualities are there, but in their transformed condition of clearness in complicated descriptions, impressiveness in giving political lessons, and a certain general dignity which no small man can ever attain. Other men have other tastes and other favourites; but history affords types and varieties to please every kind of higher intelligence, for is it not, as Cicero eloquently describes it : testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis t
HYPERION. By JOHN KEATS.
[Johs Keats : An English poet, sometimes called " The Poets' Poet "; born at Moorsfield, London, October 31, 1795 ; died at Rome, Italy, February 23, 1821. His first poem, " Endymion," was issued when he was twenty-three. It has beautiful passages, but the story is very difficult to follow, and is mainly a vehicle for luscious verbal music. Its promise was more than fulfilled in his second volume, published in 1820, and containing many noble sonnets, the im mortal "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "The Eve of St. Agnes," etc. His highest flight was reached in the sublime " Hyperion," but he had no constructive im agination and let it drop after the first canto. He had enormous effect on the coming poets of his time, and Tennyson was his thoroughgoing disciple. The " Love Letters to Fanny Brawne " appeared in 1878 ; his " Letters to his Family and Friends" in 1891. ]
Book I.
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair ;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not one light seed from the feathered grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade : the Naiad 'mid her reeds Pressed her cold finger closer to her lips.
Along the margin sand large footmarks went, No further than to where his feet had strayed,
21
HYPERION.
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, Unsceptered ; and his realmless eyes were closed ; While his bowed head seemed list'ning to the Earth, His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.
It seemed no force could wake him from his place ; But there came one, who with a kindred hand
Touched his wide shoulders, after bending low
With reverence, though to one who knew it not.
She was a Goddess of the infant world ;
By her in stature the tall Amazon
Had stood a pygmy's height : she would have ta'en Achilles by the hair and bent his neck ;
Or with a finger stayed Ixion's wheel.
Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx, Pedestaled haply in a palace court,
When sages looked to Egypt for their lore.
But oh ! how unlike marble was that face :
How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.
There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun 5
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its stored thunder laboring up.
One hand she pressed upon that aching spot
Where beats the human heart, as if just there,
Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain :
The other upon Saturn's bended neck
She laid, and to the level of his ear
Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake
In solemn tenor and deep organ tone :
Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue Would come in these like accents ; O how frail
To that large utterance of the early Gods !
" Saturn, look up ! — though wherefore, poor old King ? I have no comfort for thee, no not one :
I cannot say, ' O wherefore sleepest thou ? '
For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth
Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God ;
And ocean too, with all its solemn noise,
Has from thy scepter passed ; and all the air
Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.
HYPERION.
Thy thunder, conscious of the new command, Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house ;
And thy sharp lightning in unpracticed hands Scorches and burns our once serene domain.
O aching time ! O moments big as years !
All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth, And press it so upon our weary griefs
That unbelief has not a space to breathe. Saturn, sleep on : — O thoughtless, why did I Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude?
Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes? Saturn, sleep on! while at thy feet I weep. "
As when, upon a tranced summer night,
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night without a stir, Save from one gradual solitary gust
Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave ;
So came these words and went; the while in tears She touched her fair large forehead to the ground, Just where her falling hair might be outspread
A soft and silken mat for Saturn's feet.
One moon, with alteration slow, had shed
Her silver seasons four upon the night,
And still these two were postured motionless, Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern;
The frozen God still couchant on the earth,
And the sad Goddess weeping at his feet :
Until at length old Saturn lifted up
His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone,
And all the gloom and sorrow of the place,
And that fair kneeling Goddess ; and then spake, As with a palsied tongue, and while his beard Shook horrid with such aspen malady : —
" O tender spouse of gold Hyperion,
Thea, I feel thee ere I see thy face ;
Look up, and let me see our doom in it;
Look up, and tell me if this feeble shape
Is Saturn's; tell me, if thou hear'st the voice
Of Saturn ; tell me, if this wrinkling brow, Naked and bare of its great diadem,
Peers like the front of Saturn. Who had power
HYPERION.
To make me desolate? whence came the strength? How was it nurtured to such bursting forth,
While Fate seemed strangled in my nervous grasp? But it is so ; and I am smothered up,
And buried from all godlike exercise
Of influence benign on planets pale,
Of admonitions to the winds and seas,
Of peaceful sway above man's harvesting, And all those acts which Deity supreme Doth ease its heart of love in. — I am gone
I have left
Away from my own bosom :
My strong identity, my real self,
Somewhere between the throne, and where I sit
Here on this spot of earth. Search, Thea, search! Open thine eyes eterne, and sphere them round
Upon all space: space starred, and lorn of light;
Space regioned with life air; and barren void;
Spaces of fire, and all the yawn of hell. —
Search, Thea, search ! and tell me, if thou seest
A certain shape or shadow, making way
With wings or chariot fierce to repossess
A heaven he lost erewhile : it must — it must
Be of ripe progress — Saturn must be King.
Yes, there must be a golden victory;
There must be Gods thrown down, and trumpets blown Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival
Upon the gold clouds metropolitan,
Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir
Of strings in hollow shells ; and there shall be Beautiful things made new, for the surprise
Of the sky children; I will give command:
Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn? "
This passion lifted him upon his feet,
And made his hands to struggle in the air,
His Druid locks to shake and ooze with sweat, His eyes to fever out, his voice to cease.
He stood, and heard not Thea's sobbing deep;
A little time, and then again he snatched Utterance thus. — "But cannot I create?
Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth
Another world, another universe,
To overbear and crumble this to naught?
Where is another chaos? Where? " — That word Found way unto Olympus, and made quake
HYPERION.
The rebel three. — Thea was startled up,
And in her bearing was a sort of hope,
As thus she quick-voiced spake, yet full of awe.
" This cheers our fallen house : come to our friends, O Saturn! come away, and give them heart;
1 know the covert, for thence came I hither. "
Thus brief; then with beseeching eyes she went
With backward footing through the shade a space :
He followed, and she turned to lead the way
Through aged boughs, that yielded like the mist Which eagles cleave upmounting from their nest.
Meanwhile in other realms big tears were shed, More sorrow like to this, and such like woe,
Too huge for mortal tongue or pen of scribe :
The Titans fierce, self -hid, or prison-bound, Groaned for the old allegiance once more,
And listened in sharp pain for Saturn's voice. But one of the whole mammoth-brood still kept His sov'reignty, and rule, and majesty; — Blazing Hyperion on his orbed fire
Still sat, still snuffed the incense, teeming up From man to the sun's God ; yet unsecure :
For as among us mortals omens drear
Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he —
Not at dog's howl, or gloom bird's hated screech, Or the familiar visiting of one
Upon the first toll of his passing bell,
Or prophesyings of the midnight lamp;
But horrors, portioned to a giant nerve,
Oft made Hyperion ache. His palace bright Bastioned with pyramids of glowing gold,
And touched with shade of bronzed obelisks,
Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts, Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries;
And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds
Flushed angerly : while sometimes eagle's wings, Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,
Darkened the place; and neighing steeds were heard, Not heard before by Gods or wondering men.
Also, when he would taste the spicy wreaths
Of incense, breathed aloft from sacred hills,
Instead of sweets, his ample palate took
Savor of poisonous brass and metal sick :
And so, when harbored in the sleepy west,
HYPERION.
After the full completion of fair day, —
For rest divine upon exalted couch
And slumber in the arms of melody,
He paced away the pleasant hours of ease
With stride colossal, on from hall to hall ;
While far within each aisle and deep recess,
His winged minions in close clusters stood,
Amazed and full of fear; like anxious men
Who on wide plains gather in panting troops,
When earthquakes jar their battlements and towers. Even now, while Saturn, roused from icy trance, Went step for step with Thea through the woods, Hyperion, leaving twilight in the rear,
Came slope upon the threshold of the west; Then, as was wont, his palace door flew ope
In smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes, Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies; And like a rose in vermeil tint and shape,
In fragrance soft, and coolness to the eye, That inlet to severe magnificence
Stood full blown, for the God to enter in.
He entered, but he entered full of wrath;
His flaming robes streamed out beyond his heels, And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire,
That scared away the meek ethereal Hours
And made their dove wings tremble. On he flared, From stately nave to nave, from vault to vault, Through bowers of fragrant and enwreathed light, And diamond-paved lustrous long arcades,
Until he reached the great main cupola;
There standing fierce beneath, he stampt his foot, And from the basements deep to the high towers Jarred his own golden region; and before
The quavering thunder thereupon had ceased,
His voice leapt out, despite of godlike curb,
To this result: "O dreams of day and night!
O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!
O specters busy in a cold, cold gloom !
O lank-eared Phantoms of black-weeded pools ! Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why
Is my eternal essence thus distraught
To see and to behold these horrors new?
Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?
Am I to leave this haven of my rest,
HYPERION.
This cradle of my glory, this soft clime, This calm luxuriance of blissful light,
These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes, Of all my lucent empire? It is left Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.
The blaze, the splendor, and the symmetry,
I cannot see — but darkness, death and darkness. Even here, into my center of repose,
The shady visions come to domineer,
Insult, and blind, and stifle up my pomp. —
Fall! — No, by Tellus and her briny robes!
Over the fiery frontier of my realms
I will advance a terrible right arm
Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,
And bid old Saturn take his throne again. " —
He spake, and ceased, the while a heavier threat Held struggle with his throat but came not forth ; For as in theaters of crowded men " " Hubbub increases more they call out Hush !
So at Hyperion's words the Phantoms pale
Bestirred themselves, thrice horrible and cold;
And from the mirrored level where he stood
A mist arose, as from a scummy marsh.
At this, through all his bulk an agony
Crept gradual, from the feet unto the crown,
Like a lithe serpent vast and muscular
Making slow way, with head and neck convulsed From overstrained might. Released, he fled
To the eastern gates, and full six dewy hours
Before the dawn in season due should blush,
He breathed fierce breath against the sleepy portals, Cleared them of heavy vapors, burst them wide Suddenly on the ocean's chilly streams.
The planet orb of fire, whereon he rode
Each day from east to west the heavens through, Spun round in sable curtaining of clouds ;
Not therefore veiled quite, blindfold, and hid, But ever and anon the glancing spheres,
Circles, and arcs, and broad-belting colure,
Glowed through, and wrought upon the muffling dark Sweet-shaped lightnings from the nadir deep
Up to the zenith, — hieroglyphics old,
Which sages and keen-eyed astrologers
Then living on the earth, with laboring thought
Won from the gaze of many centuries :
HYPERION.
Now lost, save what we find on remnants huge
Of stone, or marble swart; their import gone,
Their wisdom long since fled. — Two wings this orb Possessed for glory, two fair argent wings,
Ever exalted at the God's approach :
And now, from forth the gloom their plumes immense Kose, one by one, till all outspreaded were;
While still the dazzling globe maintained eclipse, Awaiting for Hyperion's command.
