E630416A. The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets.
The Daily News, 16 April 1863, p. 3.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 369.
The contents of this volume are reprinted from the Athenæum, in which they originally appeared some twenty years since. They are marked by a high appreciation of the strength and capacity of the Greek language, and by a piquancy of remark that never flags. Perhaps the knowledge of the literature of Greece is a little paraded, and the attempt to characterise the great authors of that land of intellectual wonders by short epigrammatic sentences is certainly somewhat flippant. It is wonderful no doubt to look back and listen to the echo of that language, but we cannot say that our admiration for its beauties is much increased, or that we receive any help in understanding them from such flatulent sentences as these—“Blind Homer spoke this Greek after blind Demodocus, with a quenchless light about his brows, which he felt through his blindness. Pindar rolled his chariots in it, prolonging the clamour of the games. Sappho’s heart beat through it, and heaved up the world’s. Æschylus strained it to the stature of his high thoughts. Plato crowned it with his divine peradventures. Aristophanes made it drunk with the wine of his fantastic merriment. The later Platonists wove their souls away in it out of sight of other souls.” Having thus disposed of the pre-Christian Greeks, the author comes to the early Greek fathers of the church. These she declares to be utterly useless as theological guides; each of them she very truly says differs not only from the others but from himself. “There is not only a father a-piece for every child (sect), but a piece of every father for every child.” Mrs. Browning assigns to these confused theologians a high place in what may be called the lighter literature of the church, and especially in its poetry. Their defects of style and construction she attributes to the declining state of the Greek tongue at the period in which they wrote, but she claims for them a burning inspiration, and fresh reverence, which were felt by no secular poets. These positions she attempts to fortify in her own peculiar way by reference to the Christian writers of Greek, from Gregory Nazianzen to Manuel Phile in the 14th century, “who carried away far more of the Ælian honey clinging to the edges of his patera than the poet of the Chiliads did ever wot of.”
Reviewed:
The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
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