HISTORY

ω ξειν’, αγγελλειν Αακεδαιμονιοις ὁτι τηδεκειμεθα, τοις κεινων ῥημασι πειθομενοι,[113]{ô xein’, angellein Aakedaimoniois hoti têdekeimetha, tois keinôn rhêmasi peithomenoi,}

ω ξειν’, αγγελλειν Αακεδαιμονιοις ὁτι τηδεκειμεθα, τοις κεινων ῥημασι πειθομενοι,[113]

{ô xein’, angellein Aakedaimoniois hoti têdekeimetha, tois keinôn rhêmasi peithomenoi,}

he might see little in it but a prosaic want of colour. This exceeding simplicity or economy is a stumbling-block to those who are accustomed to the expansive modern manner. Yet such a reader would have been making the acquaintance of some of the finest things in Greek literature, which is always at its greatest when most simple, and he would have been face to face with a characteristic quality of it.

The contrast with the usual English manner may be illustratedby quoting a famous epigram—Ben Jonson’s epitaph on a boy actor:

Weep with me, all you that readThis little story;And know, for whom a tear you shed,Death’s self is sorry.’Twas a child that so did thriveIn grace and feature,As heaven and nature seemed to striveWhich owned the creature.Years he numbered scarce thirteenWhen Fates turned cruel,Yet three filled zodiacs had he beenThe stage’s jewel;And did act (what now we moan)Old men so duly,As sooth the Parcae thought him one,He played so truly.So, by error, to his fateThey all consented;But, viewing him since, alas, too late!They have repented.

Weep with me, all you that readThis little story;And know, for whom a tear you shed,Death’s self is sorry.

’Twas a child that so did thriveIn grace and feature,As heaven and nature seemed to striveWhich owned the creature.

Years he numbered scarce thirteenWhen Fates turned cruel,Yet three filled zodiacs had he beenThe stage’s jewel;

And did act (what now we moan)Old men so duly,As sooth the Parcae thought him one,He played so truly.

So, by error, to his fateThey all consented;But, viewing him since, alas, too late!They have repented.

These lines—and they are not the whole of the poem—are enough to illustrate the difference between the Greek method and the English, the latter rich and profuse, following the flow of an opulent fancy, the former reticent and restrained, leaving the reader’s imagination room and need to play its part. There are materials for half-a-dozen epigrams in Ben Jonson’s poem. Had he been Simonides or Plato, he would have stopped after the fourth line and, in the opinion of some critics, by saving his paper he would have improved his poem.

In their theory and in their practice the Greek writers were true to this principle of Economy. Their proverbs proclaim it‘the half is greater than the whole’: ‘sow with the hand and not with the whole sack.’ The great passages of their literature illustrate it. It is to be found no less in Thucydides’ account of the siege of Syracuse and in the close of thePhaedoor theRepublicthan in the death of Hector or the meeting of Priam and Achilles. The Greek writers may have emotions that would seem to demand vehement and extended expression, topics to inspire a poet and tempt him to amplify them; but resisting the temptation they set the facts down quietly and pass on practically without comment. The close of thePhaedoexemplifies this restraint. Plato has just related with severe economy of detail the death of his master. His comment on the event which saddened and confounded his whole life is but this: ‘Such, Echecrates, was the death of our friend, the best man, I think, that I have ever known, the wisest too and the most just.’[114]

There are noble examples of reticence and economy in English literature, some of the most conspicuous of which can be traced to classical influence; but no one would contend that these qualities are the rule in our great writers. The English genius is rich and lavish rather than restrained. It is less in its nature to write like Sappho,

Ἑσπερε, παντα φερων οσα φαινολις εσκεδας’ αυως,φερεις οιν, φερες αιγα, φερεις απυ ματερι παιδα,[115]{Hespere, panta pherôn osa phainolis eskedas’ auôs,phereis oin, pheres aiga, phereis apy materi paida,}

