The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III | Page 8

while composed of various parts, must be
comprehended at one glance before the right impression is produced.
Look how our modern poet goes to work! He has a fair scene before his
fancy. He paints every part of it, with no reason why one part should be
placed before another,--and as you read it, you have to piece each part
together, as in a child's dissected map; and after 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