The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III | Page 8

you have constructed the whole out of the fragments, you have to imagine the effect. The Greek told you the effect at once,--he gave up the attempt to picture the scene in words. But when he had to deal with any part of nature that had life or motion in it--in fact, any element of time--then he was as minute as the most thorough Wordsworthian could wish. How admirably, for instance, does Homer describe the advance of a foam-crested wave, or the rush of a lion, the swoop of an eagle, or the trail of a serpent!
The Greeks were as much gladdened by the sight of flowers as moderns. Did they not use them continually on all festive occasions, public and private? But minuteness of detail was out of the question in poetry. The poet was not to play the painter or the naturalist. And it had not yet become the fashion to profess a mysterious inexpressible joy in the observation of natural scenery. Nor had men as yet retired from human society in disgust, or in search of freedom from sin, and betaken themselves to the love of pure inanimate objects instead of the love of sin-stained man. It had not yet become unlawful, as it did with the Arabs afterwards, to represent the human form in sculpture. Human nature was not looked on as so contemptible, that it would be appropriate to represent human bodies writhing under gargoyles, as in Gothic churches, or beneath pillars, as in Stirling Palace. The human form was then considered diviner than the forms of lions or flowers.
In bold personification of natural objects, the Greeks could not be easily surpassed. In reality, it was not personification with them,--it was simply the result of the ideas they had formed regarding causation. If a river flowed down, fringed with flowery banks, they imagined there must be some cause for this, and so they summoned up before their fancy a beautiful river-god crowned with a garland. Even in the more common process of making nature pour back on us the sentiments we unconsciously lend her, the Greeks were very far from deficient. The passage in which Alcman describes the hills, and all the tribes of living things as asleep,[5] and the celebrated fragment of Simonides on Danae, where she says, "Let the deep sleep, let immeasurable evil sleep," are only two out of very many instances that might be quoted.
Perhaps the most marked instance of the poetic instinct of the Greeks, is their avoiding descriptions of personal beauty. Though they were permeated by the idea, and thrillingly sensitive to it, it is easier to tell what a Scotch poet regards as elements of beauty than what a Greek did. A beautiful person with the Greek is a beautiful person; and that is all he says about the matter. This is not true of the Anacreontics, or of the Latin poets. Now, in Scotland, again, there is little feeling of beauty of any kind. A Scottish boy wantonly mars a beautiful object for mere fun. There is not a monument set up, not a fine building or ornament, but will soon have a chip struck off it, if a Scotch boy can get near it. And the Scotsman, as a general matter, sees beauty nowhere except in a "bonnie lassie." Even then, when he comes to define what he thinks beautiful features, he is at fault, and there are songs in praise of the narrow waist, and other enormities--
"She 's backet like a peacock;?She 's breasted like a swan;?She 's jimp about the middle,?Her waist you weel may span--?Her waist you weel may span;?And she has a rolling e'e,?And for bonnie Annie Laurie?I 'd lay down my head and die."
It is needless to say that we are very far from having exhausted our subject. Few contrasts could be greater than that which exists between Greek and Scotch songs, and perhaps mainly for this reason, that Scotland has felt so very little of the influence of Greek literature. German poetry had its origin in a revived study of the great Greek classics; and such a study is the very thing required to give breadth to our character, and to supplement its most striking deficiencies.
[1] Later writers attributed to Anacreon immoralities in Paiderastia of which they themselves were guilty, but of which there is not the slightest trace in him, or indeed in any of the early bards. Welcker (Sappho von einem herrschenden Vorurtheile befreit) has successfully defended the character of Sappho from the accusations of a later age, and it would be easy to do the same both for Alc?us and Anacreon.
[2] Schiller's Poems and Ballads, by Bulwer, vol. ii., p. 122. The whole song should be read. Bulwer calls it a "Hymn to Joy," Schiller himself, simply,