________________________________________________
_ When he was in his third year a magazine was founded at Cambridge,
the contributions to which were exclusively by undergraduates.
Ernest sent in an essay upon the Greek Drama, which he has declined
to let me reproduce here without his being allowed to re-edit it. I
have therefore been unable to give it in its original form, but when
pruned of its redundancies (and this is all that has been done to
it) it runs as follows -
"I shall not attempt within the limits at my disposal to make a
resume of the rise and progress of the Greek drama, but will confine
myself to considering whether the reputation enjoyed by the three
chief Greek tragedians, AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, is one
that will be permanent, or whether they will one day be held to have
been overrated.
"Why, I ask myself, do I see much that I can easily admire in Homer,
Thucydides, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Aristophanes, Theocritus, parts
of Lucretius, Horace's satires and epistles, to say nothing of other
ancient writers, and yet find myself at once repelled by even those
works of AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides which are most generally
admired.
"With the first-named writers I am in the hands of men who feel, if
not as I do, still as I can understand their feeling, and as I am
interested to see that they should have felt; with the second I have
so little sympathy that I cannot understand how anyone can ever have
taken any interest in them whatever. Their highest flights to me
are dull, pompous and artificial productions, which, if they were to
appear now for the first time, would, I should think, either fall
dead or be severely handled by the critics. I wish to know whether
it is I who am in fault in this matter, or whether part of the blame
may not rest with the tragedians themselves.
"How far I wonder did the Athenians genuinely like these poets, and
how far was the applause which was lavished upon them due to fashion
or affectation? How far, in fact, did admiration for the orthodox
tragedians take that place among the Athenians which going to church
does among ourselves?
"This is a venturesome question considering the verdict now
generally given for over two thousand years, nor should I have
permitted myself to ask it if it had not been suggested to me by one
whose reputation stands as high, and has been sanctioned for as long
time as those of the tragedians themselves, I mean by Aristophanes.
"Numbers, weight of authority, and time, have conspired to place
Aristophanes on as high a literary pinnacle as any ancient writer,
with the exception perhaps of Homer, but he makes no secret of
heartily hating Euripides and Sophocles, and I strongly suspect only
praises AEschylus that he may run down the other two with greater
impunity. For after all there is no such difference between
AEschylus and his successors as will render the former very good and
the latter very bad; and the thrusts at AEschylus which Aristophanes
puts into the mouth of Euripides go home too well to have been
written by an admirer.
"It may be observed that while Euripides accuses AEschylus of being
'pomp-bundle-worded,' which I suppose means bombastic and given to
rodomontade, AEschylus retorts on Euripides that he is a 'gossip
gleaner, a describer of beggars, and a rag-stitcher,' from which it
may be inferred that he was truer to the life of his own times than
AEschylus was. It happens, however, that a faithful rendering of
contemporary life is the very quality which gives its most permanent
interest to any work of fiction, whether in literature or painting,
and it is a not unnatural consequence that while only seven plays by
AEschylus, and the same number by Sophocles, have come down to us,
we have no fewer than nineteen by Euripides.
"This, however, is a digression; the question before us is whether
Aristophanes really liked AEschylus or only pretended to do so. It
must be remembered that the claims of AEschylus, Sophocles and
Euripides, to the foremost place amongst tragedians were held to be
as incontrovertible as those of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto
to be the greatest of Italian poets, are held among the Italians of
to-day. If we can fancy some witty, genial writer, we will say in
Florence, finding himself bored by all the poets I have named, we
can yet believe he would be unwilling to admit that he disliked them
without exception. He would prefer to think he could see something
at any rate in Dante, whom he could idealise more easily, inasmuch
as he was more remote; in order to carry his countrymen the farther
with him, he would endeavour to meet them more than was consistent
with his own instincts. Without some such palliation as admiration
for one, at any rate, of the tragedians, it would be almost as
dangerous for Aristophanes to attack them as it would be for an
Englishman now to say that he did not think very much of the
Elizabethan dramatists. Yet which of us in his heart likes any of
the Elizabethan dramatists except Shakespeare? Are they in reality
anything else than literary Struldbrugs?
