Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/151

129 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 129 accustomed only to the calm unimpassioned tone of the Epos, had hut just found a temperate expression of livelier emotions in the elegy, this kind of poetry, which has nothing in common with the Epos, either in form or in matter, arose. It was a light tripping- measure, sometimes loosely constructed or purposely halting and broken, and well adapted to vituperation, unrestrained by any regard to morality or decency*. The ancients drew a lively image of this bitter and unscrupulous spirit of slanderous attack in the well-known story of the daughters of Lycambes, who hanged themselves from shame and vexation. Yet this sarcastic Archilochus, this venomous libeller, was esteemed by antiquity not only an unrivalled master in his peculiar line, but, gene- rally, the first poet after Homerf. Where, we are compelled to ask, is the soaring flight of the soul which distinguishes the true poet? Where that beauty of delineation which confers grace and dignity even on the most ordinary details ? § 2. But Poetry has not only lent herself, in every age, to the descrip- tions of a beautiful and magnificent world, in which the natural powers revealed to us by our own experience are invested with a might and a perfection surpassing truth: she has also turned back her glance upon the reality by which she was surrounded, with all its wants and its weaknesses ; and the more she was filled with the beauty and the majestic grace of her own ideal world, the more deeply did she feel, the more vividly express, the evils and the deficiencies attendant on man's condition. The modes in which Poetry has accomplished this have been various ; as various as the tempers and the characters of those whom she has inspired. A man of a serene and cheerful cast of mind, satisfied with the order of the universe, regarding the great and the beautiful in nature and in human things with love and admiration, though he distinctly per- ceives the defective and the bad, does not suffer his perception of them to disturb his enjoyment of the whole : he contemplates it as the shade in a picture, which serves but to bring out, not to obscure, the brilliancy of the principal parts. A light jest drops from the poet's tongue, a pitying smile plays on his lip ; but they do not darken or deform the lofty beauty of his creations. The thoughts, the occupations, of another are more intimately blended with the incidents and the conditions of social and civil life ; and as a more painful experience of all the errors and perversities of man is thus forced upon him, his voice, even in poetry, will assume a more angry and vehement tone. And yet even this voice of harsh rebuke p. 286.) "In celeres iambos misit furentem." Horace. f Maximus poeta aut certesummo pvoxhnus; as he is called in Valerius Maximus. K
 * AutriruvTs; "afifioi, raging iambics, says the Emperor Hadrian. (Brunck, Anal. ii.