Chapter 23

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of Eternity.Shelley(AdonaïsLII).

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

Shelley(AdonaïsLII).

Two of the most marvellous lines in all literature. With them as a text volumes might be written.

Campbell the poet, who had always a bad razor, I suppose, and was late of rising, said he believed the man of civilization who lived to be sixty had suffered more pain in littles in shaving every day than a woman with a large family had from her lyings-in.

John Brown(Horae SubsecivaeI, 457).

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and the beholder.

J. G. Zimmermann.

The maid (and thereby hangs a tale)For such a maid no Whitsun-aleCould ever yet produce:No grape, that’s kindly ripe, could beSo round, so plump, so soft as she,Nor half so full of juice.Her feet beneath her petticoatLike little mice stole in and out,As if they fear’d the light:But O, she dances such a way!No sun upon an Easter-dayIs half so fine a sight.Her cheeks so rare a white was on,No daisy makes comparison(Who sees them is undone);For streaks of red were mingled there,Such as are on a Catherine pear,The side that’s next the sun.Her lips were red, and one was thinCompar’d to that was next her chin,(Some bee had stung it newly),But, Dick, her eyes so guard her faceI durst no more upon them gazeThan on the sun in July.Sir John Suckling(Ballad upon a Wedding).

The maid (and thereby hangs a tale)For such a maid no Whitsun-aleCould ever yet produce:No grape, that’s kindly ripe, could beSo round, so plump, so soft as she,Nor half so full of juice.

The maid (and thereby hangs a tale)

For such a maid no Whitsun-ale

Could ever yet produce:

No grape, that’s kindly ripe, could be

So round, so plump, so soft as she,

Nor half so full of juice.

Her feet beneath her petticoatLike little mice stole in and out,As if they fear’d the light:But O, she dances such a way!No sun upon an Easter-dayIs half so fine a sight.

Her feet beneath her petticoat

Like little mice stole in and out,

As if they fear’d the light:

But O, she dances such a way!

No sun upon an Easter-day

Is half so fine a sight.

Her cheeks so rare a white was on,No daisy makes comparison(Who sees them is undone);For streaks of red were mingled there,Such as are on a Catherine pear,The side that’s next the sun.

Her cheeks so rare a white was on,

No daisy makes comparison

(Who sees them is undone);

For streaks of red were mingled there,

Such as are on a Catherine pear,

The side that’s next the sun.

Her lips were red, and one was thinCompar’d to that was next her chin,(Some bee had stung it newly),But, Dick, her eyes so guard her faceI durst no more upon them gazeThan on the sun in July.

Her lips were red, and one was thin

Compar’d to that was next her chin,

(Some bee had stung it newly),

But, Dick, her eyes so guard her face

I durst no more upon them gaze

Than on the sun in July.

Sir John Suckling(Ballad upon a Wedding).

“Some bee had stung it.”It, of course, means the full underlip, as against the less full upperlip.

Such is the ascendancy which the great works of the Greek imagination have established over the mind of man that.... he is tempted to ignore the real superiority of our own religion, morality, civilization, and to re-shape in fancy anadultworld on anadolescentideal.

F. W. H. Myers(Essay onGreek Oracles).

That early burst of admiration for Virgil of which I have already spoken was followed by a growing passion for one after another of the Greek and Latin poets. From ten to sixteen I lived much in the inward recital of Homer, Æschylus, Lucretius, Horace, and Ovid. The reading of Plato’s Gorgias at fourteen was a great event; but the study of the Phaedo at sixteen affected upon me a kind of conversion. At that time, too, I returned to my worship of Virgil, whom Homer had for some years thrust into the background. I gradually wrote out Bucolics, Georgics, Aeneid from memory....

The discovery at seventeen, in an old school book, of the poems of Sappho, whom till then I had only known by name, brought an access of intoxicating joy. Later on, the solitary decipherment of Pindar made another epoch of the same kind. From the age of sixteen to twenty-three there was no influence in my life comparable toHellenismin the fullest sense of the word. That tone of thought came to me naturally; the classics were but intensifications of my own being. They drew from me and fostered evil as well as good; they might aid imaginative impulse and detachment from sordid interests, but they had no check for pride.

When pushed thus far, the “Passion of the Past” must needs wear away sooner or later into an unsatisfied pain. In 1864 I travelled in Greece. I was mainly alone; nor were the traveller’s facts and feelings mapped out for him then as now. Ignorant as I was, according to modern standards, yet my emotions were all my own: and few men can have drunk that departed loveliness into a more passionate heart. It was the life of about the sixth century before Christ, on the isles of the Aegean, which drew me most;—that intensest and most unconscious bloom of the Hellenic spirit. Here alone in the Greek story do women play their due part with men. What might the Greeks have made of the female sex had they continued to care for it! Then it was that Mimnermus sang:—

τίς δε βιός, τί δε τερπνὸν ἄνευ χρυσέης Ἀφροδίτης;τεθναίην, ὅτε μοι μηκέτι ταῦτα μέλοι.[51]

τίς δε βιός, τί δε τερπνὸν ἄνευ χρυσέης Ἀφροδίτης;

τεθναίην, ὅτε μοι μηκέτι ταῦτα μέλοι.[51]

Then it was that Praxilla’s cry rang out across the narrow seas, that call to fellowship, reckless and lovely with stirring joy. “Drink with me!” she cried, “be young along with me! Love with me! wear with me the garland crown! Mad be thou with my madness; be wise when I am wise!”

I looked through my open porthole close upon the Lesbian shore. There rose the heathery promontories, and waves lapped upon the rocks in dawning day:—lapped upon those rocks where Sappho’s feet had trodden; broke beneath the heather on which had sat that girl unknown,nearness to whom made a man the equal of the gods. I sat in Mytilene, to me a sacred city, between the hill-crest and the sunny bay....

Gazing thence on Delos on the Cyclades, and on those straits and channels of purple sea, I felt that nowise could I come closer still; never more intimately than thus could embrace that vanished beauty. Alas for an ideal which roots itself in the past! That longing cannot be allayed.

