We are further aware that this artistic unity is closely bound up with the worth and beauty of the book, and with its appeal to a modern mind. The antiquarian interest of the story is no greater than that of Polybius' narrative or Xenophon's. The utility which the detailed record of battle and campaign was intended to possess--how obsolete and meaningless this must be to a world whose armoury of slaughter is enriched with siege-gun and ironclad! The political philosophy of the city state may be neglected by the modern socialist. The observations upon human nature are less subtle than those of an ordinary novelist of to-day. A certain nobility of thought, a considerable skill in the presentation of character and in narrative--what more than these would be left? If contemporaries were warned that
The results of our inquiry, if they are true, will be of some literary interest, and they also have a bearing on the moral character of Thucydides. The current interpretation of that part of the history which deals with Cleon leaves a dark cloud hanging over its author,--a cloud which well-meaning defenders have tried, but never quite successfully, to dispel. It cannot, we think, be denied that Thucydides hated and despised Cleon. We have no right to complain of that; for one man may hate and despise another with very good reason; and we need not think much the worse of either. The moral question touches not the man, but the historian. Has he misrepresented the facts about Cleon because he bad a `personal grudge' against `an able, but coarse, noisy, ill-bred, audacious man?' (note 1) If he has done so, and for that motive, what are we to say of an historian who began his work with an austere profession of fidelity to truth, and then distorted his narrative, concealed facts, and insinuated detraction, with the deliberate purpose of discrediting a politician who had been instrumental in causing his own banishment? Yet this is what is implied in the current hypothesis, that Thucydides was actuated by a personal grudge. But why do we let him off with this mild phrase, instead of branding the man for a hypocrite, to be ranked among the lowest, as having sinned against the light? If we do let him off, it is because the history as a whole leaves an impression inconsistent with this account of the matter. It is not the work of a man capable of consciously indulging the pettiness of personal spite, but of one who could tell the story of his own military failure, which cost him twenty years of exile, without a syllable of extenuation. Throughout the book there is a nobility of tone, a kind of exalted aloofness, which makes some of his
We believe, moreover, it is possible to lay our finger on the place where this new principle first definitely modifies the narrative. It is at the beginning of Book IV, in the story, of the occupation of Pylos. In the next chapter we shall proceed at once to this episode, and try to bring to the surface this underlying principle which in later chapters will be further illustrated and explained.
There is always something ungracious, something, almost, of impiety, in the office of criticism. A work of art is not meant to be taken to pieces; analysis is like a mischievous child dismounting a delicate machine. When it comes to poetry, our instinct revolts and cries out to us, for the sake of all that is beautiful, to leave it alone. But in the interpretation of an age far removed from ours, with a cast of thought and a tradition of artistic workmanship long fallen into disuse, we are faced with a cruel dilemma. If we analyse, some volatile and evanescent spirit is released and is not to be recaptured; if we refrain, we may miss the very qualities which the artist himself valued most highly. The generation is gone which was bred to the same intellectual heritage and met the lightest hint with native comprehension. For us only the strong effort of imaginative sympathy can reconquer the lost ground.