Fain would he have commanded, fain took throne
And bid the day begin, if but for change.
He might not : — No, though a primeval God :
The sacred seasons might not be disturbed.
Therefore the operations of the dawn
Stayed in their birth, even as here 'tis told.
Those silver wings expanded sisterly,
Eager to sail their orb; the porches wide
Opened upon the dusk demesnes of night;
And the bright Titan, frenzied with new woes,
Unused to bend, by hard compulsion bent
His spirit to the sorrow of the time;
And all along a dismal rack of clouds,
Upon the boundaries of day and night,
He stretched himself in grief and radiance faint.
There as he lay, the Heaven with its stars
Looked down on him with pity, and the voice
Of Coelus, from the universal space,
Thus whispered low and solemn in his ear.
" O brightest of my children dear, earth-born
And sky -en gendered, Son of Mysteries
All unrevealed even to the powers
Which met at thy creating; at whose joys
And palpitations sweet, and pleasures soft,
I, Coelus, wonder, how they came and whence ;
And at the fruits thereof what shapes they be, Distinct, and visible; symbols divine,
Manifestations of that beauteous life
Diffused unseen throughout eternal space :
Of these new-formed art thou, O brightest child!
Of these, thy brethren and the Goddesses !
There is sad feud among ye, and rebellion
Of son against his sire. I saw him fall,
I saw my first-born tumbled from his throne !
To me his arms were spread, to me his voice
Found way from forth the thunders round his head !
"WHEN THE HOUNDS OF SPRING — "
Pale wox I, and in vapors hid my face.
Art thou, too, near such doom?
. . . . ^sBattle of the Frogs and Mice . . . <i Wb Final Translation of Homer Possible .
. . . . Butcher and Lang . . 229 Andrew Lang . . . 232 Tr. by Butcher and Lang . 232 TV. by Butcher and Lang . 245
Greeks and Trojans
I Two Royal Mistresses
Shakespeare
V The Odyssey
J Calypso : Odyssey
Hausicaa : Odyssey S Glaucus and Circe
The Strayed Reveler .
Circe's Palace
^ The Longing of Circe
. . . .
^ Prayer of the Swine to Circe AFantasia on the Odyssey
*•» Odysseus in Hades : Odyssey
*V The Women of Homer .
$ Odysseus and Polyphemus : Odyssey .
^. Ulysses
.
John Keats
Matthew Arnold . . Nathaniel Bawthorne .
274 . 280 . 287 . 312 . 313 . 316 . 320 . 326 . 340 . 352
.
William Morris Euripides
John Keats
62 77 89 93 99
. . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . .
. . . .
29 Nathaniel Hawthorne . . 31
. . .
. . . . . .
TV. by P. S. Worsley J. A. Symonds .
W. E. Gladstone
J. P. Mahaffy
Pindar 113
TV. by Pope
Tr. by W. E. Aytoun .
115 . 131 . 134 . 138 . 146 . 170 . 175 . 175 . 176 . 181 Alfred Tennyson . . . 183 Lucian 190 Andrew Lang . . . 193 194 . . 213
.
.
. Tr. by J. G. Lockhart .
Lord Byron . .
Unknown
217
. .
Cameron Mann . Austin Dobson . . . . Ludvig Holberg .
. . . . .
TV. by Butcher and Lang Alfred Tennyson . .
680128
vii
.
viii TABLE OF CONTENTS.
Nature and Man in Greece
Ernst Curtius . .
Why Rome became Greece and Rome Legends of Early Rome Virginia
. . .
Great
. . . 366 368
. . . . . . . .
MM . 354 Theodor Mommsen . . 359
. . . .
387
P. B. Shelley Livy
T. B. Macaulay
JOHN PENTLAND MAHAFFY DEATH MASK OF KEATS
A READING FROM HOMER CASSANDRA
CIRCE'S PALACE
THE ABDUCTION OF HELEN
.
.
. „ .
.
.
Frontispiece
riam 89
133 175 287 327
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. volume n.
THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY
By Professor Mahaffy
It is seldom fully appreciated, what a very large share of the world's literature is history of some sort. The primitive savage is probably the only kind of man who takes no interest in it ; except it be that the memory of the dead is often carefully obliterated by him, and the names, or even words suggesting the names, of his fathers, tabooed from his speech. But as soon as a spark of civilisation illumines this primitive darkness, men begin to take an interest in other men, not only beyond their own immediate surroundings, but beyond the limits of their own generation. Interest in the past and provision for the future are perhaps the essential mental differences between the civilised man and the savage.
According as this care for the past and the future increases, all literature divides itself into that which concerns the forces of nature and that which concerns the history of man. Almost all the literature of imagination starts from this latter. Epic poems profess to tell the history of heroes. Tragic poems profess to analyse their emotions at some great crisis of their lives. Lyric poems are of interest, chiefly as giving us the history of the poet's souL Even the modern novel, which is avowedly fictitious, must base itself upon the history of ordinary men, and borrows most of its plots from actual occurrences in their lives. The historical novel is a manifest bridge between the actual occurrences of past time, and the desire to know more of the motives, of the colour, of the character of the actors, than has been handed down in contem porary documents. This kind of novel, if professorial, like the
sii THE LITERATURE OP HISTORY
Egyptian books of Ebers, may approach the tamest record of the facts ; if artistic, like those of Walter Scott, it may be almost a work of pure imagination. But the historical interest is always there, and it may be doubted whether the story of any invented being, formally divorced from the annals of known men, will ever excite the keen and permanent interest which the history of such a man as Alexander of Macedon or Napoleon will always command. The mass of fiction which gathered round the name of the former all pretends to be history ; the vast libraries of Napoleonic books contain plenty of fiction ; but the fiction is of little interest in comparison with the real history of that wonderful life.