Ἑσπερε, παντα φερων οσα φαινολις εσκεδας’ αυως,φερεις οιν, φερες αιγα, φερεις απυ ματερι παιδα,[115]

{Hespere, panta pherôn osa phainolis eskedas’ auôs,phereis oin, pheres aiga, phereis apy materi paida,}

than like Byron,

O Hesperus, thou bringest all good things—Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer,To the young bird the parent’s brooding wings,The welcome stall to the o’er-laboured steer;Whate’er of peace about our hearthstone clings,Whate’er our household gods protect of dear,Are gathered round us by thy look of rest;Thou bring’st the child too to its mother’s breast.

Something may be said in favour of both methods. Amplitude of treatment and fullness of detail enrich the imagination while economy stimulates it. The latter may become jejune, and is safe only in the hands of great writers: the former is apt to provide too rich a feast and to leave the full-fed mind inert. Everything is done for it and nothing left it to do. Economy on the other hand throws the reader on his own resources. It sets the imagination wandering in the fields of infinity. Some readers find this one of the essential delights of literature, though others prefer that the author should take them by the hand and indicate every detail with the precision of the sign-posts at a GermanKurort.

Economy is the reflection in literature of thatσωφροσυνη, which is the most deeply-rooted of Greek ideals, the most untranslatable of Greek words. But it was helped by an accident. If the art of printing were lost, modern works would contract within narrower limits, and the Greek economy was encouraged by the fact that Fust was not yet born. We, who do not rely on hand-copying for the propagation of our books, naturally write at greater length: and while it loses in conciseness, literature has a compensating gain in amplitude. But the habit of writing for money, which encourages abundant production, and the existence of the printing-press, which makes it easy, expose us to dangers from which the ancients were free. The newspapers are the worst offenders, saying many things which need not be said at all, and saying everything in a superfluous and excessive way. But literature suffers hardly less. The greatest figures of the last fifty years, such as Browning, Meredith, Hardy and Conrad, dilute their pages with unessential, if not inferior, stuff, and produce writing which has not received thesummamanus. Had their work been less by a half—a modest reduction—it would have been more perfect because more time could have been devoted to it, more powerful because each stroke would have been precise and strong, more telling because these strokes would not have been combined with ineffective blows. This is even truer of lesser men and other forms of literature. It is because theAgricolaof Tacitus extends to but thirty pages, that the biography of a Roman civil servant of no great genius will outlive those of far greater men. The art of omission is the art which English writers most need to learn; the literarylimais their least-handled tool. Both art and tool were perfectly understood and constantly used by the Greeks.

The third mark of Greek Literature, with which I have to deal, is perhaps its most important, certainly its most universal quality. It is truthfulness. The Greeks told no fewer lies than other races, but they had the desire and the power to see the world as it is. By this essential quality they gave Europe the conception of philosophy and science. These we inherit from them alone; Palestine and our German ancestors neither created them, nor show any signs of the temper that creates them, and Rome received her share from Greece.

The word ‘Truthfulness’ may seem to suggest the realism of some modern writers. But the Greek truthfulness was different. It should be distinguished from the laboured detachment and painful impartiality of such a writer as Flaubert, whose realism conceals him in the same sense as the walls of the engine-room conceal the panting machines within. The Greek Truthfulness is spontaneous, natural, and effortless—the native quality of the artist, who sees, and forgets himself in the vision. Nor has it anything to do with photographic realism. It has not the impersonality of that method or its flat and lifeless effect. A man, and no machine, makes the picture, feeling intensely what he sees, and thoughthis intensity does not distort his vision, we are conscious, as we read, of a human personality, and we feel the electric thrill of life.

