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The Shakspeare takes no airs for writing Hamlet and the Tempest, understands not that it is anything surprising: Milton, again, is more conscious of his faculty, which is, accordingly, an inferior one." What becomes, then, of Carlyle's great idol, Goethe himself, whose power of self-analysis is unparalleled? The ancients appear to us less conscious of their individual power than others, because our acquaintance with them is, after all, confined to a limited sphere. With the exception of Pindar and a few precious fragments, all the lyric poetry of Greece has perished. It is to this department that we must look for a display of self-consciousness; not to the Epos, which, in its antique form, is foreign to our culture; nor to the drama, for the individuality of the author is modified in the two great coryphæi, under whom the Attic tragedy reached its culmination, by the characters represented both in the dialogue and the chorus. It is in lyric poetry and the professedly personal parabasis of the old comedy, that we find as perfect a recognition of self, and as clear a statement of the principles of art, as can be found in any modern poet. Pindar and Simonides carried on a controversy in their odes, and evidently pursued different theories of art.* Pindar, as true and antique as a statue from the Parthenon, measured his own proportions as carefully as Phidias did those of his Pallas, and proudly asserted his own superiority in lines which strongly reminded us of Goethe's own self-exaltation.† How many men, in the whole range of literature, are secrets to themselves? Homer has escaped the charge of self-consciousness from the remoteness of his antiquity and the mystery of his origin, Shakspeare from the peculiar nature of the draina; and yet Homer and Shakspeare, if carefully studied with reference to this point,

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would evolve strange results.* We owe the erroneous impressions which are stamped on the minds of our educated men, to the abuse of those two very convenient and fashionable words, objective and subjective. How much farther down these terms will go, how much more hackneyed they will become, it is not easy to conceive. Now, while we are writing, a plain matter-of-fact man is called "too objective," while another, properly termed an arrant liar, is pronounced "too subjective." It is, therefore, not without design, that we here briefly protest against ranging antiquity under the banner of objectivity, and modern literature under the flag of subjectivity. No sensible man will suppose that human nature is so essentially different in different ages and countries. Anchilochus and Hipponax lampooned as fiercely and grumbled as savagely as any denizen of Grub-street. It is not because ancient literature is severe and statuesque, that we urge the necessity of an instamation of the study. It is because it is the offspring of a healthy humanity, that we would hold its fair, firm features up to the gaze of our teeming present, as the ancients are said to have environed the future mother with none but beautiful objects.

The dominant authority of the two classic nations cannot be shaken. The projective power of the one and the receptivity of the other have exhausted all the categories of literature, and have left standing norms for production and reproduction. The history of Grecian literature is essentially organic-"First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear." Poetry preceded prose. The Epos, which derived its material from without, was the forerunner of lyric poetry formed from within, while both were afterwards united in the artistic compass of the dramas, in which action supplemented narration and modulated the ideal flight of lyric poetry. In the field of prose, to which mature reflection led the Grecian mind, we find the Epos transmuted into history, while the perceptions of the seer, at first communicated in numbers, pass from lofty verse into unfettered language, and the orator--as true an irogs as another--nar

* Coleridge has a few remarks tending to this point, in Biographia Literaria, chap. II.

rates and reasons in dramatic monologue. Here, as in all highly organized existences, we find transitions, half-classes, connecting links. Where full development is wanting, the indicative rudiment is found. Here, as in all highly organized existences, we find a brief bloom preceded by a gradual development and followed by a gradual decline. As there were many heroes before Agamemnon, so there were many poets before Homer. Many philosophers came after Plato, many poets succeeded Sophocles. The great Aristotle spanned the chasm which separated the old world from the new, and the great Euripides planted one foot on the firm shore of antiquity and the other on the troubled waters of our agitated times, which were even then eddying up against the land.

