Demosthenes: an Encomium (6-10)

‘I love too to study his feelings and moods and transitions, the variety with which he combats weariness, his resumptions after digression, the charm of his opportune illustrations, and the never-failing native purity of his style.

‘It has often struck me about Demosthenes—for I will tell the whole truth out—that that looser of the bonds of speech rebukes Athenian slackness with a dignity that is lacking in the “ Greekesses” used by Homer of the Greeks; and again he maintains the tragic intensity proper to the great Hellenic drama moreconsistently than the poet who inserts speeches at the very crisis of battle and allows energy to evaporate in words.

‘As often as I read Demosthenes, the balanced clauses, the rhythmic movement and cadence, make me forget that this is not my beloved poetry; for Homer too abounds in contrast and parallel, in figures startling or simple. It is a provision of nature, I suppose, that each faculty should have its proper equipment attached to it. How should I scorn your Muse? I know her powers too well.

‘Your work, now, can be reeled smoothly off out of hand; you have your definite known facts; the butcher’s meat is there, only needing to be garnished with the sauce of your words, History supplies you with the greatness and distinction of Demosthenes; it is all known; his country was Athens, the splendid, the famous, the bulwark of Hellas. Now df I could have laid hands on Athens, I might have used the poet’s right to introduce the loves and judgements and sojourns there of the Gods, the gifts they lavished on it, the tale of Eleusis. As for its laws and courts and festivals, its Piraeus and its colonies, the memorials set up in it of victory by land and sea, Demosthenes himself is the authority for saying that no words could do justice to them. My material would have been inexhaustible; and I could not have been accused of hanging up my true theme; the formula of panegyric includes the arraying of the man in the splendours of his country. So too Isocrates ekes out his Helen by introducing Theseus. It is true that poets have their privileges; and perhaps you have to be more careful about your proportions; there must not be too much sack to the proverbial halfpennyworth of bread.