Nor is it akin to that type of modern realism, which, like a noxious drug, lays hold on the spirits and depresses the heart—the realism which paints so black a picture of human life, that it affects us physically like days of continued fog, and gives us no more complete and truthful a picture of the world. There is hardly any Greek writer, perhaps none at all, of whom this can be said. Many moderns can faithfully describe what is disagreeable, but their effects are often brutal and always depressing. The gift of portraying suffering and evil with unflinching truth, yet of conveying other feelings than those of mere horror, is reserved for few. Its rarity perhaps explains the rarity of great tragedy, of which it seems to be a condition that it shall truthfully show what is darkest in life, without leaving a final and dominant sense of gloom. The great Greek writers possessed this secret. They are as sensitive to evil and suffering as any writer and fully as faithful in recording them. But whereas other men are simply depressed or disgusted or appalled, lose their vital forces, and gaze in paralysed fascination, these writers, in virtue of a sense which is more aesthetic than moral, are aware of tremendous issues, see in sordid suffering the agonies of a labouring universe, and feel awe and wonder, not mere disgust and distress, at what human beings suffer and endure. That is why Homer leaves us with another feeling than depression, when he tells how Priam begged his son’s body from the man who killed him. ‘So Priam entered unseen of them and stood near and clasped with his hands the knees of Achilles and kissed the terrible murderous hands that had slain so many of his sons. But Achilles was amazed at the sight of Priam, and amazed were the rest, and they looked at each other. And Priam entreated and addressed him. “Remember your own father, godlike Achilles: he is of like years with me, and stands on the hatefulroad of old age. Perhaps the neighbours round about harry him and there is none to keep misery and ruin from him. Yet when he hears that you are alive, he rejoices and hopes, day in, day out, to see his dear son returning from Troy. But I am utterly wretched, for I begat the best of sons in Troy, and none of them is left. The one I had, who was the stay of Troy and its people, you killed but now as he fought for his country—even Hector. Respect the gods, Achilles, and pity me, and remember your own father. I am more unhappy than he. I have faced what no other mortal man ever yet faced—to stretch my hand to the face of my sons’ slayer.”’[116]There is suffering and evil enough here, and there is no attempt to disguise or lessen them. Yet most readers, I think, would read this passage with different feelings from those provoked by the close ofMadame Bovaryor ofJude the Obscure. Its truthfulness is neither ugly nor depressing.

Nor again is the Greek truthfulness identical with objectivity. An objective writer tells his story and conveys his impressions, as far as possible, by relating facts without commenting upon them. Dramatists and novelists are compelled by the nature of their art to be objective in this sense of the word (though Fielding and Thackeray in the one field, and Ibsen and Shaw in the other, manage to make their comments with their own lips, not those of their characters). But such a writer would not of necessity be more truthful or impartial than any one else. He can distort truth as thoroughly by selecting certain facts and ignoring others as by making misleading comments. He may be violently one-sided and present only the facts that support his view, thus indirectly putting himself into what he writes quite as fully as a confessed partizan, though less openly. Such a writer is objective, but his objectivity with him is no more than a literary method. Now it is true that the Greeks use this method, telling a story without personal comments, not onlyin their epics and plays where this method is natural, but also in their histories and elsewhere. Thucydides for instance tells the story of a great war, yet his comments on it are few, and are mainly given in the dramatic and would-be objective form of speeches by leading men of the day. But the Greeks have objectivity in a far more important sense than this. Their objectivity is no literary device but a quality of mind. They have the power of standing aloof from matters in which they are personally interested, and surveying them from outside like impartial spectators, with the keenest interest, but without bias. As the Delphic priestess in the act of prophecy lost her individuality and became the mouthpiece of the god, so the Greek allowed facts to speak for themselves, became their mouthpiece and banished the intrusive ego. If therefore we call the Greeks objective, all this must be included in our definition of the word.

