XIVTHE VITALIZER OF THE WORLD
This title is not an advertisement for a patent medicine; it is the brief statement of an important historical fact. “Every schoolboy knows” that the revival of learning in Italy came from the vitalizing touch of Greek. Out of that renaissance, which the Jesuits took over and embodied in their system of teaching, grew modern scholarship in England through Linacre, Lilly, Colet and More, the forerunners of the Elizabethans. It was the beginning of modern scholarship in Germany, through Erasmus, the friend of these Englishmen, and through Melanchthon, whose name, like that of Erasmus, marks the power of Greek: out of that renaissance sprang the rejuvenated civilization of our day. Every schoolboy knows that Greek brought the modern world to life, but is it as well known or remembered that Greek has always been vivifying everything it touched?
The civilization of Rome in every part felt the influence of Greece. Rome conquered the world by force of arms, but itself was humanized and then humanized the world through Greece. Everymodern language today feels the force of Isocrates and Demosthenes through Cicero, and of Alcæus and Sappho through Horace, and of Greek tragedy through Seneca and of Homer through Virgil. When later the barbarians of the north severed Rome from Greece and the Roman Empire and its civilization lay dead, who brought the world to life again? “When the accurate knowledge of Latin was declining in Gaul, even Greek was not unknown in Ireland.”[2]It was the Irish monks who freshened into flame the blackening embers of European civilization and began its restoration. The revival was brought about through the schools of Bobbio and St. Gall, mostly indeed as the scattered books of their libraries show, by means of Latin literature but always with the help of Greek, as the same libraries testify. That was an earlier renaissance in Italy and Switzerland. And who was the leading figure in the revival in Spain about the same time? It was the Greek scholars, Isidore of Seville and, a little earlier, Hosius of Cordova, and, a little later, John of Gerona. Then France began to grope out of barbarism under the leadership of Charlemagne, resuming close relations with Greece and importing the Irish monks, Clement and Dungal, and the English monk, Alcuin. But it was under Charlemagne’s successor, Charles the Bald, that this new renaissance took on a fresh energy which did not spend itself before the decline of scholasticism.John Scotus, John the Irishman, who styled himself in his translation of Dionysius from the Greek by the title of Erin-born, for a quarter of a century kept France intellectually alive, and did it chiefly by his Greek. John, the Erin-born, was the forerunner of scholastic philosophy, which caught the vital force of Greek through another channel also. When Spain was conquered by barbarians and lost its civilization, where did its Arabian conquerors go for the seeds of the new life? The Arabs went to Greece, gave Aristotle in translation to Europe, and ushered in the golden age of medieval philosophy. Rightly does Traini (1345), on an altar-piece in Pisa, picture St. Thomas Aquinas receiving the light of knowledge from Christ through the Greek New Testament and from Aristotle on his right and from Plato on his left. As Aquinas combined patristic and scholastic theology, he merged in his works the twofold Greek influences of Plato and Aristotle, who were the human aids in each of these theologies.
Pass over several centuries to the time when the Italian renaissance had grown senile and when scholarship left Spain, Italy and, to a large extent, France, and found its home in the north. These nations lost touch with Greek and their scholarship died down, while life moved northward in the wake of Greek. When F. A. Wolf went to Halle about the beginning of the nineteenth century, he represented the reaction against the realism of that day,and “his conflict with the school of useful knowledge brought into clear relief his ideal of a culture founded on Greek traditions.”[3]Time has shown that Wolf’s theories of Homeric authorship are all wrong, but the stimulus he gave to scholarship lasted all through the nineteenth century, and to no other single influence more than to Wolf may Germany ascribe its undoubted supremacy in classical learning during the last century. His inspiration came from the Greek, and in his vitalizing of Germany he was associated with others who had felt the same inspiration and were already beginning the influence that still in a measure persists: Heyne in the classics, Lessing in criticism and Winckelmann in art.
England’s partial reawakening under Queen Anne saw Bentley, the Greek scholar, and his contemporary, Pope, translator of theIliadandOdyssey, and let scholars say what they will about Pope’s translation, they cannot impugn the fine criticism of his introductions or the lasting influence for good of his versions. Passing over the prime of English eloquence, whose living roots, as Goodrich has shown, are in Greek literature, we come to the fresh memories of our own time and to the Victorian era. Again it is Greek which vitalizes every branch of literature, philosophy and art with new and unexpected truth and life. Without Greek the Victorian revival would not have come about. Inpoetry recall Keats, who awoke to life through the reflected glory of Homer; recall Cowper, translator of Homer, and Byron, who died for Greece, and Moore, who translated Anacreon, and Landor and Arnold and Tennyson and Browning, all of whom took substance and form and fire from Greek sources. In essay-writing you have Brougham, eloquent advocate of Greek oratory; De Quincey, who could, as his tutor said, at the age of thirteen harangue a Greek crowd; Macaulay, who, even in manhood, weeps over his Homer on the streets of London. In art there are Ruskin and Morris and Pater, who are saturated with Greek thought. Think of statesmanship and you will recall Lord Derby and Gladstone, political rivals, at one in their love of Homer; think of criticism, and Lang, Saintsbury, Blackie, Butcher and Jebb will say that through Greek they have dominated modern criticism; think of history, and the names of Rawlinson and Grote and Hallam, Grecians, will come forward in your mind. History! Why, you will remember that all ancient history has recently been rewritten with the spade, and it was Schliemann under the spell of Homer who turned the first sod.
Go over the great names in literature and art, in philosophy, theology and scripture, in the sciences of history, mathematics, law, government, and you will find Greek giving life and vigor. Even in the newer sciences founded on observation and experience, which have come into being within a century,whenever an observer gets beyond the elementary stage of research and classification, he will resort to Greece for principles and intellectual categories just as he borrows the language of Greece with which to name his discoveries. History shows that every people and every system of education and every house of learning, when it gives up Greek, is headed towards inferiority and decay, but when it turns with fresh endeavor toward Greek it reaches forth to life and to light. Nor is all this surprising or strained. Our civilization was born and grew for centuries in Greece. Our Christianity was early translated into the language of Greece and for centuries spoke and thought chiefly in that tongue. So then in our minds and souls our youth will ever have been Greek, and from Greek must ever come, as it has come in the past, the new blood that will flush with dynamic energy the anemic arteries of cosmos, the world, and of the microcosm, man.