"I conclude upon the whole that Aristophanes did not like any of the
tragedians; yet no one will deny that this keen, witty, outspoken
writer was as good a judge of literary value, and as able to see any
beauties that the tragic dramas contained as nine-tenths, at any
rate, of ourselves. He had, moreover, the advantage of thoroughly
understanding the standpoint from which the tragedians expected
their work to be judged, and what was his conclusion? Briefly it
was little else than this, that they were a fraud or something very
like it. For my own part I cordially agree with him. I am free to
confess that with the exception perhaps of some of the Psalms of
David I know no writings which seem so little to deserve their
reputation. I do not know that I should particularly mind my
sisters reading them, but I will take good care never to read them
myself."
This last bit about the Psalms was awful, and there was a great
fight with the editor as to whether or no it should be allowed to
stand. Ernest himself was frightened at it, but he had once heard
someone say that the Psalms were many of them very poor, and on
looking at them more closely, after he had been told this, he found
that there could hardly be two opinions on the subject. So he
caught up the remark and reproduced it as his own, concluding that
these psalms had probably never been written by David at all, but
had got in among the others by mistake.
The essay, perhaps on account of the passage about the Psalms,
created quite a sensation, and on the whole was well received.
Ernest's friends praised it more highly than it deserved, and he was
himself very proud of it, but he dared not show it at Battersby. He
knew also that he was now at the end of his tether; this was his one
idea (I feel sure he had caught more than half of it from other
people), and now he had not another thing left to write about. He
found himself cursed with a small reputation which seemed to him
much bigger than it was, and a consciousness that he could never
keep it up. Before many days were over he felt his unfortunate
essay to be a white elephant to him, which he must feed by hurrying
into all sorts of frantic attempts to cap his triumph, and, as may
be imagined, these attempts were failures.
He did not understand that if he waited and listened and observed,
another idea of some kind would probably occur to him some day, and
that the development of this would in its turn suggest still further
ones. He did not yet know that the very worst way of getting hold
of ideas is to go hunting expressly after them. The way to get them
is to study something of which one is fond, and to note down
whatever crosses one's mind in reference to it, either during study
or relaxation, in a little note-book kept always in the waistcoat
pocket. Ernest has come to know all about this now, but it took him
a long time to find it out, for this is not the kind of thing that
is taught at schools and universities.
Nor yet did he know that ideas, no less than the living beings in
whose minds they arise, must be begotten by parents not very unlike
themselves, the most original still differing but slightly from the
parents that have given rise to them. Life is like a fugue,
everything must grow out of the subject and there must be nothing
new. Nor, again, did he see how hard it is to say where one idea
ends and another begins, nor yet how closely this is paralleled in
the difficulty of saying where a life begins or ends, or an action
or indeed anything, there being an unity in spite of infinite
multitude, and an infinite multitude in spite of unity. He thought
that ideas came into clever people's heads by a kind of spontaneous
germination, without parentage in the thoughts of others or the
course of observation; for as yet he believed in genius, of which he
well knew that he had none, if it was the fine frenzied thing he
thought it was.
Not very long before this he had come of age, and Theobald had
handed him over his money, which amounted now to 5000 pounds; it was
invested to bring in 5 pounds per cent and gave him therefore an
income of 250 pounds a year. He did not, however, realise the fact
(he could realise nothing so foreign to his experience) that he was
independent of his father till a long time afterwards; nor did
Theobald make any difference in his manner towards him. So strong
was the hold which habit and association held over both father and
son, that the one considered he had as good a right as ever to
dictate, and the other that he had as little right as ever to
gainsay.
During his last year at Cambridge he overworked himself through this
very blind deference to his father's wishes, for there was no reason
why he should take more than a poll degree except that his father
laid such stress upon his taking honours. He became so ill, indeed,
that it was doubtful how far he would be able to go in for his
degree at all; but he managed to do so, and when the list came out
was found to be placed higher than either he or anyone else
expected, being among the first three or four senior optimes, and a
few weeks later, in the lower half of the second class of the
Classical Tripos. Ill as he was when he got home, Theobald made him
go over all the examination papers with him, and in fact reproduce
as nearly as possible the replies that he had sent in. So little
kick had he in him, and so deep was the groove into which he had
got, that while at home he spent several hours a day in continuing
his classical and mathematical studies as though he had not yet
taken his degree. _
Read next: CHAPTER XLVII
Read previous: CHAPTER XLV
Table of content of Way of All Flesh
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
