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does not inherit the full capacities of reason; if it is questioned, it remains dumb; if it is attacked, it can offer no defense. The spoken logos, indeed, alone is really existent; the written is a mere phantom of it. In the place where this remark occurs, it points to the difference between a barren Rhetoric and a fruitful Dialectic. But the remark itself is of still wider application. In every province of intellectual activity, and in that of poetry among the rest, the Greeks of the classical age demanded a living sympathy of mind with mind. What they felt in regard to the poet can be best understood by comparing it with the feeling which not they alone, but all people, have in regard to the orator and the preacher. The true orator, the great preacher, speaks out of the fulness of genuine conviction and emotion to the minds and hearts of those who hear him; through all variations of mood and tone, he keeps in mental touch with them. The excellence of the classical Greek poet was tried by the same test. No refinement or elaboration of art could sustain the poet through his ordeal, if he failed in truth to nature. False sentiment may pass muster in the study, but it is inevitably betrayed by its own unveracity when it is spoken aloud before listeners whose minds are sane, as those of the Greeks preeminently were; the hollow ring is detected; it offends; and the exemption of the best Greek poetry from false sentiment is a merit secured by the very conditions under which that poetry was produced.

The form of expression, again, was controlled by this tribunal of sound-minded hearers. A style might be novel and bold in any degree that the poet's faculty could reach; but at least it was required to have in it the pulse of life; it would be repugnant to his audience if they perceived the artificial outcome of mechanical formulas, a style which sought to impress or surprise by mere tricks of phrase, having no vital relation to his thought. When Aristophanes quotes such tricks of phrase, even from a poet so great in many ways as Euripides, we seem to catch an echo of Athenian laughter; we feel how strong and how sober was the control which the Athenian theatre exercised in this direction. When the work of the composer failed to be vital and sincere, this, the unpardonable fault, was described by the expressive word yvxpós, frigid. The composition was then no longer a living thing, which spoke to the hearers, and elicited a response. It was stricken with the chill of death.

Thus the Greek poetry of the great age was not merely inspired by life; it was regulated by life; the instinct of the hearers was a restraint operating upon the poet, a safeguard against affectation or unreality. The freshness, the charm of nature, the immortal youth, which belong to such Greek poetry are due not simply to the qualities of the Greek mind, but also to this relation between the poet and his audience. This fact cannot be too much emphasized, for it at once constitutes an

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essential difference between the best Greek poetry and such as has been produced under the conditions of a literary age, one of books and readers. In a literary age the influence of criticism upon poetry operates through the individual critic, who either speaks for himself alone, or is the exponent of a school or a coterie. Such criticism, working on the sensitive temperament of a poet, is too apt to check his spontaneity; on the other hand, it does not necessarily help to keep him in accord with nature, that is, with the first law of poetica! truth and beauty. But the Greek poet's spontaneity was in no way checked by his audience; they only required that he should maintain a living relation with them. It is a familiar experience that the collective impression of intelligent listen. ers, to a speech, let us say, or to a sermon, has a critical value of a certain kind which can seldom be claimed for the judgment of any single critic. There is a certain magnetic sympathy, generated by the mere presence of fellow-listeners, which more or less influences each member of such a company. He can scarcely avoid considering how that to which he is listening is likely to affect other minds beside his own. The very atmo sphere of human companionship tends to preserve the sanity of the individual judgment. In the case of people with the unique gifts of the Greek race, - their obedience to reason, and their instinct for beauty, the critical value of the collective impression was exceptionally high. Their

poets were subject to a test which, while leaving them the largest freedom, also warned them, with unfailing accuracy, when they were in danger of going wrong.

Old Greek view of the poet as a teacherwhat it implies.

Further, it should be remembered that poetry, orally delivered, not written for readers, had been from the earliest times the very basis of Greek education. The Greek genius had reached full maturity before written literature became important, and before literary prose had been developed. There is no more significant testimony of this fact than is afforded by the manner in which Greeks of the classical age conceived the office of the poet. They regarded him as primarily a teacher. Aristophanes frequently expresses this view of his own calling, and is a true interpreter of orthodox Greek sentiment when he enumerates the lessons which may be learned in various departments from the older poets. Aristotle was the first who formally asserted that the aim of poetry, as of all fine art, is to give noble pleasure, and that its didactic use is accidental. But the older conception held its ground, and often reappears in the later Greek literature. Strabo, in the Augustan age, can still describe poetry as an elementary philosophy, which instructs us pleasurably, no doubt - in regard to character, emotion, action. With the same meaning, he observes that no one can be a good poet who is not first a good man. Plutarch gives still more forcible expression to the same

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sentiment poetry, he says, is a kind of twilight, -a soft light in which truth is tempered with fiction, to which the young are introduced in order that their eyes may be gradually prepared for the full sunshine of philosophy. In the Roman writers, too, this old Greek view can be traced, though sometimes blended with the Aristotelian, as when Horace insists equally on the utile and the dulce; and from the Roman world it passed on to the Renaissance. The prevalent view of the Elizabethan age, as given by Sir Philip Sidney in his "Apology for Poetry," was that the end of poetry is "delightful teaching." Dryden was something of a heretic when he ventured to say, "I am satisfied if " verse cause delight; for delight is the chief, if not the only, end of poesy." It may seem strange that the view of poetry as primarily didactic, a view which might be deemed prosaic, should have been that which was generally held by the Greeks, the most artistic of all races, in the age when their artistic faculties were at the best. But it is needful to distinguish between this view as it was held in Hellenistic or Roman times, and as it was held by the Greeks of an earlier period. What it really signifies, in its old Greek form, is that poetry was interwoven with the whole texture of Greek life. The voice of the poet was the voice from which the people had been accustomed, through long generations, to derive every thought that raised their minds above daily routine, and every sentiment that