10 Essay on the f Writings of Hesiod. 



of this is sufficiently obvious. The improvisatore naturally seeks for the 

 same assistance from these prescriptive common-places of established 

 poetical diction, which the tyro, forced, iuvitii Minerva, to his Latin exer- 

 cise, looks for from the convenient epithets and phrases furnished ready 

 made by his gradus. I think it is quite impossible to read twenty lines of 

 either Homer or Hesiod, without being strongly impressed with the nu- 

 merous signs which they bear of having thus originally issued from the 

 school of unpremeditated improvisation. 



If we turn from the poetical diction, which is but the vehicle, to tiie 

 general spirit and style of composition, which is the living soul of poetry, 

 we shall find its leading character to be the absence of art and the force of 

 nature. All that is commonly said of the poetry of Shakespeare is far 

 more true of that of the fathers of Greek poetry ; for though we do indeed 

 perpetually find in Shakespeare the most simple and affecting touches of 

 genuine nature, we often have our gratification dashed, even at its very 

 highest, by the cold and frigid declamation, not only of art, but of the 

 worst school of art. For the Shakespearian was jiot like the Homeric age, 

 anterior to rhetoric, but rather anterior to the jnrlgment which might guide 

 how best to use and when it were best to abstain from such aid. But in 

 the early Greek poets we find nothing studied, nothing prepared for effect ; 

 we can never suspect artificial trick or design ; and therefore the effects, 

 when they do occur, being thus purely the suggestions of unsophisticated 

 nature, are calculated to tell on the soul with double force. Thus in pic- 

 turesque effect, there is never any studied effort to place a picture before 

 the mind's eye — it occurs merely as the result of picturesque epithets 

 casually employed, or from the simple description of the scenes most 

 familiar to the poet's mind, [n moral effect there is no attempt at senti- 

 mental display, no laboured contrasts of light and shade ; the characters 

 do and say every thing that in simple every-day nature they would have 

 done and said. Can any tiling be more affecting than the inimitable scene 

 between Hector and Andromache ; but it owes its great charm to its severe 

 simplicity and the obvious absence of artificial sentiment. How had one 

 touch of rhetoric marred that sweetest picture, the infant shrinking with 

 moans to its nurse's bosom, and the father smiling at the mother and 

 removing the terrors of his brazen hebnet, with its fearfully nodding crest. 



With regard to character also, nothing can be more truly characteristic 

 than the actions and speeches of the individuals introduced in this early 

 poetry; but this also entirely results from the very same reason which we 

 have just alledged, namely, that they do and say exactly what such indi- 

 viduals in their circumstances naturally would have done and said. There 

 is never any artificial attempt to make every word and motion illustrative 

 of some point of character which is intended to be brought out. Human 

 beings never do act thus in real life — nor in the earlier Greek poetry. 

 We have only to compare the Ulysses and Ajax of Ovid, with those of 

 Homer, to feel the justice of these remarks. 