F. W. H. Myers(Fragments of Prose and Poetry).

The wonderful record of Myers in classical study will first be observed. If we did not know him to be absolutely trustworthy, we would find it practically impossible to believe his statement. Imagine, for instance, a boy of sixteen learning by heartthe whole of Virgilfor his own pleasure! However, anything vouched for by Myers must be accepted as literally true.Extraordinary as this is, the above quotations introduce us to a subject quite as extraordinary and far more interesting and important, namely, the distortion of truth caused by extreme classical enthusiasm.[52]It is perfectly easy to see how such enthusiasm arises. Greek art and literature are not only intrinsically wonderful and valuable but, seeing that they were produced by a comparatively small population in a barbaric age, they constitute the greatest (secular) marvel in the history of the world. Everything tends to excite enthusiasm for this remote, alien, primitive, but most remarkable people. I need not speak of the art in which they stand unrivalled throughout the ages. As regards their literature, apart from its intrinsic excellence and the beauty of the language in which it is written, it has an additional fascination and charm, because it is the speech and song of the infancy of the world. Through it we see into the mind and realize the life of the most interesting race that ever lived. Possessing astounding intellect and intense originality, they were nevertheless the children of nature. Their earth was peopled with fauns and nymphs, their gods lived and moved and had their being in every natural object—and they had very little of our ideas of right and wrong. They had nothing of our wide knowledge and experience, yet they constructed a world of life and thought for themselves. It is absorbingly interesting to read their beautiful poetry, fine literature, and philosophic thought, bearing in mind that it was produced in the ignorant childhood and paganism of the human race, over two thousand years ago. And one of the most astonishing things about them is that essential product of civilization, a keen sense of humour. So curiously “modern” is their literature that the writers speak to us across the ages with as vivid a voice as if they were still alive. No other primitive race has been able to leave us any such adequate conception of its life and thought. Moreover, we can never forget how the Greek arose out of the tomb, where he had slept for many centuries, to preside at the re-birth of our own modern world—that emergence of Europe from medieval darkness which we call the Renaissance. It was largely Greek art and literature that stimulated the mental activity of the world and made us what we are to-day.Very great enthusiasm is, therefore, warranted in the Greek student—but there comes a point where enthusiasm may become purefanaticism, and lead to that most deadly of all things, the perversion of the truth.In the above quotations two Greek poems are quoted, and another is referred to in the lines I have italicized. The first two[53]refer to vice, which to us is revolting and criminal, but to the whole Greek nation was natural, and recognised by law. The third expresses even more revolting passion. It will be seen, therefore, that Myers, in order to illustrate the “departed loveliness” of Greek life made a strange choice of quotations (which also, standing alone, would give a very false notion of classic Greek poetry).Seeing that Myers was one of the purest-minded of men, what is the explanation of this very remarkable fact? The explanation is simply that Myers was aclassical enthusiast. He had forgotten the warning he himself gave in the first quotation. It is absolutely amazing how such an enthusiast, however brilliant a scholar and capable a man in other respects, can blind himself to the most obvious facts where anything Greek is concerned. It is very certain that Myers read into each poem a perfectly innocent meaning—and he would not be alone in that respect. Take, for instance, the third quotation which is from Sappho. In my youth thegreat majorityof classical men appeared to have convinced themselves that a poem of terribly fierce passion was an expression of mere friendship! Even our leading reference-book, Smith’sDictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, gave the same absurd view until about 1877.[54]However, we must get away from this ugly subject and seek further illustrations elsewhere.This perverted enthusiasm seems to permeate all books of the last fifty or sixty years dealing with Greek life, art and literature that I have met with. This is a very large statement to make, and, of course, I do not mean that such flagrant instances as those above referred to are the rule. But to me there seems always to besomebias which tends to exaggerate or falsify the facts tosomeextent. We can trace this tendency back more than eighteen hundred years to Plutarch. (On the Malice of Herodotus). He, as Mr. Livingstone[55]says, “took the view that the Greeks of the great age could do no wrong, and rates the historian for ‘needlessly describing evil actions.’” And it is largely in this way that the enthusiast works—byomitting facts. I should think few readers unfamiliar with the classics will have known all the facts already put before them in these notes—because such facts, although known to all classical scholars, are kept in the background as much as possible. Again the tendency is to judge the Greeks by their greatest men—to imagine every Greek to have been a Plato!I might add greatly to what I have already said about the Greeks, but I must confine myself to a few matters, repeating nothing that has been said in previous notes. The Greeks had very little regard for truthfulness. Anoathwas a matter of religion and was supposed to be binding upon them, but it was excusable to twist out of it. They also saw nothingimmoral in theft. Hermes was the god of thieves, and “the wily Odysseus” was a favourite hero of the Greeks. Autolycus, the grandfather of Odysseus, was taught by Hermes himself to surpass all men in stealing and perjury. (Od.XIX, 395.) Hence it was thought quite a proper thing to make war for the purpose of robbing neighbours of territory or property. I need quote only the truly “German” opinions ofSocratesandAristotleplaced by Mr. Zimmern at the head of his chapter on Warfare inThe Greek Commonwealth. “But, Socrates, it is possible to procure wealth for the State from our foreign enemies.” “Yes, certainly you may, if you are the stronger power” (Xen.Mem., III, 6, 7). “War is strictly a means of acquisition, to be employed against wild animals and against inferior races of men who, though intended by nature to be in subjection to us, are unwilling to submit[!], for war of such a kind is just by nature” (Aristotle,Politics, 1256). On considering that such sentiments are expressed by their greatest philosophers, we are not surprised to find thatthe history of the Greeks is one of lies, perfidy, and cruelty.[56]It further illustrates their unsympathetic pagan character when we find the Greek mother mourning for her dead son because he will not “feed her old age,” and Socrates valuing friendship because friends were useful.[57]When the enthusiast is confronted with the debased Greek religion he tells us, or leads us to think, that the people did not believe in their dissolute gods. As regards this I cannot do better than quote the terse statement of Mr. Livingstone. After pointing out that there were some advanced thinkers among the Greeks who were more or less sceptics (and that there were also some small sects who are said to have had highermoralbeliefs than their countrymen[58]) he says, “We are concerned with the state religion, which Athenians learnt to reverence as children, which permeated the national literature, which crowned the high places of the city with its temples, which consecrated peace and war and everything solemn and ceremonial in civil life, which by its intimate connection with these things acquired that support of instinctive sentiment which is stronger than any moral or intellectual sanction.”[59]Something may be added to this. Why was the Greek so greatly concerned about his tomb and his burial rites? The main reason why he burdened himself with a wife and household was that a son should be left to see to those rites and look after his tomb. He did not see his wife before marriage, and, however beautiful he found her to be, the uneducated girl would be no companion for him; and her beauty would soon fade in the unwholesome confined life she led. Her office was fulfilled when she had borne him sons—and he looked for his pleasures elsewhere. Surely this one fact alone proves that the Greeks had a very real belief in their religion. Again why do we find that only Socrates and a few other thinkers appear to have been charged with impiety? Mr. Livingstone, curiously enough, argues from this that there was greater freedom of thought among the Greeks. Surely the simple and natural explanation is far preferable, namely, that there wereno other pronounced scepticsthan those few advanced thinkers. Imagine the danger of declaring anything against the gods which would throw in doubtthe divinity of the patron goddess Athena![60]It is often argued that the intelligent Greeks could no more have believed the monstrous stories of their gods, than we believe some of the Old Testament stories of Jehovah. But the position is entirely different. We disbelieve stories that offend our moral sense: the gods of the Greeks had a character similar to their own, and acted as they themselves would have acted if they had been gods. Also they had no ethnology, no knowledge of purer religions to teach them the falsity and depravity of their own—nor, indeed, would the proud Greeks have condescended to learn from barbarians (especially as they believed themselves descended from heroes who were sprung from the gods). Finally one has only to read the accounts of travellers in Greece to learn that the religioneven lingers on to-day—see, for instance, S. C. Kaines Smith’sGreek Art and National Life(pp. 153, 172), where the woodcutters, when a tree is falling, throw themselves on the ground and hide their faces in deadly fear of the Dryads,[61]and aneminent Greek gentlemancrosses himself at the name of the Nereïds. (See also W. H. D. Rouse’sTales from the Isles of Greece. I learn from theSpectatorreview of a book just published,Balkan Home Life, by Lucy M. J. Garnett, that the religion has a very strong hold on the people.)My statement has been very one-sided so far, as I have said very little of the virtues of the Greeks. These virtues were those of intelligent primitive people, love of freedom, justice, and equality (but confined to their own nation and not including their own women and slaves), personal courage, great patriotism, fidelity to kinsfolk and guests; they showed at times generosity to a valiant enemy and recognized some such duties as burying the dead. While I do not think we can carry the national virtues much further than this, there would be gradations of character among the Greeks, and probably many would be more or less kindly, others have a true affection for their wives, others show private virtues in various directions—we can only conjecture as to something of which there is very little evidence in their literature. On the one hand, we know that Socrates suffered martyrdom for the truth,[62]and we may surmise that there were other fine characters; on the other hand, we know that this highly intellectualnationput the philosopher to death as a blasphemer against their profligate gods.But while we can give the Greeks credit for little of the morality of modern civilization, on the other hand we would be thinking very absurdly if we regarded their vices as though the people were on the same moral plane as ourselves. (This is the fact to be recognised. The ridiculous tendency of the modern enthusiast is to depict the Greeks as a highly moral nation striving for righteousness!) Strictly speaking, the Greek practices and habits should not be called vices, because the Greeks had no reason to believe that they were doing anything wrong. Their virtues and their vices were those of ordinary primitive life.[63]The moral principle, that highest product of creation, had not yet developed itself among the people to any appreciable extent, but we see it gradually emerging in the growing disbelief in the national religion among thinking men, and reaching an advanced stage in Plato, the greatest philosopher of antiquity. But to the average Greek, apart from religion (including respect for parents), the patriotism which they had learnt from Homer, their one great book, covered much of what they meant by “virtue”.[64]Whatever was good for the State was a virtue, whatever bad for the State a vice. We can hardly realize what Athens stood for in the Greek mind. For instance, Æschylus tells us that the patron goddess Athena came to Athens to preside over the balloting of the jurors and conduct the trial of Orestes, and also that the Furies lived among the citizens in a sacred grotto. The Greeks saw that they were immensely superior to the surrounding “barbarians,” and they regarded their State practically as an object ofworship(as Rome was also regarded by the Romans).It would have been interesting to discuss here the ethical views of the philosophers, but the subject is far too intricate for this note—and in any case they and their followers formed only a few exceptions among the Greeks. It will be seen later that the use of such words as “virtue,” “holiness,” etc., causes a vast deal of meaning to be read into Plato which never entered that philosopher’s mind.The great outstanding fact about the Greeks is their astonishing intellect, combined with sound commonsense (σωφροσύνη) and a quite modern gift of humour. Their powerful intellect, however, had very poor material to work upon. In a previous note I have mentioned their remarkably limited idea of the world—but, while knowing this to be a fact, we still cannot realize themental attitudeof men who had evenonefalse conception of such magnitude as regards their general outlook and thought. Let us take an instance of a different kind from the great philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), who came after Plato—bearing in mind that the average Greeks would be vastly more ignorant and superstitious than their greatest thinkers. In hisMechanicaAristotle explains the power of a lever to make a small weight lift a larger one. His explanation is that acircle has a certain magical character. A very wonderful thing is a circle, because it is bothconvexandconcave; it is made by afixedpoint and amovingline, which are contradictory to each other; and whatever has acircular movement movesin opposite directions. Also, Aristotle says, movement in a circle is the mostnaturalmovement! Hence we get the result: the long arm of the lever moves in thelarger circleand has the greater amount of this magicalnatural motion, and so requires the lesser force! Again, let us take a story which was as firmly believed by Aristotle as the most ignorant of his countrymen. Our word halcyon is the Greek wordAlkuon, meaning a bird, probably of the Kingfisher species. The Greeks supposed the word to be formed of two words,hals kuon, meaning “conceived in the sea”—therefore they believed the birdwasso conceived and that it was bred in a nest floating on the sea—and, as the sea must then be smooth, they further believed that a period of fourteen days’ calm necessarily occurred about Christmas—finding there was no such period of calm around their own coasts they either thought that it must occur (and the birds breed) elsewhere, or, like Theocritus, that the bird couldcharmthe sea into tranquillity.[65]The Greeks believed queer things about animals. I take the following instances of birds alone from Mr. Rogers’ Introduction to hisBirds of Aristophanes, so that I need not give references. By looking at a plover, who returns the look, a man is cured of jaundice. Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, was said to have been so named because, having been cast into the sea, she was rescued by widgeons (Greek,penelops). The song of the dying swan was a belief of the Greeks. The raven was the bird of augury and had mysterious knowledge. The cranes fought the pygmies and swallowed stones for ballast. The young storks fed their aged parents. The sisken foresees the winter and snowstorms. Mr. Rogers has no need to discuss the yet more extravagant stories of the phœnix, sirens, harpies, etc. Plutarch (De Is. and Os.LXXI) tells us how the Greeks regarded birds and other animals in relation to the gods; he says that while they did not, like the Egyptians,worshipanimals, “they said and believed rightly that the dove was the sacred animal of Aphrodite, the raven of Apollo, the dog of Artemis, and so on.” (Possibly Aristophanes’ comedy did not win the prize, because the audience saw little humour in exaggerating the powers which they really believed the birds to have. To the Greeks the birds weregreaterand the godssmallerthan we ourselves picture them. Ruskin’s translation of Od. V. 67,[66]the seabirds which “have care of the works of the sea,” seems much more likely to be correct than the accepted version that the birds live by diving and fishing. Consider how the Greeks would regard the birds that flew round and over their ships or fishing-nets and over the waves and rocks, where the sea-gods lay beneath—and compareIl.II, 614.)[67]All that has been said about the Greeks in this and previous notes is intended, not so much to exhibit the character of that nation—a matter which does not greatly concern me—but for other reasons. In one instance the intention was to indicate how vast a gulf exists between Christianity and the ancient world. Many classical enthusiasts do not seem to realize this, and a definitelypagantendency is very apparent in their habits of thought.But the main object of pointing out the inferior state of civilization among the Greeks, their non-moral character in certain respects, their ignorance and superstition, and their low standard of morality generally, has to do with the important question of interpreting Greek literature and philosophy. It would matter very little that the enthusiast should picture the Greeks as a race of saints and demigods, if there were no beautiful and valuable literature to be coloured and falsified by reason of such views. It is only by realizing the actual life and thought of this primitive race thatwe can understand their language, that is to say, we can learn what meanings should be attached to the words they use. Only thus can weinterpret their literature. We have already had two simple illustrations of this. In one case what appears to be a poetic fancy in Theocritus, when the voyager hopes the halcyons will calm the sea for him, is seen to be a wish that the birdswill actually exercise the power that they possess. The other instance appears on page 294. But much more important is it that, in reading words of knowledge such as references to the starry heavens or the constitution of matter, or mental or moral phenomena, we should not attribute to the Greek writer conceptions far larger and higher than he had in his mind. To amplify what I have said in a previous note, let us take the words in Plato, Aristotle or, say, Euripides which are translated by such English words as “morality,” “purity,” “virtue,” “honour,” “religion,” etc. It is clear that the original Greek expressions cannot signify, for instance, either purity as we know it, or even abstention from unnatural vice or from infanticide.[68]We are, therefore, mistranslating when we use such English words (because they are the nearest equivalent to the Greek expressions), and this fact needs to be steadily borne in mind. Again when interpreting, say, a Greek play, it is necessary to bear in mind, not only thesupposedcharacter of thedramatist, but also theactual,knowncharacter of theaudienceto whom the play was addressed. I now propose to give an illustration which will bring me on dangerous ground.Is it reasonable to ask if the Athenians, some few of whose characteristics have been outlined in these notes, would have flocked to hear, and have greatly enjoyed, a play replete with high moral teaching, and containing hymns that might have come out of a Church Hymnal? Now theBacchaeof Euripides, one of the most popular of Greek plays, and theHippolytusof the same dramatist, have been translated by one great Greek scholar, Professor Gilbert Murray, in a manner that (at any rate, as regards theBacchae) received the “hearty admiration and approval” of another great Greek scholar, Dr. Verrall. In this version, one after another of the debased Greek gods is called “God.” We also find such expressions as (note the capitals) “God’s grace,” “Virgin of God,” “Babe of God,” “God’s son,” and even “God’s true son” (who is Dionysus or Bacchus), “Spirit of God,” “Child of the Highest,” “Heaven,” “Purity,” “Saints” (who are the Maenads!), “righteous,” “divine,” “holy,” and so on.Professor Murray is put in a difficulty when two or more gods are referred to. In some cases he becomes illogical (and reminds us of the Kaiser), as when Dionysus has to say “God and me.” In others he has to use the Greek name for one god, and then the words sound blasphemous, as when he speaks of Dionysus who was “born from the thigh of Zeus and now is God.” These instances are taken quite at random and there must be many others.Take the following two lines as a short illustration of Professor Murray’s version:Where a voice of living waters never ceasethIn God’s quiet garden by the sea.The original reads: “Where the ambrosial fountains stream forth by the couches of the palaces of Zeus,” or, to give them a more musical turn, Mr. A. S. Way’s version is:Where the fountains ambrosial sunward are leapingBy the couches where Zeus in his halls lieth sleeping.In Professor Murray’s two lines Zeus becomes “God,” “living waters” is taken from the Song of Solomon, and “God’s quiet garden” from Isaiah and Ezekiel. Such expressions, with their tender and beautiful associations, do not in the least convey the sense of the original. Used to describe the palace of a vicious, barbaric deity, they are amistranslation. Also every one of the expressions referred to above is, wherever used, another mistranslation (although some may be necessitated by the limitation of language). Again there are other more pronounced mistranslations, some of which are pointed out by Verrall (Bacchants of Euripides). Thus where the very old man Cadmus, setting out on an unusual journey, merely says to his ancient comrade, “We have pleasantly forgotten that we are old” (Bacchae184-9). Professor Murray interpolates a stage direction, “A mysterious strength and exaltation” (from the god Dionysus) “enters into him”—and he alters the words of Cadmus to conform with the miracle:Sweetly and forgetfullyThe dim years fall from off me!Here, therefore, we findan important episodedeliberately introduced into the play.Take another instance which Verrall does not mention. In the very enthusiastic “Introductory Essay,” Professor Murray tells us that Euripides longed to escape from the bad, hard, irreligious Athenians[69]of that day, and proceeds as follows:“What else is wisdom?” he asks, in a marvellous passage:—What else is wisdom? What of man’s endeavourOr God’s high grace so lovely and so great?To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;To hold a hand uplifted over Hate;And shall not loveliness be loved for ever?There is nothing here, nor in the translation that follows, to indicate that there has been any interference with the text. It is only upon turning to the notesat the end of the translation(which the average reader would hardly study) that we find the third line is “practically interpolated.” He gives reasons for this that are not easy to follow, and says “If I am wrong, the refrain is probably a mere cry for revenge;” I add that the latter is the generally accepted meaning, and the only meaning I can see in the original Greek.Now Professor Murray’s object in all this is to convey in words that appeal to our minds his conception of the devout, religious and, therefore,highly moralattitude of, not only Euripides,but also his Athenian audience. The attitude of mind must be that of theaudience, as well as the dramatist, because none but devout, religious people go to a “Service of Song,” and, as stated above, theBacchaewas a very popular play among the Greeks. If, however, Professor Murray thought that, by colouring, altering, and adding to the play, he gave a more correct impression of it as it appeared to the Greeks, he was perfectly at liberty with that object to mistranslate as much as he pleased—provided he told his readers and hearers that they were not reading or hearing the words that Euripides wrote.Has he told them this? The book is entitled “Euripidestranslatedinto English rhyming verse.” In the Preface he also begins by telling us definitely that it is a translation; later on he says: “As to the method of this translation ... my aim has been to build up something as like the original as I possibly could, in form and what one calls ‘Spirit.’ To do this, the first thing needed was a work of painstaking scholarship, a work in which there should beno neglect of the letterin an attempt to snatch at the spirit.” He then goes on to tell us that “The remaining task” was to reproduce the poetry of the original and (here is the only admission that he has varied from the text) he ‘has often changed metaphors, altered the shapes of sentences, and the like.... On one occasion he has even omitted a line and a half’ (because unnecessary) and he says, he ‘has added, of course by conjecture, a few stage directions.’ Let the non-classical reader look back over what has been said above and ask himself whether such words—however carefully studied—would have given him the least impression of what this “translation” actually amounts to.Without entering into any long discussion as to the so called “purity choruses” of theBacchae, let us simply ask the question, Does this pious, fervently-religious version represent the actual play that the cruel, lying, treacherous and unspeakably sensual Greeks flocked to see and enjoy? Further comes a much more important question, Would such a “translation,” put before English readers, or staged before an English audience, give them atrueor afalseidea of the character of the Greeks?I might compare with this Ruskin’s view of the Greek character (The Crown of Wild Olive.). This is what he says the Greeks won from their lives: “Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed trust, andrequited love, andthe sight of the peace of others, and the ministry to their pain.” (Italics mine.) This is truly amazing! I am tempted to go back again to Professor Murray’sEuripides(p. lxiii) and quote a like passage:“Love thou the day and the night,” he (Euripides) says in another place. “It is only so that Life can be made what it really is, a Joy:by loving not only your neighbour—he is so vivid an element in life that, unless you do love him, he will spoil all the rest!—but the actual details and processes of living, etc., etc.”The italics are again mine—but here it will be seen that Euripides has,as a matter of course, anticipated the great evangel of Christ! He has even gone a step further—but I must leave Professor Murray to his love of the “details and processes of living,” whatever that may mean.Finally, in this extraordinary essay, I come to something which is absolutelyrepulsive. I must first briefly premise that the Dionysiac mystery cult was not sectarian. It was orthodox, believing in the plurality and the profligacy of the gods. Its adherents had no more idea of morality or purity than other Greeks. Its rites were indecent. The so-called “purification rites,” including regulations regarding continence, were simplytraining rulespreparatory to their hideous orgies. The essential rite of the cult was practised by the Maenads or Bacchantes. They tore to pieces live animals (and at one time human beings) and devoured their raw, quivering flesh. As stated above, these horrible women are Professor Murray’s “Saints.” He now proceeds todraw an analogy between their loathsome god Dionysus and Jesus Christ! Thus Dionysus is born of God (Zeus) and a human mother. He is the “twice-born”—having been hidden in Zeus’s thigh after birth! He “comes to his ownpeople of Thebes,and—his own receive him not.” Again “It seemed to Euripides in that favourite metaphor of his, which was always a little more than a metaphor, that aGod had been rejected by the worldthat he came from.” Dionysus “gives his Wine to all men.... It is a mysticism which includes democracy, as it includesthe love of your neighbour.” Dionysus “has given man Wine, which is his Blood and a religious symbol.” In the translation Dionysus is called “God’s son” and even “God’s true son.” Reading this and such statements as Miss Jane Harrison’s (see p. 292, n.), one stands amazed. Apparently this fanatical enthusiasm destroys the critical faculties, so that the enthusiast becomes utterly incapable of appreciating the beauty and value of Our Lord’s ethical teaching and its exemplification in His life.For my last illustration of how enthusiasm affects our leading classical authorities (and, therefore, leads toperversion of the truth) I take Mr. A. E. Zimmern’sGreek Commonwealth. This, like Mr. Livingstone’s work, is a very excellent book, which should be in all libraries.Mr. Zimmern quotes anddefinitely endorsesthe well-known statement in Galton’sHereditary Genius(1869), which is as follows:—“The average ability of the Athenian race is,on the lowest possible estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own, that is,about as much as our race is above that of the African Negro.” (The italics are mine.) Here I have happened by chance[70]upon an excellent illustration of classical enthusiasm, which is worth while dwelling upon at some length. In the first place Galton’s statement is perhaps the most absurd utterance ever made by an important thinker; in the second placeit appears to have been accepted by English and European authorities for nearly half a century.Galton bases his argument on the number of great men produced by a nation in proportion to its population. He states that between 530 and 430 B.C. the Athenian Greeks produced fourteen highly illustrious men:—Themistocles, Miltiades, Aristides, Cimon, and Pericles (statesmen and commanders), Thucydides, Socrates, Xenophon, and Plato (literary and scientific men), Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes (poets), and Pheidias (sculptor). I take the minor objections to his statement first.He estimates the population of free-born Greeks in Attica at 90,000. In this instance he was misled by the authorities of his time and is not to blame;but I take Mr. Zimmern’s own figures, as he endorses Galton’s statement. The 90,000 should have been, according to Mr. Zimmern’s more correct figures, 180,000 to 200,000.This alone cuts down Galton’s estimate of the “average ability” of the Greeks to at least one-half.Galton also excludes the resident aliens who, according to him, numbered 40,000, but according to Mr. Zimmern 96,000. Yet both these and the outside aliens must be considered, for there were intermarriages. Themistocles and Cimon had alien mothers, Thucydides also probably had an alien mother, or at any rate was partly of Thracian descent, and there would besomeground for the charge of usurping citizenship repeatedly made by Cleon against Aristophanes. Galton also takes no account of the slaves, the number of whom he estimates at 400,000, but Zimmern at about 112,000. These cannot be entirely omitted when we consider the life of the Greek women and the habits of the men. It should be remembered that the slaves were often Greeks of other States and also by reason of the practice of exposing children some would be Athenians and even of the best families (Plato’sLaws, 930, deals with children of slaves and Greek men and women). However, on these figures, it will be seen that Galton’s estimate has to be enormously reduced.Next, thegreatestof all the names in his list, Plato, has to bestruck out. There can be no reasonable doubt that he was not born until 428 or 427 B.C. (This appears to have been well recognised in 1869 and it is unaccountable that Galton and his reviewers should not have known it.) However, there issomeevidence that he was born in 430, and let us assume that this is so. But, if we are to include in the 100 (or rather 101) years everyone whois bornordiedin that time, we are actually taking a period of 200, not 100, years, anddoublingthe proper estimate! Besides Plato, I may mention that Aristophanes and Xenophon could have been only about fourteen years of age in 430, Thucydides had not then begun to write, and of the eighteen plays extant of Euripides two only were written before 430. Here again is another enormous reduction of Galton’s estimate.Again let us take Galton’s opinion of the ability of these fourteen men. It is amazingly high. It will be seen that there are onlytwo gradesbetween ourselves and the African negro. Again, in Galton’s table, “eminent men” aretwo gradesabove “the mass of men who obtain the ordinary prizes of life.”He now places the whole of these fourteen Greeks two grades above the eminent men!To what starry height he means to raise them, it is impossible to say, for the whole statement is exceedingly vague; but he tells us that two of the fourteen, Socrates and Pheidias,stand alone as the greatest men that ever lived.It is clear then that the fourteen Greeks have to be placed at a tremendous height in our estimation. It is impossible here to take each man anddiscuss his ability, but let us inquire what qualifications Galton hadas a critic. We turn to his list of great modern English and European literary men. Although he goes back as far as the Fifteenth Century and his list comprisesonly fifty-twowriters, he finds room among them for such names as John Aikin and Maria Edgeworth! Again his ten great English poets are Milton, Byron, Chaucer,Milman, Cowper,Dibdin(!), Dryden,Hook, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. (Some names would no doubt be omitted because they did not throw light on questions of heredity, but these lists in any case are highly absurd.)We need not greatly prolong this part of the discussion. We might ask, however, what ground had Galton, for example, to place such men as Miltiades, Aristides, or Cimon evenon an equality with, say, Cæsar, Alexander, or Marlborough. How can he class Xenophon as evenequalto our great writers? It is the interestingfactshe tells us of, not his literary ability, that makes this somewhat monotonous writer so very interesting. (The important point to remember is that Greek literature has a very special interest and value for us, quite apart from its great intrinsicliteraryvalue. Taking De Quincey’s classification,see p. 227, it is both “literature of power” and “literature of knowledge.”)Now take another point which I might illustrate from Galton’s own pages. He tells us (in another connection) that about sixty years before the time he is writing (1869) there were Senior Wranglers in Cambridge who also obtained first classes in the Classical Tripos—and even at a later date men could take high rank in both departments. Is it then to be argued that the earlier men were the greater? Not so, but, as Galton says, knowledge had become so far advanced that it was no longer possible for a man to gain such a distinction in more than one of the two subjects. Here we have the point—the world of knowledge and activity is infinitely wider to-day than when it formed the subject of Greek speculation. Their great men were very original thinkers—butin a very few subjects. Moreover, they had no books to read, no foreign languages to learn. Even their social and political life was far less complicated and involved than our own.Again, where we speak of “average ability,” it is not correct to compare large populous countries, where great talents are often submerged (see Gray’s “Elegy”) with smaller communities that afford far ampler scope. Take my own State, South Australia, with its huge territory and a population of under half a million, less than that of one of the larger English towns. We have our Premier, Government, Parliament, Town Councils, Heads of Departments, University, schools, judges, lawyers, journalists and literary men, financiers, merchants, men who design and construct railways, irrigation and other important works, mining men, heads of institutions and so on—which means a large number of men of ability and resource in all departments of life. If we compare ourselves with an average half-million of Englishmen, how great our superiority would apparently be! And yet, we know that we are not actually more capable—our ability has been simply brought into play. Mr. W. M. Hughes might himself have been a “flower to blush unseen,” if he had not emigrated to Australia.We have so far dealt with minor matters, which have nevertheless reduced Galton’s arithmetical estimate by, say, 75 per cent. at the very least. Let us now take the one great misrepresentation that must have immediately flashed upon the minds of all reviewers of Galton’s book, if they had not been blinded by classical enthusiasm. It is truly remarkable that not a single one of them seems to have called attention to the obvious fact that Galton takes the one great Athenian period,as though it were an average period in their history! From Homer’s time to the Fifth Century, B.C., would probably be about as long as from the Norman Conquest to the present time, or from King Alfred to Shakespeare—and there are again the many centuries that followed. Is the “average ability” of the Greeks during hundreds or thousands of years to be estimated on their one most brilliant period? The question needs no discussion. Galton might in the same way have taken our Elizabethan period when London had a population of 150,000, and Great Britain of about three millions—and provedthat our own ancestorswere as far above ourselves as we are above the negro.[71]Mr. C. T. Whiting, of the Adelaide Public Library, knowing how my time was limited, very kindly volunteered to make an extensive search for references to Galton’s statement in such of the literature of the time as is available in Adelaide. In addition to a number of books, he has searched throughthirty-eightjournals. He finds reviews of Galton’s book in the following:—Athenæum,British Quarterly,Saturday Review,Edinburgh Review,Fortnightly Review,Chambers’ Journal,Journal of Anthropology,Atlantic Monthly,Frazer’s Magazine,Nature,Times,and Westminster Review. The first seven do not refer at all to the statement—they apparently accept it as a matter of course. Of the last fiveFrazer’smentions the statement, and says vaguely that the chapter in which it is contained “offers several vulnerable points to the critic;” theWestminsterstates the fact without taking any exception to it; theAtlantic Monthlyraises the question whether Miltiades, Aristides, Cimon, and Xenophon were so very illustrious, and enters into an argument on Galton’s figures; theTimesconsiders that we have had other men in different fields of human effort, who could be named with Socrates and Pheidias, and lays stress on the enormous increase of knowledge and activity in modern life; inNatureA. R. Wallace, misreading Galton as referring only to the age of Pericles[72]admits the truth of the statement as applied to the Athenians of that time. None of them refer to the fact that Galton takes the most brilliant period of Greek history as a normal period—and the arguments, taken together, amount to very little. As regards the twenty-six journals which appear to have taken no notice of so startling a statement in an important book, the fact seemsto indicate that to the writers for those journals the statement contained nothing of a remarkable or dubious character! (EvenPunchmissed the chance of an amusing cartoon!)It may be objected that the reviewers of the book would not be classical men. Butfirstit must be remembered that the writers of 1869 would practically all have had a classical education andsecondlyit needed no special classical knowledge to see the absurdity of the statement. Every one without exception would know, for example, that the period taken by Galton was the one great Greek period. The statement must also have excited interest on all sides. I myself remember how it was talked of when I was a boy in Melbourne, and I have heard it repeated as an acknowledged fact up to the present time—and, therefore, comment would have been expectedin every direction. But apparently the statement was generally accepted. Mr. Whiting finds that in 1892, twenty-three years after, Galton calmly repeated the statement word for word,without reference to any criticisms. Again we find Mr. Zimmern accepting it as a matter of course in hissecondedition in 1915. As it was in his first edition, which would be reviewed in the classical journals, it must presumably have met with no adverse comments.But we have to go even further than this. Galton’s was one of those important books that are studied byall Europe. Seeing that he makes no mention of adverse criticism in his second edition, and Mr. Zimmern sees no reason to qualify the statement, it is fair to assume that no serious objection has been made in England or Europe during nearly half a century. So amazingly does classical enthusiasm pervade the thought of the world! I do not think I need say anything further on this subject.[73]Mr. Zimmern heads one of his chapters “Happiness orthe Rule of Love,” the “Rule of Love” being his translation of εὐδαιμονία! This chapter is occupied exclusively by the famous Funeral Speech of Pericles. I invite the reader to look through that terribly hard speech, and see how muchloveit contains! Again to another chapter the heading is “Gentleness or the Rule of Religion,” followed by two quotations which are evidently intended to be read as parallel passages:στέργοι δέ με σωφροσύναδώρημα κάλλιστον θεῶν.[74]—Eur.Medea, 638.Give unto us made lowly wiseThe spirit of self-sacrifice.—Wordsworth.Apart from the question whether the proud Greek could ever by any possibility have become “lowly wise,” the word σωφροσύνη “temperance,” “moderation”—or perhaps better still, “commonsense”—becomes not only a “Rule ofReligion” but even the highest conception of Christianity, self-sacrifice. It is very extraordinary. Imagine theGreeks—as we know them, and as Mr. Zimmern knows them—having the faintest conception of what we mean by self-sacrifice! It reminds one very much of Humpty Dumpty inThrough the Looking Glass: “WhenIuse a word” (εὐδαιμονία or σωφροσύνη) “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”As this is my last note I am giving myself great latitude, but I must not prolong it into a treatise. I shall, as briefly as I can, refer to only one other matter, the Greek sense of beauty. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that we are given to believe that in this respect the Greeks are exalted high as gods above the rest of mankind. What is the fact?They saw beauty in only one natural object, the human body.In a land of clear skies, wonderful sunsets, starry nights, remarkable for its ranges of mountains and extent of sea-coast, they were (with some tiny exceptions not worth mentioning) absolutely blind to any beauty in inanimate nature. Nor did any bird or beast or insect, tree or flower appeal to them to any appreciable extent as a thing of beauty. They admired only what was useful or added to their comfort—the laden fruit tree, the shady grove, the clear spring, the soft water-meadows.Various explanations have been given for the Greek failure to appreciate beauty in nature. Ruskin’s theory is most often quoted, that the Greeks wereso familiarwith beautiful scenes that they could not appreciate them. In the first place he forgot that it was not always the bright tourist-season in Greece; they had their dark and wintry times. In the second place, I have lived all my life in the southern part of Australia, which has much the same climate as Greece, and I do not think there are any greater lovers of nature than the Australians.Is not the love of nature, as it came later,[75]alsohigherthan love of the human form (omitting that facial expression which is an index of the soul)? Our ideals of human beauty appear to be purelyrelativeand depend on our surroundings, while the same beauty in nature appeals to the most diverse nations. Take for example the Japanese and Dutch artists who both loved nature much as we do—yet they admired very different types of the human figure. I understand that the Japanese, originally at least, regarded with positive disgust our tall English beauties.The beauty the Greeks saw in one object only, the human body, they reproduced in statues which have never been equalled in grace and charm, and are the admiration of the world. Their pure white marble statues and temples seem to be always present in our minds and to transfigureour conceptions of the Greeks. We unconsciously picture them as a race of glorious men and beautiful women moving in a city of marble.[76]We find ourselves forgetting what we know of their character and habits—and also forgetting the fact that both statues and temples werepainted.With the disappearance of colour through the effect of time, the flesh effect has disappeared from their statues, and the chaste white marble gives an idealized and spiritual conception of the utmost purity. As stated before, this would be a conception quite alien to the Greek mind, which saw no beauty in physical purity. If, when we stand in admiring awe before that calm, majestic and exceedingly graceful and beautiful Venus of Milo, we imagine her as the Greeks saw her, how different is the picture! To begin with, the Greeks had little sense of colour, as is seen from their limited colour-vocabulary. For example, one wordporphureoswas used for dark-purple, red, rose, sea-blue, violet, and other shades even to a shimmery white. Their colours were harsh, glaring, and put together in shockingly bad taste (from our point of view). In temples and sculpture reds and blues were the main colours used. In the Venus of Milo we must, therefore, picture the hair painted red or red-brown, the lips a hard red, eyebrows black, the eyes red or red-brown with black pupils, the dress with borders and patterns of crude reds and greens or reds and blues. As regards the flesh surfaces, we know they were wax-polished, but there is no literary record or actual trace of any tinting or colouring. The effect of the white marble would have been so horrible to us against the living eyes and face, that Mr. Kaines Smith (being one of our enthusiasts) suggests that the artist “might quite well” have used some colouring matter for the nude parts of the figure! We must further picture the statue standing in a temple, which must of course also have been painted. The structure would have its borders generally of harsh reds and blues, and the decorative sculpture of the pediments, metopes and friezes would be painted in most inconceivable colours. Thus in the metope relief of the slaying of the Hydra at Olympia, the hydra is blue, the background red, and the hair, lips, and eyes of Hercules are coloured. I might go on to the Elgin marbles, the greatest sculptures that we possess in the world, and show them gorgeous in bronze and colour. (Armour, horse-trappings, etc., were attached to the marble in bronze or other metal.) The two masterpieces of Pheidias, forty and sixty feet high respectively, which have not survived to us, were much more admired by the Greeks than the sculptures of the Parthenon. These were in barbaric ivory and gold, with the same living eyes, red lips, and so on. The fact is that the Greek, “builded better than he knew.” He unintentionally produced objects whosespiritualbeauty he was incapable of appreciating and, therefore, he gave them a grosser form that appealed to his own primitive sensual nature.(Apart from this the Greek sculptor was very limited by the paucity of his subjects. How tiresome are the never-ending Centaurs and Amazons!)[77]As regards Greek architecture, its ornament is a question of sculpture, its structure is the result of intellect combined with a certain amount of design due to their artistic sense of proportion. The Greeks did great service to humanity in working out the principles of building—but, thereafter, there was no scope for originality. Apart from its sculptural ornament, nothing more monotonous could well be imagined than a series of Greek temples, all of the same type and subject to definite, rigid rules of measurement.[78]Finally there are two matters I am bound to refer to in connection with these rough notes. First, in merely enumerating the salient features of a nation’s character, one gives no picture whatever of thelifethey led. The Greekmenled a highly intellectual, artistic, and on the whole a very gay life. If we look around us to-day, we shall find among ourselves Greeks, intellectual men who are moral sceptics, who simply do not understand that moral motives exist, who do no act in their lives from a sense of principle, and who live a purely material life (unless perhaps some great crisis, the arrival of the angel of Death or some other overwhelming event, awakens them to a sense of higher things). We can see something like a parallel to the Greeks in the gay, immoral, artistic French aristocracy who lived in the midst of a starving peasantry before the Revolution—or in George Eliot’s fascinating renaissance story inRomolaof the young Greek Tito Melema. A man may be cruel, faithless and immoral, and yet live a gay artistic and intellectual life—but it is not such a life as would have appealed to Myers or to ourselves. Secondly, a clear knowledge of the truth about the Greek character does in no way detract from the miracle of their literature or of their art. Itaddsto the wonder of it all. (If one may with the utmost reverence make another comparison, how can we fully appreciate the wonder and beauty of Christ’s teaching, if we forget the conditions of the time?) To find most beautiful poetry, fine literature, deep philosophic thought, amazing grace and charm in art emanating from this primitive race is purely astounding in itself. And it needs to be borne in mind that even the men who took part in Plato’sSymposiumlived in a different atmosphere from our own, and had a very different conception of the physical universe and the moral law. But this shouldaddto our admiration, ourveneration, for a Plato who could rise to so great a sublimity of thought in spite of such semi-barbarous conditions and surroundings. These men also looked upon the world with younger and fresher eyes. We are two thousand three hundred years older than they are. They knew very little of the past history of the world and had only an insignificant fraction of our scientific knowledge. If any religious doubts had begun to arise in their minds, they still could not possibly have rid themselves of the belief instilled into them since childhood—and they lived among Nymphs and Fauns, and saw a god in every star and under every wave. Never had they heard or dreamt of any Love of God, or Love of Man. It is only the enthusiast who, by picturing the Greeks as a modern moral nation, detracts from our real interest in them and robs their literature of its fascination. If knowledge of the true Greek character were to destroy all our enjoyment in their art and literature, even then truth must prevail “though the heavens fall”; but the fact is far otherwise. The fuller our knowledge the more we shall enjoy the greatness and beauty of their art and poetry and the more absorbing will be our interest in their literature.