As history in the widest sense therefore embraces the greater part of literature, we must here confine ourselves to what is strictly such — the efforts made by many writers in many nations for the last 3000 years either to ascertain the history of men who lived before them, who live away from them, or else to give us a picture of the society in which they themselves have lived.
So long as the belief in a golden age, in a heroic past, dominated the imagination of men, so long both epic poems and annals were occupied with the uncertain and legendary past. The history of Herodotus is justly regarded as the masterpiece in a new line, the attempt to narrate a great struggle which was still in the memory of old men, and also to show how the earlier conditions of Greece and of Asia led up to this struggle. And here for the first time the literary side of such a work was made important in contrast to the dry annals or mere enumeration of events, which was the earlier method of escaping from the fables of the romancers into the domain of real facts. The antagonism to the ornamental or poetical treatment was too strong in these annals. Sober men then made the mistake which sober men do now ; they imagined that if we could only ascertain the bare facts, we should have before us the true history of the past. Such a notion is chimerical ; unless we have living men reproduced with their passions and
the logic of their feeling, we have no real human history. The historical novel gives us a far closer approximation to the whole truth than the chronological table. Hence the genius of Herodotus,
THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY xiii
like the genius of the Old Testament historians, hit upon the great truth that every worthy portrait is a character-portrait, and
that the perfection of such a portrait depends as much upon the painter as upon the subject of the painting. Herodotus' individual men and women, nay, his individual city-states, live in our imagina tion. He has done most of all men to make the history of Greece a subject of eternal interest. Plutarch is his only rival in this respect. Had these two authors been lost, the educated public in all the European nations would long since have lost touch with the Greeks, and the interest in Greek things might have been confined to the lesser audience of artists and scholars.
If it be felt that Herodotus has still the obscure feeling of making history an epic poem, that he has too many digressions and halting-places — yet how precious they are ! — the Greeks have supplied us with a strong antidote.
By reason of that curious law, which forbids literary genius to appear sporadically (as in the exceptional case of Dante), but rather in clusters (as in the Periclean, Elizabethan, and Napoleonic epochs), we have as a great rival and contemporary of Herodotus the historian Thucydides. In deliber ate antagonism to the free and easy gossiping of the old school traveller, who often delays the great march of his immortal epic by refreshing his readers with posies from the flowery fields of anecdote, this other literary genius lets us know clearly, without condescending to say it oftener than in one brief sentence, that the permanent value of history (in his opinion) lies not in the social or artistic side, but in the progress of political movements, in the conflicts of great principles, which mould the character and condition of nations. To him the war between Athens and Sparta, even down to its petty and monotonous raids, is far more important than the sculpture of Phidias, the poetry of Sophocles, the buildings of Ictinus and Mnesicles. With him, as with a great school of modern historians, from Macchiavelli to
Seeley, politics dominate the world, and therefore political history exceeds all other in value and in interest.
But is it possible for any thoughtful man, living and taking part in the political controversies of his day, to give us an objective
xiv THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY
record of his own time ? This is what Thucydides professes to do ; and so well has he concealed his partialities by his seriousness and his affected accuracy, that his literary genius has imposed upon the world of scholars from that day up to the present critical age. We know now that his subjectivity was no less dominating than that of Herodotus. But it was disguised, as the subjectivity of a great painter is disguised from the vulgar by the accuracy of the likeness he paints. The contemporaries of Eembrandt may have insisted upon the fidelity with which he reproduced his Burgo masters, his old women, and his Jews. We now value his portraits not as likenesses, but as expressions of the painter's genius ; and that is the real value of the history of Thucydides. If Herodotus be the Vandyck who gives us a gallery of the grandees of Hellas and of Asia, Thucydides is the Eembrandt who expresses his own people, be they coarse or even ugly, with the force and spirit of his gloomy genius.
These are the two immortal types, even among our masters the Greeks, for all their successors seem weak beside them. Xenophon has all the technique of a historical artist, but he wants the strong character, the subjectivity which produces the harmony of a great work. Polybius has the subjectivity, the strong character of a historian, but he is so deficient in the technique that he is neglected by the world.
It cannot but be interesting to inquire how far these eternal contrasts are manifested in the great writers who have kept alive the torch of artistic history in modern times, but the subject is too vast to allow us here more than some general reflections. The solidarity of Europe, the myriad relations of great kingdoms in constant communication, have made the task so vast that no human mind can fill the whole canvas of contemporary history with an adequate and harmonious picture. Thus Alison's Europe must have been a failure as a great work of art, nor would it have been attempted by any true historical genius. The subject was too vast, and the events too close to the writer to admit of his pro ducing a K-nj/Mi «s det. The only contemporary history which can claim a high place in art is in the form of memoirs such as those
THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY XT
of St. Simon, or of Boswell, which reflect the surface of an inter esting society from day to day. The men who have shown a true genius for history in modern times have selected epochs from past centuries, in which the characters and the events were of such importance that they maintained their interest in the minds of civilised men.
