T. G. Tucker

“ There are studious men enough in ancient literature who complain that sleep or study is impossible in Rome. They exclaim upon the bawling of the hawkers, the canting songs of the beggars, the banging of hammers, the sing-song of schoolboys learning to read in the open-air verandahs or balconies which often served as schools, and the shouting in the baths. All night long there was the rattle of carts and the creaking of heavy waggons. But the average Roman cared, and still cares, very little for quiet or sleep, and no emperor attempted to check the annoyance. ”

“ Nowhere does there obtrude itself a desire to be clever, rhetorical, dazzling. Yet no one can read the Iliad without seeing those warriors face to face, as they were, in their physical strength and simplicity of character; nor can he read the Odyssey without feeling that he is with Ulysses on his raft, sailing through the deep, blue Mediterranean, that the salt breeze is blowing on his face, that the world is young and fresh, and that a man’s part is to perform that which lies nearest to his hand. ”

“ The age of philosophy and science is upon us all, and poetry is dead. See how in Germany not a single worthy note of a poet's singing is heard amid the din of critics, philosophers, jurists, scientists. See how in France we find historians, letter-writers, philosophers, moralists, but not a verse worth hearing since the dry-light prose-versicles of Voltaire. Observe how in England our so-called poetry is but prose sawed into lines of five feet each, and contains not one drop of the sap of nature, unless it be some suggestion in Thomson and a half-ashamed trace in Collins or in Gray. ”

“ The life of many a Roman was deplorably dissolute; the splendour of Rome was beyond doubt astonishing; of oppression there were too many scattered instances; but we do not judge the civilisation of the British Empire by the choicest scandals of London, nor the good sense of the United States by the freak follies of New York. We do not take it that the modern satirist who vents his spleen on an individual or a class is describing each and all of his contemporaries, nor even that what he says is necessarily true of such individual or class. ”

“ Amazingly rich as Spenser is in imagery and melody, exhaustless as Shakespeare is in ideas, boundless as he is in capacity of seeing and feeling, no one will call either Spenser or Shakespeare a flawless artist, or say that either is free from extravagance or unevenness. In short, no one will concede to them the Greek spirit, which tempers imagination with self-restraint and unfailing sanity. The wide free range of mind they have; the tactful sense of proportion and seasonableness they too often lack. The influence of Greece, beneficent and large as it is, remains yet incomplete. ”

“ Science, we are told, and philosophy are but an inclement atmosphere for poetry to thrive in. Their spiteful frost nips the young buds and tender shoots of imagination, of fancy, of "sentiment." Well, at what date was modern science born? At what date philosophy? Does philosophy date from Kant, or from Bacon, or from Plato? Does modern science begin with Darwin, with Newton, with Copernicus, or with Aristotle? ”

“ We need not follow with any closeness the infancy of either boy or girl till the seventh year. The ancient world was very much like the modern. Suffice it to glance at them cutting their teeth on the teeth of wolves or horses, rocked in cradles decorated with gold and purple, or running about and calling their parents by the time-honoured mamma, tata—words, if we can call them words, which came from those small Roman mouths precisely as they have come from time immemorial from so many others. Their slave nurse, who is a Greek and talks Greek to them, tells them the old wives' tales and fables. ”

“ Hellenic thought means direct and fresh, if not always profound, thought; Hellenic art means art of consummate simplicity, art of clear principle. Hellenic style means in literature a perfect directness and lucidity, with just so much of the figurative as will flash light upon the sense.
This is what is meant by “Classical” Hellenism. True, no scholar would dare to say that even in the classical age every Greek who has left us a book or a fragment was always as perfect as Greek principles and ideals were perfect. Homer sometimes nods. We may find palpable blemishes not a few. ”

“ As artist, his function is simply to body forth, and present to other minds, whatever he conceives, and he is consummate artist just in proportion as he secures that end.
Now take the literary artist. He in his turn conceives a thought, or picture of the imagination or fancy. A feeling may come over him with a gentle grace, a subtle influence, an overmastering passion. A mood—a state of soul—may colour all his view, tinging it with some haunting melancholy or irradiating his whole world till it seems a Paradise. ”

“ ITALIAN LITERATURE AND ENGLISH
To Italy there always attaches a singular fascination. Its natural beauties, its historic associations, its ancient ruins, its mediaeval buildings, its collections of art—these things scattered thickly and in endless variety from one end of the peninsula to the other, from Sicily to Milan, from Genoa to Venice, make Italy the country of countries for the traveller of culture and sensibility, of enthusiasm for things splendid and beautiful. ”

“ Least valued among the real Romans were the athletic sports. For genuine enjoyment of these we must look to the Greek part of the empire. At Rome they appeared tame, for the mind of the Roman populace was naturally coarse in grain; what it delighted in was something sensationally acrobatic, or provocative of a rather gross laughter, or else involving a thrilling anticipation of danger and bloodshed. In taste the Romans were in fact similar to those modern spectators who love to see a man plunge from a lofty trapeze into a narrow tank, with a reasonable chance of breaking his neck. ”

“ Their characters may be direct and plain as those of Lear and Kent, or they may be as subtly shaded as that of Hamlet or of the melancholy soliloquist of Arden. He can in imagination traverse the whole gamut of feeling. He can be what or whom he will. This is the imagination in which Shakespeare is unsurpassable. This more than all powers, unless it be that of humour, is the one which Nature must bestow, and which nothing but Nature can bestow. And this is the power which alone can make drama convincing and immortal. ”

“ Not everyone perceives that his Manfred is an unmistakable echo of Aeschylus’ Prometheus, in the tone and pitch of its composition, in the firmness of the central character, in his mental suffering, in the tremendous solitude, in the supernatural of the surroundings. Yet Byron is not one whom we may quote as typifying any great direct and salutary effect of Greek upon either his style or his matter. He is too slipshod in the one and too romantic in the other. But his ardour for the land of great literature is beyond denying:
The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! ”

“ Perhaps it is also true that many a Roman who possessed fine works of art, and even exquisite ones, was not in reality a true connoisseur; that, even if he were, he lacked instructive and ardent appreciation of art for its own sake; and that, like his cultivation of intellectual society or learning, his cultivation of art was rather that of a man determined to be on a level with the culture of his times. Nevertheless the fact is palpable, that the cultivation was there, and was displayed in public architecture and in household embellishment in a way which puts the modern world to shame. ”

“ We realize how it has been brought over us by loneliness, mountain solitude, a sunset, great heights, stormy seas, music, sorrow, love, the sound of distant bells, calm evenings, summer and the perfume of the flowers, fine characters, heroic deeds, and a thousand other causes, within us and without: and, when the supreme writer voices it for us, whatever it may be, we feel and know it at once for the final and the perfect. ”