Extraordinary as this is, the above quotations introduce us to a subject quite as extraordinary and far more interesting and important, namely, the distortion of truth caused by extreme classical enthusiasm.[52]It is perfectly easy to see how such enthusiasm arises. Greek art and literature are not only intrinsically wonderful and valuable but, seeing that they were produced by a comparatively small population in a barbaric age, they constitute the greatest (secular) marvel in the history of the world. Everything tends to excite enthusiasm for this remote, alien, primitive, but most remarkable people. I need not speak of the art in which they stand unrivalled throughout the ages. As regards their literature, apart from its intrinsic excellence and the beauty of the language in which it is written, it has an additional fascination and charm, because it is the speech and song of the infancy of the world. Through it we see into the mind and realize the life of the most interesting race that ever lived. Possessing astounding intellect and intense originality, they were nevertheless the children of nature. Their earth was peopled with fauns and nymphs, their gods lived and moved and had their being in every natural object—and they had very little of our ideas of right and wrong. They had nothing of our wide knowledge and experience, yet they constructed a world of life and thought for themselves. It is absorbingly interesting to read their beautiful poetry, fine literature, and philosophic thought, bearing in mind that it was produced in the ignorant childhood and paganism of the human race, over two thousand years ago. And one of the most astonishing things about them is that essential product of civilization, a keen sense of humour. So curiously “modern” is their literature that the writers speak to us across the ages with as vivid a voice as if they were still alive. No other primitive race has been able to leave us any such adequate conception of its life and thought. Moreover, we can never forget how the Greek arose out of the tomb, where he had slept for many centuries, to preside at the re-birth of our own modern world—that emergence of Europe from medieval darkness which we call the Renaissance. It was largely Greek art and literature that stimulated the mental activity of the world and made us what we are to-day.