Foremost among those of English race comes Gibbon, the Herodotus of modern times in the wide range of his subject, in the clearness of his grasp, in the wealth of his imagination, but inferior to Herodotus as an artist, in that the artificial pomp of style is too prominent, and often distracts the reader's attention from the narrative ; whereas the old Greek had attained that higher stage in which art seems to be nature in its apparent simplicity and the total absence of affectation. Still Gibbon's history is a great and enduring work of art, which will never be superseded by the more pragmatic writing of modern men. He held fast to the old classical principle, that the historian must be rich in imagination, and not wanting in eloquence. Next to Gibbon's Decline and Fall, among the histories written in English, comes (in my opinion) Grote's History of Greece. Like Thucydides in his seriousness, his exclusive attention to politics, his decently veiled desire to refute the views of his predecessors, Grote was wanting in rhetorical skill, still more in that pathetic terseness which makes the narrative of Thucydides so impressive. It is in fact in paraphras ing his ancient models that Grote shows to the greatest advantage. But though his history has been called a huge political pamphlet in support of philosophical radicalism, his breadth, his learning, his thoroughness in working out his sources, make his History of Greece stand out ahead of the many shorter histories furnished by European scholars. For he was not only a scholar, but a politician ; he knew how theoretical contradictions in a constitution are avoided by practical compromises, and if he neglected art, archaeology, and, in general, the picturesqueness of his subject, he
can still be used to rectify the want of insight in politics which the professorial historians of France and Germany are wont to display.
xvi THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY
The research of Germany and the brilliancy of France have not produced any masterpieces which can rank with those of Gibbon or Grote. But they have, of course, produced many excellent and even great contributions to history. Two among the Germans impress me as greater than the rest — Mommsen's Roman History, and Histories of Mediaeval Athens, and of Rome, by Gregorovius. Both are written with far more finish of style than is usual in Germany, and both are monuments of great and accurate learning. InMommsen's book this learning is as it were disguised by an absence of foot-notes, and still more by a certain petulance of style which suggests a mind prejudiced upon certain leading political questions. The suspicion thus raised by the style of this remark able book 1 may be confirmed by careful criticism of its authorities. On the other hand, a knowledge of Mommsen's special studies shows his gigantic power in gathering the materials for history. The greatest of all the predecessors of these men, Niebuhr, though the originator of a new method, was not great enough as a writer to maintain his position against modern competition. Yet hia successors, with the exception of Mommsen, are rather respectable than great as artists. Many of them are first-rate scholars, but that is not our business here.
As might be expected from a nation that produces such excellent prose, the French have given us a whole series of eminent historians, but it is perhaps the high level of their style that has hindered any one of them from holding any primacy over his fellows. Guizot, Taine, Thiers, Eenan, Montalembert, Henri Martin, and many others, have given us brilliant expositions of sundry periods in European history, but there is seldom absent from them that subjectivity which marks a Frenchman, and which mars his authority among other nations as a judge of historical
to style, an anxiety to say brilliant things, which rather dazzle the
evidence. There is also, in most of them, an over-attention
1 The English reader is fortunate in this case to have an unusually excellent English translation (that of Dr. Dickson) to his hand. The translation of Gregorovius' History of Some, which is now in progress, is not sufficiently known to me to warrant any opinion upon it.
THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY xvii
reader than illumine the subject in hand. Possibly any of them may be superseded more easily than de Tocqueville, whose studies on Democracy are, however, examples of political philosophy rather than of history.
But such generalities upon foreign historians are empty with out some fuller justification for the writer's impressions. Let us return to the English writers who have made the present century, and even the present generation, famous for its historical studies. There are two Americans who stand among our foremost —Motley, the historian of the great period of Dutch history, and Parkman, upon a smaller canvas, but with no inferior hand, portraying the long struggle of France and England for the possession of North America. In our own country two eminent men, who afford such marked contrasts as to invite comparison, have but lately passed from among us—Freeman and Froude. The latter was a great writer, and had moreover a brilliant imagination—that faculty which may mar a historian, though it is absolutely indispensable for his greatness. But though he has been convicted of many inaccuracies, his grasp and insight are so often true that I cannot but regard him as a far greater historian than his adversary and critic Freeman, who had greater talents for research, far greater accuracy in details, but a certain boorishness which will turn men away from him. He constantly displays his learning not only with pedantic pride, but asserts or implies the inferiority of other workers in the same field with insolence. He turns aside in his History of Greek Federations to write notes on Napoleon III. , which might have been written by V. Hugo. In spite, therefore, of his rugged learning, his large grasp of the whole world's history, his careful research, he will be forgotten when the brilliant and graceful Froude is still read, and still speaking to thousands where Freeman speaks to scores, just as the masters of the English people in history are Shakespeare and Walter Scott, rather than Bishop Stubbs or Sir John Seeley. For this is the extremest form of the contrast between the picturesque writer and the laborious investigator. It know, the rule among the students of the Research School to deny all merit or value as
VOL. II. —
2
is, I
xviii THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY
historians to imaginative writers. Nevertheless, I will maintain that ten thousand average people have got a general idea, and a true idea, of Louis XI. from Quentin Dunoard, or from N6tre Dame de Paris, for one who gets it by grubbing up the con temporary chronicles. It may be added that to interest the general public in historical reading is no small duty, and no small gain in our most modern civilisation.