The Greeks solved the problem-the Romans verified the solution. The former produced the flower from within outward; the latter proceeded in their imitation from without inward. The Roman drama preceded the bloom of lyricpoetry, and lyric poetry was followed by the Epos. The traces of Roman literature, like those of the Kine in wellknown myth, are all backwards. Intense consciousness marks every step. In Rome we have the strange, but by no means unaccountable phenomenon, of grammarians in advance of and parallel with classical literature. No people ever observed so closely the celebrated sentence of Schiller

"The weakling is to be despised

Who ne'er hath weighed what he fulfils."*

Livius Andronicus, with whom the history of Roman literature begins, was a grammaticus, and divided his time between the Odyssey, with which the plagosus Ortilius tortured little Horace, and his private class of Roman gentlemen. In Ennius we find an instance of that straight-forward perseverance so truly Roman, which would undertake alike the laying of an aqueduct and the alteration of a language. Had Mr. Pinkerton and Frederic II. been Romans, the Eng

* Den schlechten mann muss man verachten
Der Lie lelacht, was er vollbringt.

lish and German languages might this day be tricked out in the cast-off finery of Italian terminations. Ennius was fully determined to introduce the hexameter-the versus longusinto the Italian literature, and he achieved it against difficulties, the number and magnitude of which have been but recently disclosed. Many and many a struggle did it cost the triligual Calabrian before he could force the stubborn materials into that superb causeway over which the numbers of Virgil march so firmly. Attius, the tragic poet, attempted to reform the spelling.* Lucilius devoted more than one book of his Saturæ to the subject of orthography. Hence it is not surprising to find Cæsar writing a treatise on grammar, or Cicero making etymologies, which sound marvellously like bad puns. Indeed, the history of Roman literature cannot be studied aright without constant reference to the parallelism of grammatical and literary systems. We must watch Ennius cautiously clipping the refractory long syllables, Attius doubling his letters, Horace breaking in the high-trotting hexameter to a gentle amble, and Ovid, that seemingly careless child of the Muses, deftly arranging the fall of his pentameters. The writers of Rome were, at once, the demiurgi of language and of literature. By reason of this intense consciousness, the Roman literature has been called a bridge to lead us to Hellenism, a law-giving school-master to bring us to the knowledge of that grand æsthetic revelation. This mission is well-nigh accomplished with regard to the world at large, and is continued chiefly in its bearing upon individuals. To speak with Bernhardy, "the Roman literature has totally exhausted its world-historic task, and will henceforward develope a propædentic power rather than enter into the thesaurus of our ideas or the movements of our culture."+

As the Roman literature was based on reflection, it ceased when there was nothing left to analyze. Satire and history, where the peculiar merits of original Roman conception found ample scope, were the one narrowed down to the pasquill, the other attenuated into the gossiping chronicle. The

* Ritschl, De Vocalibus geminatis deque Lucio Attio grammatico Bonnæ. 1852. + Grundriss der Römischen Litteratur, s. 132.

iron age of Latinity lost itself in the dross of the middle ages, before the spirit of Hellenistic productiveness had been crushed, under the pomp of the Byzantine court, before Paulus Silentianius hymned the pulpit, or Tzetzes broke up the artistic rhythm of Homer into the halting jumble of the versus politicus. The formative elements of Græco-Roman literature continued to work through the lapse of centuries, though straightened and distorted in its modes of operation and manifestation. Aristotle reigned supreme, though robbed of the fine robe in which he clothed his subtle distinctions, as he did his delicate frame, and draped in the rags of an Arabic version woven into a texture of barbarous Latin. Virgil, the sorcerer, took the place of Virgil, the poet, and figured as a prototypical Dr. Faustus.* The heroic forms of antiquity, historic as well as mythical, the fair impersonations of its theology, formed the groundwork of much of the poetry on which Roman tri-literature is based. enchantress, has still her mountains in Germany. figures in the western as well as eastern myth. of England derived their origin from Brutus. Troy attracted listening ears, which were strangers to the Latin or Hellenic tongue. The most sacred persons of our theology were commingled with the plastic forms of mythology, and the legend of many a saint meets the eye of the enquirer in a heathen garb. Diana and Minerva, or Artemis and Athene, furnish parallels for many an artistic conception and many a theological dogma, which are admired and revered down to the present day.† Around the magic cadences of our existence, the twin eternities of the Hebrew faith and the Hellenic imagination have buried themselves inextricably, and the one can be as little dispensed with in art as the other in morals. The grand revolution of the Reformation overturned the physical systems of antiquity, and opened the

Venus, the Alexander The princes

The siege of

*Bernhardy, l. c. p. 413. This subject has recently excited much attention. We cite, in addition to Bernhardy's authorities, Michel and Tappet. A French scholar has written an especial Essay on Virgile l'enchanteur.

+ We have found a trace of the Immaculate conception in the myth of Erechtheus or Erichthonius, Schuenck, Mythologie des Griechen, p. 79. The legend was preserved in the Exáλn of Callimachus, according to the Schol. on II. B. v. 547.

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