Very great enthusiasm is, therefore, warranted in the Greek student—but there comes a point where enthusiasm may become purefanaticism, and lead to that most deadly of all things, the perversion of the truth.

In the above quotations two Greek poems are quoted, and another is referred to in the lines I have italicized. The first two[53]refer to vice, which to us is revolting and criminal, but to the whole Greek nation was natural, and recognised by law. The third expresses even more revolting passion. It will be seen, therefore, that Myers, in order to illustrate the “departed loveliness” of Greek life made a strange choice of quotations (which also, standing alone, would give a very false notion of classic Greek poetry).

Seeing that Myers was one of the purest-minded of men, what is the explanation of this very remarkable fact? The explanation is simply that Myers was aclassical enthusiast. He had forgotten the warning he himself gave in the first quotation. It is absolutely amazing how such an enthusiast, however brilliant a scholar and capable a man in other respects, can blind himself to the most obvious facts where anything Greek is concerned. It is very certain that Myers read into each poem a perfectly innocent meaning—and he would not be alone in that respect. Take, for instance, the third quotation which is from Sappho. In my youth thegreat majorityof classical men appeared to have convinced themselves that a poem of terribly fierce passion was an expression of mere friendship! Even our leading reference-book, Smith’sDictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, gave the same absurd view until about 1877.[54]However, we must get away from this ugly subject and seek further illustrations elsewhere.

This perverted enthusiasm seems to permeate all books of the last fifty or sixty years dealing with Greek life, art and literature that I have met with. This is a very large statement to make, and, of course, I do not mean that such flagrant instances as those above referred to are the rule. But to me there seems always to besomebias which tends to exaggerate or falsify the facts tosomeextent. We can trace this tendency back more than eighteen hundred years to Plutarch. (On the Malice of Herodotus). He, as Mr. Livingstone[55]says, “took the view that the Greeks of the great age could do no wrong, and rates the historian for ‘needlessly describing evil actions.’” And it is largely in this way that the enthusiast works—byomitting facts. I should think few readers unfamiliar with the classics will have known all the facts already put before them in these notes—because such facts, although known to all classical scholars, are kept in the background as much as possible. Again the tendency is to judge the Greeks by their greatest men—to imagine every Greek to have been a Plato!

I might add greatly to what I have already said about the Greeks, but I must confine myself to a few matters, repeating nothing that has been said in previous notes. The Greeks had very little regard for truthfulness. Anoathwas a matter of religion and was supposed to be binding upon them, but it was excusable to twist out of it. They also saw nothingimmoral in theft. Hermes was the god of thieves, and “the wily Odysseus” was a favourite hero of the Greeks. Autolycus, the grandfather of Odysseus, was taught by Hermes himself to surpass all men in stealing and perjury. (Od.XIX, 395.) Hence it was thought quite a proper thing to make war for the purpose of robbing neighbours of territory or property. I need quote only the truly “German” opinions ofSocratesandAristotleplaced by Mr. Zimmern at the head of his chapter on Warfare inThe Greek Commonwealth. “But, Socrates, it is possible to procure wealth for the State from our foreign enemies.” “Yes, certainly you may, if you are the stronger power” (Xen.Mem., III, 6, 7). “War is strictly a means of acquisition, to be employed against wild animals and against inferior races of men who, though intended by nature to be in subjection to us, are unwilling to submit[!], for war of such a kind is just by nature” (Aristotle,Politics, 1256). On considering that such sentiments are expressed by their greatest philosophers, we are not surprised to find thatthe history of the Greeks is one of lies, perfidy, and cruelty.[56]It further illustrates their unsympathetic pagan character when we find the Greek mother mourning for her dead son because he will not “feed her old age,” and Socrates valuing friendship because friends were useful.[57]When the enthusiast is confronted with the debased Greek religion he tells us, or leads us to think, that the people did not believe in their dissolute gods. As regards this I cannot do better than quote the terse statement of Mr. Livingstone. After pointing out that there were some advanced thinkers among the Greeks who were more or less sceptics (and that there were also some small sects who are said to have had highermoralbeliefs than their countrymen[58]) he says, “We are concerned with the state religion, which Athenians learnt to reverence as children, which permeated the national literature, which crowned the high places of the city with its temples, which consecrated peace and war and everything solemn and ceremonial in civil life, which by its intimate connection with these things acquired that support of instinctive sentiment which is stronger than any moral or intellectual sanction.”[59]Something may be added to this. Why was the Greek so greatly concerned about his tomb and his burial rites? The main reason why he burdened himself with a wife and household was that a son should be left to see to those rites and look after his tomb. He did not see his wife before marriage, and, however beautiful he found her to be, the uneducated girl would be no companion for him; and her beauty would soon fade in the unwholesome confined life she led. Her office was fulfilled when she had borne him sons—and he looked for his pleasures elsewhere. Surely this one fact alone proves that the Greeks had a very real belief in their religion. Again why do we find that only Socrates and a few other thinkers appear to have been charged with impiety? Mr. Livingstone, curiously enough, argues from this that there was greater freedom of thought among the Greeks. Surely the simple and natural explanation is far preferable, namely, that there wereno other pronounced scepticsthan those few advanced thinkers. Imagine the danger of declaring anything against the gods which would throw in doubtthe divinity of the patron goddess Athena![60]It is often argued that the intelligent Greeks could no more have believed the monstrous stories of their gods, than we believe some of the Old Testament stories of Jehovah. But the position is entirely different. We disbelieve stories that offend our moral sense: the gods of the Greeks had a character similar to their own, and acted as they themselves would have acted if they had been gods. Also they had no ethnology, no knowledge of purer religions to teach them the falsity and depravity of their own—nor, indeed, would the proud Greeks have condescended to learn from barbarians (especially as they believed themselves descended from heroes who were sprung from the gods). Finally one has only to read the accounts of travellers in Greece to learn that the religioneven lingers on to-day—see, for instance, S. C. Kaines Smith’sGreek Art and National Life(pp. 153, 172), where the woodcutters, when a tree is falling, throw themselves on the ground and hide their faces in deadly fear of the Dryads,[61]and aneminent Greek gentlemancrosses himself at the name of the Nereïds. (See also W. H. D. Rouse’sTales from the Isles of Greece. I learn from theSpectatorreview of a book just published,Balkan Home Life, by Lucy M. J. Garnett, that the religion has a very strong hold on the people.)

My statement has been very one-sided so far, as I have said very little of the virtues of the Greeks. These virtues were those of intelligent primitive people, love of freedom, justice, and equality (but confined to their own nation and not including their own women and slaves), personal courage, great patriotism, fidelity to kinsfolk and guests; they showed at times generosity to a valiant enemy and recognized some such duties as burying the dead. While I do not think we can carry the national virtues much further than this, there would be gradations of character among the Greeks, and probably many would be more or less kindly, others have a true affection for their wives, others show private virtues in various directions—we can only conjecture as to something of which there is very little evidence in their literature. On the one hand, we know that Socrates suffered martyrdom for the truth,[62]and we may surmise that there were other fine characters; on the other hand, we know that this highly intellectualnationput the philosopher to death as a blasphemer against their profligate gods.