Intermediate in position between Froude and Freeman, I put my two personal friends, Green and Lecky, who are probably the most popular writers of history that England has seen since the days of Gibbon. Green was carried off by disease, long before his work, under normal circumstances, would have ceased. Mr. Lecky is still a prominent figure in England, but rather as a politician than a historian, seeing that he exchanged the study for the Senate, and contemplative for practical life. He is not therefore likely to give us another book on history. His eight volumes on England in the Eighteenth Century would, however, in themselves be an ample record of his genius, even had they not been preceded by those remarkable volumes on the History of European Culture, which first made his name a household word throughout the Empire. It is indeed doubtful whether his graceful and finished style equals that of Froude, or whether his research that of Freeman ; but he combines qualities which they did not, and therefore may be classed above them by any independent critic. Perhaps it is impossible for any man to write as brilliantly as Froude, if he writes with judicial calmness, if he makes allowance for his opponents, and strives to be impartial in the midst of political controversies. Mr. Lecky's narrative is not like the rushing Aufidus, which carries away men and cattle with its sudden floods, but the peaceful Liris, wearing the banks with its quiet stream.
But though Mr. Lecky knows well the necessity of eloquence to make a history, he knows equally well how to subordinate it to his purpose. In his closing two volumes, which narrate the Irish Rebellion of 1798, his feeling that no one else was likely to go through the evidence again, made him abandon the beauty of his work, for the purpose of giving us a digest of all the most trust
THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY xix
worthy contemporary evidence in the very words of his authorities. Thus these inestimable volumes give us little more than a catalogue of extracts, gathered and set forth with modest, and therefore more admirable, skill and care. And therefore they may fairly be judged as specimens of his research, not of his style, unless it be to show that he is no slave to style, and can lay it aside for higher purposea Yet had his whole book been of the same quality, it would have been read by students only and not by men and women of the world.
John Richard Green was a brilliant man of another type, and his single volume on the growth and education of the English people, the Volksgeist of England, at once attained, and has maintained exceptional popularity. But as this book is not upon the large scale of Lecky's Eighteenth Centwry, so it shows traces of less care ful research. His accounts, for example, of military operations are manifestly perfunctory, and convey no real comprehension to the reader. He could never have described a battle as Sir G. Trevelyan (who might have stood among our foremost historians, but for the distractions of party politics) has recently described the battle of Bunker's HilL On the other hand, his accounts of popular move ments, for example the revulsion of the people from the Protec torate to the old Eoyalty, are as brilliant as anything we have in English historical literature.
There is no place in this essay given to political philosophy —to the history of ideas apart from their historical setting, such as the works of Mr. Lecky above mentioned. But I will not lay down my pen without saying that in one of them — Buckle's huge fragment of a huge conception on the civilisation of Europe —I found more stimulus, more suggestion, more incitement to think and to study than in any other book of its day ; nor do I know any work which can perfectly replace it in the spiritual education of a historian. This is but a personal confession ; other men may have been incited by other causes, to whom Buckle might not have been palatable. Green was turned to think of history, by the accident that when a boy he was shaken by the hand, in obtaining a prize, by an old President of Magdalen, who said to him : " Remember
XX THE LITERATURE OF HISTORY
that the hand you now shake, was shaken by the great Doctor Johnson. " And other men have been determined by other accidents, apparently trivial, which awoke in them a dormant faculty. If I may mention mine own case, it was the freedom from all school work, a want of sufficient occupation, and the chance of stumbling upon Grote's Greece, which set me, at the age of fourteen, to the study of classical history, and yet Grote possessed neither the imagination nor the eloquence which would impress a childish reader. Both these qualities are there, but in their transformed condition of clearness in complicated descriptions, impressiveness in giving political lessons, and a certain general dignity which no small man can ever attain. Other men have other tastes and other favourites; but history affords types and varieties to please every kind of higher intelligence, for is it not, as Cicero eloquently describes it : testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis t
HYPERION. By JOHN KEATS.
[Johs Keats : An English poet, sometimes called " The Poets' Poet "; born at Moorsfield, London, October 31, 1795 ; died at Rome, Italy, February 23, 1821. His first poem, " Endymion," was issued when he was twenty-three. It has beautiful passages, but the story is very difficult to follow, and is mainly a vehicle for luscious verbal music. Its promise was more than fulfilled in his second volume, published in 1820, and containing many noble sonnets, the im mortal "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "The Eve of St. Agnes," etc. His highest flight was reached in the sublime " Hyperion," but he had no constructive im agination and let it drop after the first canto. He had enormous effect on the coming poets of his time, and Tennyson was his thoroughgoing disciple. The " Love Letters to Fanny Brawne " appeared in 1878 ; his " Letters to his Family and Friends" in 1891. ]
Book I.
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair ;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not one light seed from the feathered grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade : the Naiad 'mid her reeds Pressed her cold finger closer to her lips.
Along the margin sand large footmarks went, No further than to where his feet had strayed,
21
HYPERION.
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, Unsceptered ; and his realmless eyes were closed ; While his bowed head seemed list'ning to the Earth, His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.
It seemed no force could wake him from his place ; But there came one, who with a kindred hand
Touched his wide shoulders, after bending low
With reverence, though to one who knew it not.
She was a Goddess of the infant world ;
By her in stature the tall Amazon
Had stood a pygmy's height : she would have ta'en Achilles by the hair and bent his neck ;
Or with a finger stayed Ixion's wheel.
Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx, Pedestaled haply in a palace court,
When sages looked to Egypt for their lore.
But oh ! how unlike marble was that face :
How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.