We shall understand Greek ‘truthfulness’ best, if, dropping philosophical terms, and forgetting modern meanings, we remember a saying of Anaxagoras, who, when asked for what purpose he was born, replied: ‘To contemplate the works of nature.’ The disinterested passion for contemplating things, which gathered inquiring groups round Socrates to discuss what justice and friendship mean, or whether goodness is knowledge and can be learnt, has its counterpart in literature. The Greeks were fascinated by the spectacle of man and the world, and their fascination is seen not only in their formal philosophy. Of their poets too it may be said that they were born to see the world and human life—not to moralize or to indulge in sentiment or rhetoric or mysticism about it, but to see it. Keats’s description of the poetic temperament fits them closely: ‘It has no self, it is everything and nothing.... It enjoys light and shade.... A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, he is continually in, for, and filling some other body.’ In such a mood men will write literature that may justly be calledtruthful. Avoiding the didactic, they will not distort truth to suit personal bias; avoiding rhetoric, they will not sacrifice it to fine phrases; avoiding sentiment and fancy, they will not gratify their own or their hearer’s feelings at the expense of truth; avoiding mysticism, they will not move away from facts into a world of emotions. Their care will be to see things, and their delight will be in the mere vision. They will echo the words of Keats, ‘If a sparrow comes before my windows, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel’[117]: they will not treat it as Shelley treats the skylark, or even as Keats and Wordsworth treat the nightingale. Herein is one of the secrets of Greek poetry, for the Greek poets, more than any others, bring us in a manner entirely simple and natural into immediate contact with what they describe, and thus escape the thousand distortions for which epigram, rhetoric, sentiment, fancy, mysticism and romanticism are responsible. This secret may be called ‘directness’. It is the habit of looking straight and steadily at things, and describing them as they are, the very contrary of the habit of didactic comment and of rhetorical or emotional inflation. The ‘direct’ writer, in the fullest extent that is possible, keeps himself and his feelings in the background. He does not allow the mists which rise from a man’s personality to come between him and his subject.

A few instances of directness will give a better idea of it than many definitions. The epigram quoted a few pages back shows how the Greek writer lets his subject speak instead of expressing his own feelings about it. So does the following epitaph, placed by a father on his son’s grave.

Δωδεκετη τον παιδα πατηρ απεθηκε Φιλιπποςενθαδε την πολλην ελπιδα Νικοτελην.[118]{Dôdeketê ton paida patêr apethêke Philipposenthade tên pollên elpida Nikotelên.}

Δωδεκετη τον παιδα πατηρ απεθηκε Φιλιπποςενθαδε την πολλην ελπιδα Νικοτελην.[118]

{Dôdeketê ton paida patêr apethêke Philipposenthade tên pollên elpida Nikotelên.}

The bereaved father says nothing of his sorrow, or the greatness of his loss, but records his son’s name and age and says that he was his father’s ‘high hope’, and so doing gives us everything. Simonides does not express his own feelings about the heroism of the Spartan dead; their grave speaks for them to the passer-by. Nor is this a mere literary method, a way of writing which states facts and leaves them to make an impression by their own weight, unaided by comment or explanation. A comparison of Ben Jonson’s epigram with the Greek epitaph, will show that directness is much more than this. The fancies with which Jonson closes are pretty; but they are false, for they are really incompatible with deep feeling: the Greek directness never loses from sight the dead child; it sees only that and the father’s sorrow.

