NATIONAL STYLE 181 



'they represent. Still, they reveal an element of weakness in 

 ithe juvenile Greek language its talkative facility, its want 

 of massy weight and pregnant suggestiveness. This defect 

 through them becomes the more apparent, because they are 

 the supreme examples of the quality in style to which Greek 

 prose aspired. 



Aristotle was far less gifted as a stylist than his master. 

 In his hands Greek prose lost its charm of adolescent beauty. 

 At the same time it ceased to be garrulous. By his method 

 of scientific analysis and by his coinage of technical terms, 

 Aristotle exercised more influence over the language of 

 philosophy than Plato did ; and, when he passed away, the 

 genius of the race had already lost its fresh, creative faculty. 

 The Greeks continued for centuries to display inexhaustible 

 fertility in the manipulation of their plastic speech to suit the 

 subtlest shades of thought. This power gave them an empire 

 over the creeds, the logic, the diurnal diction of Christendom. 

 But they could not produce a prose style worthy of Hellas. 

 I will not except the orators from this criticism. Wonderful 

 as are the burning floods of eloquence in Demosthenes, the 

 long-wrought periods conducted to a fiery close, the march of 

 his phalanxed arguments, the pungent sting of his sarcasm, 

 and the sublimity of his appeals to human or to patriotic 

 feeling, Demosthenes did not found a solid prose style. The 

 study of rhetoric, when it left the bema for the academy, 

 encouraged the worst vices of Attic literature. It diverted 

 attention from matter to manner, and ended in the wire-drawn 

 conceits of the later sophists. 



When we reflect upon Greek style, we return to Homer's 

 phrase : eTrea Trrepoevra. The words of the language were too 

 winged too swift, perchance, for poetry of the severest order 

 too light and feathered for the purposes of monumental 

 prose. 



Ill 



The passage from Greek to Latin is like passing from a 

 paradise of flowers and fruit trees to a region of tilth and 

 pasture, from the boyhood of demigods to the adult manhood 



