BOOKS OF THE DAY
Our Debt to the Classics
The Classical Background of English Literature. By J. A. K. Thomson. (Allen and Unwin. 12s. 6d.)
ENGLISH literature and civilisation are inevitably flowers of the European or " Hellenic " tree, the literature even more so than the civilisation. The tradition is not Anglo-Saxon ; it is Graeco-Roman. It goes back to such authors as Cicero, Virgil and Ovid, to Homer and Plato and Plutarch, and the various intermediaries who at different times with different degrees of perversity or inefficiency represented them. Different ages have their own fashions of taste ; they can react in different ways towards the tradition, choose out of it what they like, accept it, enrich it, rebel against it, misinterpret it, but can never quite escape from it until the whole " Hellenic " civilisation is swept away.
Professor Thomson treats of this classical background in a most fascinating book, in which the charm and ease of the style might almost conceal from an uninstructed reader the foundation of wide reading and erudition. The book is meant primarily for that 'oppressed and misguided class of student who, at universities or elsewhere, seeks Honours in English language and literature without any knowledge of Latin or Greek. When the English School was first started in Oxford and other universities, it could be taken for granted that at the public schools, from which most students came, they would have had some training in the classics. There seemed to be no need of any special provision or encouragement for such training in the English course. Instead, the Anglo-Saxon language was imposed, a subject no doubt of philological importance, but as far as literature is concerned virtually irrelevant.
Perhaps to the entirely unclassical student the most valuable part of the book will be the brief but vivid and sensitive intro- ductory sketch of the main Greek and Latin authors who have specially influenced English literature at various periods. It will give the student who is in the habit of referring to Ovid or Seneca or Plutarch in his examination papers some real notion of what those authors were like. One wishes that more actual quotation could have been given illustrating the different styles ; but that would need a book at least double the size. Besides, one may hope that these sketches may induce students to read further for themselves.
The " influence of the classics " is a phrase that may have two quite separate meanings : the conscious use of Latin or Greek subjects or turns of phrase, or again those qualities of style and thought which have made certain Latin or Greek authors " classics " as contrasted with others of inferior quality. The Graeco-Roman world loft behind it, both through the Church and otherwise, an incredible richness of material alike in legends and in recorded history ; this was what the Middle Ages loved and swallowed without criticism, by preference in the form it assumed in the most unclassical authorities. It was Dares and Dictys, not Homer, who gave them their information about Hector and the Trojan War and, of course, Cressida and Palomides. Their chief possession inherited from
Rome was romance. Even the writers of the Renaissance, white they paid great attention to form in Ciceronian prose and Ovidian verse, were far removed from classical self-restraint. It was an extraordinary achievement of individual genius when Milton, by a somewhat Latinised diction and an intensely Latinised syntax, together with a far deeper sense of metre than his predecessors or most of his followers, not only produced a magnificent result but to a great extent created the accepted diction for English poetry of the higher range up to the end of the eighteenth century. In prose he failed. He produced splendour but not form. It was in prose that Dryden and his successors taught English to be classic. It was a very great advance. Unfortunately they went rather far in imposing the virtues of prose upon poetry.
The eighteenth century, as Professor Thomson remarks, was essentially Latin ; the nineteenth was pre-eminently the Greek century. In Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Greek poetry and imaginative thought were quite a major inspiration ; Keats, without the same knowledge, was deeply affected by the same spell ; nor can one forget Laodamia and The Isles of Greece. The emanci- pation from fetters which was characteristic of the nineteenth century was found by some writers in a pursuit of the Middle Ages or the East ; but in poetry, philosophy and politics the Greek in- fluence contributed vastly more. The eighteenth century had not asked enough from its poets and philosophers ; the inspiration to seek deeper thought and richer music came chiefly from Greece.
GILBERT MURRAY.
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