The following extract deals with a very different subject, but illustrates directness equally well. The scene is the Athenian colony of Amphipolis on the Struma; the dramatis personae are the Spartan general Brasidas who wishes to capture it, and the Athenian Thucydides who was then at Thasos, distant half a day’s sail from Amphipolis. ‘As soon as Thucydides heard the news about Brasidas, he sailed quickly to Amphipolis ... in order to garrison it if possible before it could capitulate, or at any rate to occupy Eion (its seaport). Meanwhile Brasidas, fearing the arrival of the Athenian fleet at Thasos and hearing that Thucydides ... was one of the leading men of the country, did his utmost to get possession of the city before he arrived.... He therefore offered moderate terms.... These terms were accepted, and the city was surrendered to him. On the evening of the same day Thucydides and his ships sailed into Eion, but not until Brasidas had taken possession of Amphipolis: another night, and he would have seized Eion.’[119]The gist of the story contained in this extract is plain. The Spartan general Brasidas seized the important town of Amphipolis, and the Atheniangeneral came too late to save it. But who would guess that the Athenian general Thucydides was the historian Thucydides who wrote these words, and that the episode which he here describes with such detachment and neutrality earned him perpetual exile under pain of death, from the country which he passionately loved? Thucydides has told the bare facts, objectively, as if they related to some one else, without a comment, without a word of protest, excuse, explanation or regret on the crowning disaster of his life. He writes of himself in the third person. This is not the way in which modern generals write of their mishaps, but it is the Greek way. Thucydides has forgotten himself and his feelings; he sees only the disastrous day when he sailed up the Struma with his ships and found the gates of Amphipolis closed against him. He ignores himself so far that he does not call it disastrous, though disastrous it was for himself and his country. With the same detachment he speaks of the enslavement of Melos and the tragedy of Syracuse, though he thinks, and makes us feel, that the one was the crowning crime, the other the crowning disaster of his country. He narrates the plain facts and leaves the reader to draw his inferences. If we did not know that he was an Athenian, we could hardly tell from his history whether he took the side of Athens or Sparta in the war; so entirely are he and his feelings kept in the background. Yet he was an ardent patriot, and he is describing the war in which his country lost supremacy and empire. No historian of the war of 1914-18, whether on the Allied or the German side, is likely to write of it in this way.

The art of Homer has the same quality of detachment. He is a Greek, writing of a ten years’ war between Greeks and Asiatics, yet most of his readers sympathize with Hector rather than with Achilles. He himself preferred neither, but saw and felt equally with both; with the hero who fought the losing battle for Troy, and with him who lost his friend, and,intoxicated with sorrow, could see and feel nothing but a passion of revenge. It would seem hardly possible to write the close of the 22nd Book of theIliad, where the heroes meet, without taking sides; we, no doubt, should take Hector’s side. But Homer stands apart from the quarrel, and sees both men and the feelings of both, writing with the pen of the Recording Angel, not of the Judge. What he or Thucydides thought in each case can only be guessed at. They have presented the facts without comment, and the facts tell their own tale, explain themselves, carry with them the feelings they should evoke, and shine by their own light, like the phosphorescence of the sea.

Little thinking is needed to see that the direct, detached, objective temper is the generative principle of the Greek achievement, for it is the parent of science and philosophy, which are the children of a desire to see things in themselves as they are, and not as the seer might wish them to be. The effects of this temper in poetry can be appreciated by a comparison of certain phenomena of our own literature which are absent from Greek. The comparison will indicate, too, what modern writers can learn from the Greeks, and enable us to judge whether the lessons are needed.

The habit of keeping the eye on the subject, which is the essence of directness, discourages, and indeed excludes, conventionality, sentimentalism, fancifulness, which prevent a writer from seeing and recording life as it is. These failings are always with us, and as I have given one instance of their working in Ben Jonson’s epigram and have discussed the matter elsewhere,[120]I shall pass to diseases which are more particularly modern, and with which directness is equally at war.

The richness of the English language is in itself a danger. English, like Latin, lends itself superbly to ranting, a capacitydiscovered by the Elizabethans. Modern writers tend to more delicate excess, and have exploited the musical quality of English. This is clear from such a collection as theOxford Book of Victorian Verse, which faithfully represents the output of the age, and contains some fine poetry, but also a very large percentage of what Horace called,Versus inopes rerum nugaeque canorae. There is an intolerable deal of sack to a very little bread among the imitators of Tennyson. To such rhetorical or musical trifles no better antidote can be found than Greek literature, for there is no rhetoric in it, and what melodious nothings it contained, were parodied in its own age and have scantily survived to ours. In general it avoided both by its directness. The rhetoric of Lucan or Byron, the predominance of sound over sense in some of Shelley and much of Swinburne arise because those poets shut their eyes to the real world and become lost in the music of words. The Greek, starting with facts, not with sounds or with feelings about facts, could not easily become the victim of words. The temptation did not arise for him, or if it did, his sin was easily detected. Herein he is a good model, especially for poets who are apt to lose sight of the earth and pass into an unearthly paradise of vague feelings. For the greatest poetry is the poetry of things, not of words, and to whatever regions the Muse may take her flight, she can only be safe if she starts from Earth, and keeps her communication with it open.