There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun 5
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its stored thunder laboring up.
One hand she pressed upon that aching spot
Where beats the human heart, as if just there,
Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain :
The other upon Saturn's bended neck
She laid, and to the level of his ear
Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake
In solemn tenor and deep organ tone :
Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue Would come in these like accents ; O how frail
To that large utterance of the early Gods !
" Saturn, look up ! — though wherefore, poor old King ? I have no comfort for thee, no not one :
I cannot say, ' O wherefore sleepest thou ? '
For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth
Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God ;
And ocean too, with all its solemn noise,
Has from thy scepter passed ; and all the air
Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.
HYPERION.
Thy thunder, conscious of the new command, Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house ;
And thy sharp lightning in unpracticed hands Scorches and burns our once serene domain.
O aching time ! O moments big as years !
All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth, And press it so upon our weary griefs
That unbelief has not a space to breathe. Saturn, sleep on : — O thoughtless, why did I Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude?
Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes? Saturn, sleep on! while at thy feet I weep. "
As when, upon a tranced summer night,
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night without a stir, Save from one gradual solitary gust
Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave ;
So came these words and went; the while in tears She touched her fair large forehead to the ground, Just where her falling hair might be outspread
A soft and silken mat for Saturn's feet.
One moon, with alteration slow, had shed
Her silver seasons four upon the night,
And still these two were postured motionless, Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern;
The frozen God still couchant on the earth,
And the sad Goddess weeping at his feet :
Until at length old Saturn lifted up
His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone,
And all the gloom and sorrow of the place,
And that fair kneeling Goddess ; and then spake, As with a palsied tongue, and while his beard Shook horrid with such aspen malady : —
" O tender spouse of gold Hyperion,
Thea, I feel thee ere I see thy face ;
Look up, and let me see our doom in it;
Look up, and tell me if this feeble shape
Is Saturn's; tell me, if thou hear'st the voice
Of Saturn ; tell me, if this wrinkling brow, Naked and bare of its great diadem,
Peers like the front of Saturn. Who had power
HYPERION.
To make me desolate? whence came the strength? How was it nurtured to such bursting forth,
While Fate seemed strangled in my nervous grasp? But it is so ; and I am smothered up,
And buried from all godlike exercise
Of influence benign on planets pale,
Of admonitions to the winds and seas,
Of peaceful sway above man's harvesting, And all those acts which Deity supreme Doth ease its heart of love in. — I am gone
I have left
Away from my own bosom :
My strong identity, my real self,
Somewhere between the throne, and where I sit
Here on this spot of earth. Search, Thea, search! Open thine eyes eterne, and sphere them round
Upon all space: space starred, and lorn of light;
Space regioned with life air; and barren void;
Spaces of fire, and all the yawn of hell. —
Search, Thea, search ! and tell me, if thou seest
A certain shape or shadow, making way
With wings or chariot fierce to repossess
A heaven he lost erewhile : it must — it must
Be of ripe progress — Saturn must be King.
Yes, there must be a golden victory;
There must be Gods thrown down, and trumpets blown Of triumph calm, and hymns of festival
Upon the gold clouds metropolitan,
Voices of soft proclaim, and silver stir
Of strings in hollow shells ; and there shall be Beautiful things made new, for the surprise
Of the sky children; I will give command:
Thea! Thea! Thea! where is Saturn? "
This passion lifted him upon his feet,
And made his hands to struggle in the air,
His Druid locks to shake and ooze with sweat, His eyes to fever out, his voice to cease.
He stood, and heard not Thea's sobbing deep;
A little time, and then again he snatched Utterance thus. — "But cannot I create?
Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth
Another world, another universe,
To overbear and crumble this to naught?
Where is another chaos? Where? " — That word Found way unto Olympus, and made quake
HYPERION.
The rebel three. — Thea was startled up,
And in her bearing was a sort of hope,
As thus she quick-voiced spake, yet full of awe.
" This cheers our fallen house : come to our friends, O Saturn! come away, and give them heart;
1 know the covert, for thence came I hither. "
Thus brief; then with beseeching eyes she went
With backward footing through the shade a space :
He followed, and she turned to lead the way
Through aged boughs, that yielded like the mist Which eagles cleave upmounting from their nest.
Meanwhile in other realms big tears were shed, More sorrow like to this, and such like woe,
Too huge for mortal tongue or pen of scribe :
The Titans fierce, self -hid, or prison-bound, Groaned for the old allegiance once more,
And listened in sharp pain for Saturn's voice. But one of the whole mammoth-brood still kept His sov'reignty, and rule, and majesty; — Blazing Hyperion on his orbed fire
Still sat, still snuffed the incense, teeming up From man to the sun's God ; yet unsecure :
For as among us mortals omens drear
Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he —
Not at dog's howl, or gloom bird's hated screech, Or the familiar visiting of one
Upon the first toll of his passing bell,
Or prophesyings of the midnight lamp;
But horrors, portioned to a giant nerve,
Oft made Hyperion ache. His palace bright Bastioned with pyramids of glowing gold,
And touched with shade of bronzed obelisks,
Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courts, Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries;
And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds
Flushed angerly : while sometimes eagle's wings, Unseen before by Gods or wondering men,
Darkened the place; and neighing steeds were heard, Not heard before by Gods or wondering men.
Also, when he would taste the spicy wreaths
Of incense, breathed aloft from sacred hills,
Instead of sweets, his ample palate took
Savor of poisonous brass and metal sick :
And so, when harbored in the sleepy west,
HYPERION.