But while we can give the Greeks credit for little of the morality of modern civilization, on the other hand we would be thinking very absurdly if we regarded their vices as though the people were on the same moral plane as ourselves. (This is the fact to be recognised. The ridiculous tendency of the modern enthusiast is to depict the Greeks as a highly moral nation striving for righteousness!) Strictly speaking, the Greek practices and habits should not be called vices, because the Greeks had no reason to believe that they were doing anything wrong. Their virtues and their vices were those of ordinary primitive life.[63]The moral principle, that highest product of creation, had not yet developed itself among the people to any appreciable extent, but we see it gradually emerging in the growing disbelief in the national religion among thinking men, and reaching an advanced stage in Plato, the greatest philosopher of antiquity. But to the average Greek, apart from religion (including respect for parents), the patriotism which they had learnt from Homer, their one great book, covered much of what they meant by “virtue”.[64]Whatever was good for the State was a virtue, whatever bad for the State a vice. We can hardly realize what Athens stood for in the Greek mind. For instance, Æschylus tells us that the patron goddess Athena came to Athens to preside over the balloting of the jurors and conduct the trial of Orestes, and also that the Furies lived among the citizens in a sacred grotto. The Greeks saw that they were immensely superior to the surrounding “barbarians,” and they regarded their State practically as an object ofworship(as Rome was also regarded by the Romans).

It would have been interesting to discuss here the ethical views of the philosophers, but the subject is far too intricate for this note—and in any case they and their followers formed only a few exceptions among the Greeks. It will be seen later that the use of such words as “virtue,” “holiness,” etc., causes a vast deal of meaning to be read into Plato which never entered that philosopher’s mind.

The great outstanding fact about the Greeks is their astonishing intellect, combined with sound commonsense (σωφροσύνη) and a quite modern gift of humour. Their powerful intellect, however, had very poor material to work upon. In a previous note I have mentioned their remarkably limited idea of the world—but, while knowing this to be a fact, we still cannot realize themental attitudeof men who had evenonefalse conception of such magnitude as regards their general outlook and thought. Let us take an instance of a different kind from the great philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), who came after Plato—bearing in mind that the average Greeks would be vastly more ignorant and superstitious than their greatest thinkers. In hisMechanicaAristotle explains the power of a lever to make a small weight lift a larger one. His explanation is that acircle has a certain magical character. A very wonderful thing is a circle, because it is bothconvexandconcave; it is made by afixedpoint and amovingline, which are contradictory to each other; and whatever has acircular movement movesin opposite directions. Also, Aristotle says, movement in a circle is the mostnaturalmovement! Hence we get the result: the long arm of the lever moves in thelarger circleand has the greater amount of this magicalnatural motion, and so requires the lesser force! Again, let us take a story which was as firmly believed by Aristotle as the most ignorant of his countrymen. Our word halcyon is the Greek wordAlkuon, meaning a bird, probably of the Kingfisher species. The Greeks supposed the word to be formed of two words,hals kuon, meaning “conceived in the sea”—therefore they believed the birdwasso conceived and that it was bred in a nest floating on the sea—and, as the sea must then be smooth, they further believed that a period of fourteen days’ calm necessarily occurred about Christmas—finding there was no such period of calm around their own coasts they either thought that it must occur (and the birds breed) elsewhere, or, like Theocritus, that the bird couldcharmthe sea into tranquillity.[65]

The Greeks believed queer things about animals. I take the following instances of birds alone from Mr. Rogers’ Introduction to hisBirds of Aristophanes, so that I need not give references. By looking at a plover, who returns the look, a man is cured of jaundice. Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, was said to have been so named because, having been cast into the sea, she was rescued by widgeons (Greek,penelops). The song of the dying swan was a belief of the Greeks. The raven was the bird of augury and had mysterious knowledge. The cranes fought the pygmies and swallowed stones for ballast. The young storks fed their aged parents. The sisken foresees the winter and snowstorms. Mr. Rogers has no need to discuss the yet more extravagant stories of the phœnix, sirens, harpies, etc. Plutarch (De Is. and Os.LXXI) tells us how the Greeks regarded birds and other animals in relation to the gods; he says that while they did not, like the Egyptians,worshipanimals, “they said and believed rightly that the dove was the sacred animal of Aphrodite, the raven of Apollo, the dog of Artemis, and so on.” (Possibly Aristophanes’ comedy did not win the prize, because the audience saw little humour in exaggerating the powers which they really believed the birds to have. To the Greeks the birds weregreaterand the godssmallerthan we ourselves picture them. Ruskin’s translation of Od. V. 67,[66]the seabirds which “have care of the works of the sea,” seems much more likely to be correct than the accepted version that the birds live by diving and fishing. Consider how the Greeks would regard the birds that flew round and over their ships or fishing-nets and over the waves and rocks, where the sea-gods lay beneath—and compareIl.II, 614.)[67]

All that has been said about the Greeks in this and previous notes is intended, not so much to exhibit the character of that nation—a matter which does not greatly concern me—but for other reasons. In one instance the intention was to indicate how vast a gulf exists between Christianity and the ancient world. Many classical enthusiasts do not seem to realize this, and a definitelypagantendency is very apparent in their habits of thought.

But the main object of pointing out the inferior state of civilization among the Greeks, their non-moral character in certain respects, their ignorance and superstition, and their low standard of morality generally, has to do with the important question of interpreting Greek literature and philosophy. It would matter very little that the enthusiast should picture the Greeks as a race of saints and demigods, if there were no beautiful and valuable literature to be coloured and falsified by reason of such views. It is only by realizing the actual life and thought of this primitive race thatwe can understand their language, that is to say, we can learn what meanings should be attached to the words they use. Only thus can weinterpret their literature. We have already had two simple illustrations of this. In one case what appears to be a poetic fancy in Theocritus, when the voyager hopes the halcyons will calm the sea for him, is seen to be a wish that the birdswill actually exercise the power that they possess. The other instance appears on page 294. But much more important is it that, in reading words of knowledge such as references to the starry heavens or the constitution of matter, or mental or moral phenomena, we should not attribute to the Greek writer conceptions far larger and higher than he had in his mind. To amplify what I have said in a previous note, let us take the words in Plato, Aristotle or, say, Euripides which are translated by such English words as “morality,” “purity,” “virtue,” “honour,” “religion,” etc. It is clear that the original Greek expressions cannot signify, for instance, either purity as we know it, or even abstention from unnatural vice or from infanticide.[68]We are, therefore, mistranslating when we use such English words (because they are the nearest equivalent to the Greek expressions), and this fact needs to be steadily borne in mind. Again when interpreting, say, a Greek play, it is necessary to bear in mind, not only thesupposedcharacter of thedramatist, but also theactual,knowncharacter of theaudienceto whom the play was addressed. I now propose to give an illustration which will bring me on dangerous ground.

Is it reasonable to ask if the Athenians, some few of whose characteristics have been outlined in these notes, would have flocked to hear, and have greatly enjoyed, a play replete with high moral teaching, and containing hymns that might have come out of a Church Hymnal? Now theBacchaeof Euripides, one of the most popular of Greek plays, and theHippolytusof the same dramatist, have been translated by one great Greek scholar, Professor Gilbert Murray, in a manner that (at any rate, as regards theBacchae) received the “hearty admiration and approval” of another great Greek scholar, Dr. Verrall. In this version, one after another of the debased Greek gods is called “God.” We also find such expressions as (note the capitals) “God’s grace,” “Virgin of God,” “Babe of God,” “God’s son,” and even “God’s true son” (who is Dionysus or Bacchus), “Spirit of God,” “Child of the Highest,” “Heaven,” “Purity,” “Saints” (who are the Maenads!), “righteous,” “divine,” “holy,” and so on.

Professor Murray is put in a difficulty when two or more gods are referred to. In some cases he becomes illogical (and reminds us of the Kaiser), as when Dionysus has to say “God and me.” In others he has to use the Greek name for one god, and then the words sound blasphemous, as when he speaks of Dionysus who was “born from the thigh of Zeus and now is God.” These instances are taken quite at random and there must be many others.

Take the following two lines as a short illustration of Professor Murray’s version:

Where a voice of living waters never ceasethIn God’s quiet garden by the sea.

Where a voice of living waters never ceaseth

In God’s quiet garden by the sea.

The original reads: “Where the ambrosial fountains stream forth by the couches of the palaces of Zeus,” or, to give them a more musical turn, Mr. A. S. Way’s version is:

Where the fountains ambrosial sunward are leapingBy the couches where Zeus in his halls lieth sleeping.

Where the fountains ambrosial sunward are leaping

By the couches where Zeus in his halls lieth sleeping.

In Professor Murray’s two lines Zeus becomes “God,” “living waters” is taken from the Song of Solomon, and “God’s quiet garden” from Isaiah and Ezekiel. Such expressions, with their tender and beautiful associations, do not in the least convey the sense of the original. Used to describe the palace of a vicious, barbaric deity, they are amistranslation. Also every one of the expressions referred to above is, wherever used, another mistranslation (although some may be necessitated by the limitation of language). Again there are other more pronounced mistranslations, some of which are pointed out by Verrall (Bacchants of Euripides). Thus where the very old man Cadmus, setting out on an unusual journey, merely says to his ancient comrade, “We have pleasantly forgotten that we are old” (Bacchae184-9). Professor Murray interpolates a stage direction, “A mysterious strength and exaltation” (from the god Dionysus) “enters into him”—and he alters the words of Cadmus to conform with the miracle:

Sweetly and forgetfullyThe dim years fall from off me!

Sweetly and forgetfully

The dim years fall from off me!

Here, therefore, we findan important episodedeliberately introduced into the play.

Take another instance which Verrall does not mention. In the very enthusiastic “Introductory Essay,” Professor Murray tells us that Euripides longed to escape from the bad, hard, irreligious Athenians[69]of that day, and proceeds as follows:

“What else is wisdom?” he asks, in a marvellous passage:—

What else is wisdom? What of man’s endeavourOr God’s high grace so lovely and so great?To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;To hold a hand uplifted over Hate;And shall not loveliness be loved for ever?

What else is wisdom? What of man’s endeavour

Or God’s high grace so lovely and so great?

To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;

To hold a hand uplifted over Hate;

And shall not loveliness be loved for ever?

There is nothing here, nor in the translation that follows, to indicate that there has been any interference with the text. It is only upon turning to the notesat the end of the translation(which the average reader would hardly study) that we find the third line is “practically interpolated.” He gives reasons for this that are not easy to follow, and says “If I am wrong, the refrain is probably a mere cry for revenge;” I add that the latter is the generally accepted meaning, and the only meaning I can see in the original Greek.