Directness is also a protection against that literature of egotism which is the excess into which subjective poetry easily falls. Legitimate when kept within bounds, the habit of putting oneself into what one writes can become an offence, and from this offence English literature is not free. No one can complain because Milton and Wordsworth are less detached than Shakespeare or Sophocles; but the subjectivity of Byron or Carlyle is very different. Their subject is continually darkened by the shadow of their personality; it suffers a partial, at timesa total, eclipse. Childe Harold sees himself in all that he sees, projects himself into Belgium, Athens and Rome, and colours the bluest skies with the jaundiced hues of his temperament. This is almost equally true of Carlyle’s pupils, Ruskin and Froude, and, among the moderns, of a swarm of minor poets and novelists, who display before the public the pageant of their indignant or bleeding hearts. Egotism is a fault of manners as much as of morals, and has its peculiar effect and its appropriate penalty. Its effect is to distract a man’s attention from major to minor issues, from the large world to the small self; its penalty is that it wearies its audience, and the next generation, if not its own, dislikes the continual obtrusion of an element in which it has no interest. Hence oblivion, often unjust, is the punishment which the egotist suffers. Even our age, interested as it is in personalities, has little time to spare for those of Byron or Carlyle; it is too busy with the characters of its own contemporaries to trouble about those of its predecessors. But no Greek writer is forgotten for this cause. Whatever their other offences, the Greeks are free from literary egotism. Directness turned their eyes to the external world, and taught them to see even themselves from without.

Egotism is a minor defect in English literature. To some it may even seem to be a virtue. A more serious weakness, which our literature shares with other modern literatures, is one-sidedness or incompleteness of view, which reveals itself by a series of reactions, and in England has taken the form of an oscillation between sentimentalism and a rather cruel realism, the latter being dominant at the present time. These two schools represent excesses of temperament, the one of generosity and kindliness, the other of truth; and among our writers of genius Dickens and Hardy typify them well. The one school desire in fiction to reward their good characters and punish the bad, just as they would wish that life should do;and truth is not allowed to thwart their benevolence or their indignation. In defiance of all probability Micawber and Mr. Mell make a success of life in Australia, though truth cries out that they were born to be failures; while the foot of punishment moves more swiftly and visibly in the pages of Dickens than it does in fact. Then comes the veracious person, who, growing indignant at a travesty of life that misleads the reader and insults truth, gives us the opposite extreme in an imagined world where the shadows are deepened and the high lights carefully blocked out. Scott and Dickens picture a world in which at the end vice finds itself in the gutter while virtue marries the heroine. Later, Thomas Hardy has given usJude the ObscureandTess of the D’Urbervilles.[121]Here is a protest, a redressing of the balance, by an advocate who rises to supply a side of the case which has been ignored. Yet once again Truth is violated, and by her sworn servant; for the world that Hardy portrays is not the world as it is. When Dickens makes Mr. Micawber the District Magistrate of Port Middlebay, he is not representing life, but saying what he and his audience would like to believe in order to feel comfortable when they close the book. As a protest therefore against him in the next generation comes Thomas Hardy, who after recording the miserable end of Tess, writes ‘The President of the immortals had ended his sport with Tess’. In so writing he is no true recorder any more than was Dickens, but the self-appointed Judge of a universe which he conceives to be cruel.