After the full completion of fair day, —
For rest divine upon exalted couch
And slumber in the arms of melody,
He paced away the pleasant hours of ease
With stride colossal, on from hall to hall ;
While far within each aisle and deep recess,
His winged minions in close clusters stood,
Amazed and full of fear; like anxious men
Who on wide plains gather in panting troops,
When earthquakes jar their battlements and towers. Even now, while Saturn, roused from icy trance, Went step for step with Thea through the woods, Hyperion, leaving twilight in the rear,
Came slope upon the threshold of the west; Then, as was wont, his palace door flew ope
In smoothest silence, save what solemn tubes, Blown by the serious Zephyrs, gave of sweet And wandering sounds, slow-breathed melodies; And like a rose in vermeil tint and shape,
In fragrance soft, and coolness to the eye, That inlet to severe magnificence
Stood full blown, for the God to enter in.
He entered, but he entered full of wrath;
His flaming robes streamed out beyond his heels, And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire,
That scared away the meek ethereal Hours
And made their dove wings tremble. On he flared, From stately nave to nave, from vault to vault, Through bowers of fragrant and enwreathed light, And diamond-paved lustrous long arcades,
Until he reached the great main cupola;
There standing fierce beneath, he stampt his foot, And from the basements deep to the high towers Jarred his own golden region; and before
The quavering thunder thereupon had ceased,
His voice leapt out, despite of godlike curb,
To this result: "O dreams of day and night!
O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!
O specters busy in a cold, cold gloom !
O lank-eared Phantoms of black-weeded pools ! Why do I know ye? why have I seen ye? why
Is my eternal essence thus distraught
To see and to behold these horrors new?
Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?
Am I to leave this haven of my rest,
HYPERION.
This cradle of my glory, this soft clime, This calm luxuriance of blissful light,
These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes, Of all my lucent empire? It is left Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.
The blaze, the splendor, and the symmetry,
I cannot see — but darkness, death and darkness. Even here, into my center of repose,
The shady visions come to domineer,
Insult, and blind, and stifle up my pomp. —
Fall! — No, by Tellus and her briny robes!
Over the fiery frontier of my realms
I will advance a terrible right arm
Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,
And bid old Saturn take his throne again. " —
He spake, and ceased, the while a heavier threat Held struggle with his throat but came not forth ; For as in theaters of crowded men " " Hubbub increases more they call out Hush !
So at Hyperion's words the Phantoms pale
Bestirred themselves, thrice horrible and cold;
And from the mirrored level where he stood
A mist arose, as from a scummy marsh.
At this, through all his bulk an agony
Crept gradual, from the feet unto the crown,
Like a lithe serpent vast and muscular
Making slow way, with head and neck convulsed From overstrained might. Released, he fled
To the eastern gates, and full six dewy hours
Before the dawn in season due should blush,
He breathed fierce breath against the sleepy portals, Cleared them of heavy vapors, burst them wide Suddenly on the ocean's chilly streams.
The planet orb of fire, whereon he rode
Each day from east to west the heavens through, Spun round in sable curtaining of clouds ;
Not therefore veiled quite, blindfold, and hid, But ever and anon the glancing spheres,
Circles, and arcs, and broad-belting colure,
Glowed through, and wrought upon the muffling dark Sweet-shaped lightnings from the nadir deep
Up to the zenith, — hieroglyphics old,
Which sages and keen-eyed astrologers
Then living on the earth, with laboring thought
Won from the gaze of many centuries :
HYPERION.
Now lost, save what we find on remnants huge
Of stone, or marble swart; their import gone,
Their wisdom long since fled. — Two wings this orb Possessed for glory, two fair argent wings,
Ever exalted at the God's approach :
And now, from forth the gloom their plumes immense Kose, one by one, till all outspreaded were;
While still the dazzling globe maintained eclipse, Awaiting for Hyperion's command.
Fain would he have commanded, fain took throne
And bid the day begin, if but for change.
He might not : — No, though a primeval God :
The sacred seasons might not be disturbed.
Therefore the operations of the dawn
Stayed in their birth, even as here 'tis told.
Those silver wings expanded sisterly,
Eager to sail their orb; the porches wide
Opened upon the dusk demesnes of night;
And the bright Titan, frenzied with new woes,
Unused to bend, by hard compulsion bent
His spirit to the sorrow of the time;
And all along a dismal rack of clouds,
Upon the boundaries of day and night,
He stretched himself in grief and radiance faint.
There as he lay, the Heaven with its stars
Looked down on him with pity, and the voice
Of Coelus, from the universal space,
Thus whispered low and solemn in his ear.
" O brightest of my children dear, earth-born
And sky -en gendered, Son of Mysteries
All unrevealed even to the powers
Which met at thy creating; at whose joys
And palpitations sweet, and pleasures soft,
I, Coelus, wonder, how they came and whence ;
And at the fruits thereof what shapes they be, Distinct, and visible; symbols divine,
Manifestations of that beauteous life
Diffused unseen throughout eternal space :
Of these new-formed art thou, O brightest child!
Of these, thy brethren and the Goddesses !
There is sad feud among ye, and rebellion
Of son against his sire. I saw him fall,
I saw my first-born tumbled from his throne !
To me his arms were spread, to me his voice
Found way from forth the thunders round his head !
"WHEN THE HOUNDS OF SPRING — "
Pale wox I, and in vapors hid my face.
Art thou, too, near such doom?