Now Professor Murray’s object in all this is to convey in words that appeal to our minds his conception of the devout, religious and, therefore,highly moralattitude of, not only Euripides,but also his Athenian audience. The attitude of mind must be that of theaudience, as well as the dramatist, because none but devout, religious people go to a “Service of Song,” and, as stated above, theBacchaewas a very popular play among the Greeks. If, however, Professor Murray thought that, by colouring, altering, and adding to the play, he gave a more correct impression of it as it appeared to the Greeks, he was perfectly at liberty with that object to mistranslate as much as he pleased—provided he told his readers and hearers that they were not reading or hearing the words that Euripides wrote.

Has he told them this? The book is entitled “Euripidestranslatedinto English rhyming verse.” In the Preface he also begins by telling us definitely that it is a translation; later on he says: “As to the method of this translation ... my aim has been to build up something as like the original as I possibly could, in form and what one calls ‘Spirit.’ To do this, the first thing needed was a work of painstaking scholarship, a work in which there should beno neglect of the letterin an attempt to snatch at the spirit.” He then goes on to tell us that “The remaining task” was to reproduce the poetry of the original and (here is the only admission that he has varied from the text) he ‘has often changed metaphors, altered the shapes of sentences, and the like.... On one occasion he has even omitted a line and a half’ (because unnecessary) and he says, he ‘has added, of course by conjecture, a few stage directions.’ Let the non-classical reader look back over what has been said above and ask himself whether such words—however carefully studied—would have given him the least impression of what this “translation” actually amounts to.

Without entering into any long discussion as to the so called “purity choruses” of theBacchae, let us simply ask the question, Does this pious, fervently-religious version represent the actual play that the cruel, lying, treacherous and unspeakably sensual Greeks flocked to see and enjoy? Further comes a much more important question, Would such a “translation,” put before English readers, or staged before an English audience, give them atrueor afalseidea of the character of the Greeks?

I might compare with this Ruskin’s view of the Greek character (The Crown of Wild Olive.). This is what he says the Greeks won from their lives: “Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed trust, andrequited love, andthe sight of the peace of others, and the ministry to their pain.” (Italics mine.) This is truly amazing! I am tempted to go back again to Professor Murray’sEuripides(p. lxiii) and quote a like passage:

“Love thou the day and the night,” he (Euripides) says in another place. “It is only so that Life can be made what it really is, a Joy:by loving not only your neighbour—he is so vivid an element in life that, unless you do love him, he will spoil all the rest!—but the actual details and processes of living, etc., etc.”

The italics are again mine—but here it will be seen that Euripides has,as a matter of course, anticipated the great evangel of Christ! He has even gone a step further—but I must leave Professor Murray to his love of the “details and processes of living,” whatever that may mean.

Finally, in this extraordinary essay, I come to something which is absolutelyrepulsive. I must first briefly premise that the Dionysiac mystery cult was not sectarian. It was orthodox, believing in the plurality and the profligacy of the gods. Its adherents had no more idea of morality or purity than other Greeks. Its rites were indecent. The so-called “purification rites,” including regulations regarding continence, were simplytraining rulespreparatory to their hideous orgies. The essential rite of the cult was practised by the Maenads or Bacchantes. They tore to pieces live animals (and at one time human beings) and devoured their raw, quivering flesh. As stated above, these horrible women are Professor Murray’s “Saints.” He now proceeds todraw an analogy between their loathsome god Dionysus and Jesus Christ! Thus Dionysus is born of God (Zeus) and a human mother. He is the “twice-born”—having been hidden in Zeus’s thigh after birth! He “comes to his ownpeople of Thebes,and—his own receive him not.” Again “It seemed to Euripides in that favourite metaphor of his, which was always a little more than a metaphor, that aGod had been rejected by the worldthat he came from.” Dionysus “gives his Wine to all men.... It is a mysticism which includes democracy, as it includesthe love of your neighbour.” Dionysus “has given man Wine, which is his Blood and a religious symbol.” In the translation Dionysus is called “God’s son” and even “God’s true son.” Reading this and such statements as Miss Jane Harrison’s (see p. 292, n.), one stands amazed. Apparently this fanatical enthusiasm destroys the critical faculties, so that the enthusiast becomes utterly incapable of appreciating the beauty and value of Our Lord’s ethical teaching and its exemplification in His life.

For my last illustration of how enthusiasm affects our leading classical authorities (and, therefore, leads toperversion of the truth) I take Mr. A. E. Zimmern’sGreek Commonwealth. This, like Mr. Livingstone’s work, is a very excellent book, which should be in all libraries.

Mr. Zimmern quotes anddefinitely endorsesthe well-known statement in Galton’sHereditary Genius(1869), which is as follows:—“The average ability of the Athenian race is,on the lowest possible estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own, that is,about as much as our race is above that of the African Negro.” (The italics are mine.) Here I have happened by chance[70]upon an excellent illustration of classical enthusiasm, which is worth while dwelling upon at some length. In the first place Galton’s statement is perhaps the most absurd utterance ever made by an important thinker; in the second placeit appears to have been accepted by English and European authorities for nearly half a century.

Galton bases his argument on the number of great men produced by a nation in proportion to its population. He states that between 530 and 430 B.C. the Athenian Greeks produced fourteen highly illustrious men:—Themistocles, Miltiades, Aristides, Cimon, and Pericles (statesmen and commanders), Thucydides, Socrates, Xenophon, and Plato (literary and scientific men), Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes (poets), and Pheidias (sculptor). I take the minor objections to his statement first.

He estimates the population of free-born Greeks in Attica at 90,000. In this instance he was misled by the authorities of his time and is not to blame;but I take Mr. Zimmern’s own figures, as he endorses Galton’s statement. The 90,000 should have been, according to Mr. Zimmern’s more correct figures, 180,000 to 200,000.This alone cuts down Galton’s estimate of the “average ability” of the Greeks to at least one-half.Galton also excludes the resident aliens who, according to him, numbered 40,000, but according to Mr. Zimmern 96,000. Yet both these and the outside aliens must be considered, for there were intermarriages. Themistocles and Cimon had alien mothers, Thucydides also probably had an alien mother, or at any rate was partly of Thracian descent, and there would besomeground for the charge of usurping citizenship repeatedly made by Cleon against Aristophanes. Galton also takes no account of the slaves, the number of whom he estimates at 400,000, but Zimmern at about 112,000. These cannot be entirely omitted when we consider the life of the Greek women and the habits of the men. It should be remembered that the slaves were often Greeks of other States and also by reason of the practice of exposing children some would be Athenians and even of the best families (Plato’sLaws, 930, deals with children of slaves and Greek men and women). However, on these figures, it will be seen that Galton’s estimate has to be enormously reduced.

Next, thegreatestof all the names in his list, Plato, has to bestruck out. There can be no reasonable doubt that he was not born until 428 or 427 B.C. (This appears to have been well recognised in 1869 and it is unaccountable that Galton and his reviewers should not have known it.) However, there issomeevidence that he was born in 430, and let us assume that this is so. But, if we are to include in the 100 (or rather 101) years everyone whois bornordiedin that time, we are actually taking a period of 200, not 100, years, anddoublingthe proper estimate! Besides Plato, I may mention that Aristophanes and Xenophon could have been only about fourteen years of age in 430, Thucydides had not then begun to write, and of the eighteen plays extant of Euripides two only were written before 430. Here again is another enormous reduction of Galton’s estimate.

Again let us take Galton’s opinion of the ability of these fourteen men. It is amazingly high. It will be seen that there are onlytwo gradesbetween ourselves and the African negro. Again, in Galton’s table, “eminent men” aretwo gradesabove “the mass of men who obtain the ordinary prizes of life.”He now places the whole of these fourteen Greeks two grades above the eminent men!To what starry height he means to raise them, it is impossible to say, for the whole statement is exceedingly vague; but he tells us that two of the fourteen, Socrates and Pheidias,stand alone as the greatest men that ever lived.

It is clear then that the fourteen Greeks have to be placed at a tremendous height in our estimation. It is impossible here to take each man anddiscuss his ability, but let us inquire what qualifications Galton hadas a critic. We turn to his list of great modern English and European literary men. Although he goes back as far as the Fifteenth Century and his list comprisesonly fifty-twowriters, he finds room among them for such names as John Aikin and Maria Edgeworth! Again his ten great English poets are Milton, Byron, Chaucer,Milman, Cowper,Dibdin(!), Dryden,Hook, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. (Some names would no doubt be omitted because they did not throw light on questions of heredity, but these lists in any case are highly absurd.)

We need not greatly prolong this part of the discussion. We might ask, however, what ground had Galton, for example, to place such men as Miltiades, Aristides, or Cimon evenon an equality with, say, Cæsar, Alexander, or Marlborough. How can he class Xenophon as evenequalto our great writers? It is the interestingfactshe tells us of, not his literary ability, that makes this somewhat monotonous writer so very interesting. (The important point to remember is that Greek literature has a very special interest and value for us, quite apart from its great intrinsicliteraryvalue. Taking De Quincey’s classification,see p. 227, it is both “literature of power” and “literature of knowledge.”)

Now take another point which I might illustrate from Galton’s own pages. He tells us (in another connection) that about sixty years before the time he is writing (1869) there were Senior Wranglers in Cambridge who also obtained first classes in the Classical Tripos—and even at a later date men could take high rank in both departments. Is it then to be argued that the earlier men were the greater? Not so, but, as Galton says, knowledge had become so far advanced that it was no longer possible for a man to gain such a distinction in more than one of the two subjects. Here we have the point—the world of knowledge and activity is infinitely wider to-day than when it formed the subject of Greek speculation. Their great men were very original thinkers—butin a very few subjects. Moreover, they had no books to read, no foreign languages to learn. Even their social and political life was far less complicated and involved than our own.

Again, where we speak of “average ability,” it is not correct to compare large populous countries, where great talents are often submerged (see Gray’s “Elegy”) with smaller communities that afford far ampler scope. Take my own State, South Australia, with its huge territory and a population of under half a million, less than that of one of the larger English towns. We have our Premier, Government, Parliament, Town Councils, Heads of Departments, University, schools, judges, lawyers, journalists and literary men, financiers, merchants, men who design and construct railways, irrigation and other important works, mining men, heads of institutions and so on—which means a large number of men of ability and resource in all departments of life. If we compare ourselves with an average half-million of Englishmen, how great our superiority would apparently be! And yet, we know that we are not actually more capable—our ability has been simply brought into play. Mr. W. M. Hughes might himself have been a “flower to blush unseen,” if he had not emigrated to Australia.

We have so far dealt with minor matters, which have nevertheless reduced Galton’s arithmetical estimate by, say, 75 per cent. at the very least. Let us now take the one great misrepresentation that must have immediately flashed upon the minds of all reviewers of Galton’s book, if they had not been blinded by classical enthusiasm. It is truly remarkable that not a single one of them seems to have called attention to the obvious fact that Galton takes the one great Athenian period,as though it were an average period in their history! From Homer’s time to the Fifth Century, B.C., would probably be about as long as from the Norman Conquest to the present time, or from King Alfred to Shakespeare—and there are again the many centuries that followed. Is the “average ability” of the Greeks during hundreds or thousands of years to be estimated on their one most brilliant period? The question needs no discussion. Galton might in the same way have taken our Elizabethan period when London had a population of 150,000, and Great Britain of about three millions—and provedthat our own ancestorswere as far above ourselves as we are above the negro.[71]

Mr. C. T. Whiting, of the Adelaide Public Library, knowing how my time was limited, very kindly volunteered to make an extensive search for references to Galton’s statement in such of the literature of the time as is available in Adelaide. In addition to a number of books, he has searched throughthirty-eightjournals. He finds reviews of Galton’s book in the following:—Athenæum,British Quarterly,Saturday Review,Edinburgh Review,Fortnightly Review,Chambers’ Journal,Journal of Anthropology,Atlantic Monthly,Frazer’s Magazine,Nature,Times,and Westminster Review. The first seven do not refer at all to the statement—they apparently accept it as a matter of course. Of the last fiveFrazer’smentions the statement, and says vaguely that the chapter in which it is contained “offers several vulnerable points to the critic;” theWestminsterstates the fact without taking any exception to it; theAtlantic Monthlyraises the question whether Miltiades, Aristides, Cimon, and Xenophon were so very illustrious, and enters into an argument on Galton’s figures; theTimesconsiders that we have had other men in different fields of human effort, who could be named with Socrates and Pheidias, and lays stress on the enormous increase of knowledge and activity in modern life; inNatureA. R. Wallace, misreading Galton as referring only to the age of Pericles[72]admits the truth of the statement as applied to the Athenians of that time. None of them refer to the fact that Galton takes the most brilliant period of Greek history as a normal period—and the arguments, taken together, amount to very little. As regards the twenty-six journals which appear to have taken no notice of so startling a statement in an important book, the fact seemsto indicate that to the writers for those journals the statement contained nothing of a remarkable or dubious character! (EvenPunchmissed the chance of an amusing cartoon!)

It may be objected that the reviewers of the book would not be classical men. Butfirstit must be remembered that the writers of 1869 would practically all have had a classical education andsecondlyit needed no special classical knowledge to see the absurdity of the statement. Every one without exception would know, for example, that the period taken by Galton was the one great Greek period. The statement must also have excited interest on all sides. I myself remember how it was talked of when I was a boy in Melbourne, and I have heard it repeated as an acknowledged fact up to the present time—and, therefore, comment would have been expectedin every direction. But apparently the statement was generally accepted. Mr. Whiting finds that in 1892, twenty-three years after, Galton calmly repeated the statement word for word,without reference to any criticisms. Again we find Mr. Zimmern accepting it as a matter of course in hissecondedition in 1915. As it was in his first edition, which would be reviewed in the classical journals, it must presumably have met with no adverse comments.

But we have to go even further than this. Galton’s was one of those important books that are studied byall Europe. Seeing that he makes no mention of adverse criticism in his second edition, and Mr. Zimmern sees no reason to qualify the statement, it is fair to assume that no serious objection has been made in England or Europe during nearly half a century. So amazingly does classical enthusiasm pervade the thought of the world! I do not think I need say anything further on this subject.[73]

Mr. Zimmern heads one of his chapters “Happiness orthe Rule of Love,” the “Rule of Love” being his translation of εὐδαιμονία! This chapter is occupied exclusively by the famous Funeral Speech of Pericles. I invite the reader to look through that terribly hard speech, and see how muchloveit contains! Again to another chapter the heading is “Gentleness or the Rule of Religion,” followed by two quotations which are evidently intended to be read as parallel passages:

στέργοι δέ με σωφροσύναδώρημα κάλλιστον θεῶν.[74]—Eur.Medea, 638.

στέργοι δέ με σωφροσύνα

δώρημα κάλλιστον θεῶν.[74]—Eur.Medea, 638.

Give unto us made lowly wiseThe spirit of self-sacrifice.—Wordsworth.

Give unto us made lowly wise

The spirit of self-sacrifice.—Wordsworth.

Apart from the question whether the proud Greek could ever by any possibility have become “lowly wise,” the word σωφροσύνη “temperance,” “moderation”—or perhaps better still, “commonsense”—becomes not only a “Rule ofReligion” but even the highest conception of Christianity, self-sacrifice. It is very extraordinary. Imagine theGreeks—as we know them, and as Mr. Zimmern knows them—having the faintest conception of what we mean by self-sacrifice! It reminds one very much of Humpty Dumpty inThrough the Looking Glass: “WhenIuse a word” (εὐδαιμονία or σωφροσύνη) “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

As this is my last note I am giving myself great latitude, but I must not prolong it into a treatise. I shall, as briefly as I can, refer to only one other matter, the Greek sense of beauty. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that we are given to believe that in this respect the Greeks are exalted high as gods above the rest of mankind. What is the fact?They saw beauty in only one natural object, the human body.In a land of clear skies, wonderful sunsets, starry nights, remarkable for its ranges of mountains and extent of sea-coast, they were (with some tiny exceptions not worth mentioning) absolutely blind to any beauty in inanimate nature. Nor did any bird or beast or insect, tree or flower appeal to them to any appreciable extent as a thing of beauty. They admired only what was useful or added to their comfort—the laden fruit tree, the shady grove, the clear spring, the soft water-meadows.

Various explanations have been given for the Greek failure to appreciate beauty in nature. Ruskin’s theory is most often quoted, that the Greeks wereso familiarwith beautiful scenes that they could not appreciate them. In the first place he forgot that it was not always the bright tourist-season in Greece; they had their dark and wintry times. In the second place, I have lived all my life in the southern part of Australia, which has much the same climate as Greece, and I do not think there are any greater lovers of nature than the Australians.

Is not the love of nature, as it came later,[75]alsohigherthan love of the human form (omitting that facial expression which is an index of the soul)? Our ideals of human beauty appear to be purelyrelativeand depend on our surroundings, while the same beauty in nature appeals to the most diverse nations. Take for example the Japanese and Dutch artists who both loved nature much as we do—yet they admired very different types of the human figure. I understand that the Japanese, originally at least, regarded with positive disgust our tall English beauties.

The beauty the Greeks saw in one object only, the human body, they reproduced in statues which have never been equalled in grace and charm, and are the admiration of the world. Their pure white marble statues and temples seem to be always present in our minds and to transfigureour conceptions of the Greeks. We unconsciously picture them as a race of glorious men and beautiful women moving in a city of marble.[76]We find ourselves forgetting what we know of their character and habits—and also forgetting the fact that both statues and temples werepainted.

With the disappearance of colour through the effect of time, the flesh effect has disappeared from their statues, and the chaste white marble gives an idealized and spiritual conception of the utmost purity. As stated before, this would be a conception quite alien to the Greek mind, which saw no beauty in physical purity. If, when we stand in admiring awe before that calm, majestic and exceedingly graceful and beautiful Venus of Milo, we imagine her as the Greeks saw her, how different is the picture! To begin with, the Greeks had little sense of colour, as is seen from their limited colour-vocabulary. For example, one wordporphureoswas used for dark-purple, red, rose, sea-blue, violet, and other shades even to a shimmery white. Their colours were harsh, glaring, and put together in shockingly bad taste (from our point of view). In temples and sculpture reds and blues were the main colours used. In the Venus of Milo we must, therefore, picture the hair painted red or red-brown, the lips a hard red, eyebrows black, the eyes red or red-brown with black pupils, the dress with borders and patterns of crude reds and greens or reds and blues. As regards the flesh surfaces, we know they were wax-polished, but there is no literary record or actual trace of any tinting or colouring. The effect of the white marble would have been so horrible to us against the living eyes and face, that Mr. Kaines Smith (being one of our enthusiasts) suggests that the artist “might quite well” have used some colouring matter for the nude parts of the figure! We must further picture the statue standing in a temple, which must of course also have been painted. The structure would have its borders generally of harsh reds and blues, and the decorative sculpture of the pediments, metopes and friezes would be painted in most inconceivable colours. Thus in the metope relief of the slaying of the Hydra at Olympia, the hydra is blue, the background red, and the hair, lips, and eyes of Hercules are coloured. I might go on to the Elgin marbles, the greatest sculptures that we possess in the world, and show them gorgeous in bronze and colour. (Armour, horse-trappings, etc., were attached to the marble in bronze or other metal.) The two masterpieces of Pheidias, forty and sixty feet high respectively, which have not survived to us, were much more admired by the Greeks than the sculptures of the Parthenon. These were in barbaric ivory and gold, with the same living eyes, red lips, and so on. The fact is that the Greek, “builded better than he knew.” He unintentionally produced objects whosespiritualbeauty he was incapable of appreciating and, therefore, he gave them a grosser form that appealed to his own primitive sensual nature.

(Apart from this the Greek sculptor was very limited by the paucity of his subjects. How tiresome are the never-ending Centaurs and Amazons!)[77]

As regards Greek architecture, its ornament is a question of sculpture, its structure is the result of intellect combined with a certain amount of design due to their artistic sense of proportion. The Greeks did great service to humanity in working out the principles of building—but, thereafter, there was no scope for originality. Apart from its sculptural ornament, nothing more monotonous could well be imagined than a series of Greek temples, all of the same type and subject to definite, rigid rules of measurement.[78]

Finally there are two matters I am bound to refer to in connection with these rough notes. First, in merely enumerating the salient features of a nation’s character, one gives no picture whatever of thelifethey led. The Greekmenled a highly intellectual, artistic, and on the whole a very gay life. If we look around us to-day, we shall find among ourselves Greeks, intellectual men who are moral sceptics, who simply do not understand that moral motives exist, who do no act in their lives from a sense of principle, and who live a purely material life (unless perhaps some great crisis, the arrival of the angel of Death or some other overwhelming event, awakens them to a sense of higher things). We can see something like a parallel to the Greeks in the gay, immoral, artistic French aristocracy who lived in the midst of a starving peasantry before the Revolution—or in George Eliot’s fascinating renaissance story inRomolaof the young Greek Tito Melema. A man may be cruel, faithless and immoral, and yet live a gay artistic and intellectual life—but it is not such a life as would have appealed to Myers or to ourselves. Secondly, a clear knowledge of the truth about the Greek character does in no way detract from the miracle of their literature or of their art. Itaddsto the wonder of it all. (If one may with the utmost reverence make another comparison, how can we fully appreciate the wonder and beauty of Christ’s teaching, if we forget the conditions of the time?) To find most beautiful poetry, fine literature, deep philosophic thought, amazing grace and charm in art emanating from this primitive race is purely astounding in itself. And it needs to be borne in mind that even the men who took part in Plato’sSymposiumlived in a different atmosphere from our own, and had a very different conception of the physical universe and the moral law. But this shouldaddto our admiration, ourveneration, for a Plato who could rise to so great a sublimity of thought in spite of such semi-barbarous conditions and surroundings. These men also looked upon the world with younger and fresher eyes. We are two thousand three hundred years older than they are. They knew very little of the past history of the world and had only an insignificant fraction of our scientific knowledge. If any religious doubts had begun to arise in their minds, they still could not possibly have rid themselves of the belief instilled into them since childhood—and they lived among Nymphs and Fauns, and saw a god in every star and under every wave. Never had they heard or dreamt of any Love of God, or Love of Man. It is only the enthusiast who, by picturing the Greeks as a modern moral nation, detracts from our real interest in them and robs their literature of its fascination. If knowledge of the true Greek character were to destroy all our enjoyment in their art and literature, even then truth must prevail “though the heavens fall”; but the fact is far otherwise. The fuller our knowledge the more we shall enjoy the greatness and beauty of their art and poetry and the more absorbing will be our interest in their literature.

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