Neither Dickens nor Hardy can be called unveracious writers; both give a picture of life that is true up to a point. Hardy, in particular, errs less by distortion than by omission; he seesone side of life, but at the expense of another side; he fails to hold the balance fairly, and lacks the large charity of the universe. Both writers are incomplete. No one could say of them, what is completely true of most Greek writers and largely true of all, that they see life steadily and see it whole. Still less can this be said of their followers, who, after the fashion of disciples, imitate and develop their defects, and oscillate between sentimental falsity, and the starkness and brutality which have been familiar in English literature during the last twenty years and in French literature for a much longer period. None of these writers, not even the best, is direct. Like Dickens, they consult their generous hearts, or, worse, ask: ‘Can truth be told without making the public angry?’ Or, like Hardy, they veil a didactic purpose under the name of realism, and register a bitter personal protest against the cruelty of life. In either case they narrow their view, and see the world through a mist of temperament.

This point may be illustrated by examining a famous passage from Homer, and then asking how a sentimental and a realistic writer might have treated it. Imagine the death of Hector in the hands of Dickens or Hardy. The first most probably would not have permitted it to occur, or, if he had, would have made Achilles the villain of the piece and emphasized and developed the tragedy in the manner of his death scenes, till he had wearied the reader with pathos. Confronted with such a tragedy he would have given the rein to emotion. Mr. Hardy, we may guess, would be impressed less by the pathos of the scene, than by the savagery of Achilles and the misgovernment of a universe in which such things were possible, and he would not have let these morals escape his readers. By small touches, by stressing suitable incidents, he would have made the tragedy more tragic, and the brutality more brutal. It is thus that he has treated the death of Jude. By so doing, both Dickens and Hardy in their different ways, would havebeen allowing their own personalities rather than the facts to speak, and, seeing only one side of the story, would have made it less complicated than life and less complete. But in theIliadwe see nothing of Homer’s personality and hear no voice but that of the facts. The story tells itself without the heightening of artifice. The two men are brought before our eyes—Hector, the last hope of Troy, with his wife and child waiting for him at home—Achilles, mad with the memory of his dead friend. There is no judgement and no comment, but only the thing as it was.

To those who would maintain that Dickens or Hardy give an accurate picture of the world, there are two answers. First, their world is not the world as Shakespeare or Meredith sees it; this for many persons will be a sufficient disproof of its reality. Second, the history of English and French literatures has been for the last 150 years a history of successive reactions. The classical school was followed by the romantics, the romantics by the realists; each was a protest and a reaction against its predecessor. These swerving movements must have a cause. Now there are no reactions in literature unless there is some excess to provoke them. The existence of a reaction is a symptom of disease, and not only would it never take place apart from disease, but there is always a chance that it may go too far; for as in the body, so in the world of letters, a balance once disturbed is difficult to restore. But Greek literature, unlike our own and unlike French, at no stage developed by reaction. Its epic poets are followed by the lyrists and these by the tragedians: tragedy passes into the New Comedy, which is followed by the learned and artistic poetry of Alexandria. In prose the unperiodic style of Herodotus is succeeded by the style of Thucydides; while Plato and the various orators develop different types of writing. None of these styles, however, and none of these writers, are in reaction against one another. Some traces of reactionagainst the Homeric outlook of Sophocles may perhaps be found in Euripides. But this contrast lies between two individual writers and not between two literary schools, and has no analogy with the relation of the romantic to the classical or to the realist movements. It is far less marked, for instance, than the contrast between Voltaire and Victor Hugo or that between Victor Hugo and Flaubert. There is no reaction in the development of Greek literature, because at no stage is there any excess to react from; and there is no excess, because the Greek writers are direct and objective, because they are mirrors that reflect life, not imperfect lenses that distort it each according to its own imperfection.

The literature of the Elizabethans here resembles Greek. It is indeed more wayward, more fanciful, more personal, more luxuriant than the Greek; but it is on the whole more disinterested, freer from any didactic bent, more inclined to contemplate life for its own sake than the literature of any succeeding epoch in England. Since the Puritans a didactic strain has continually appeared in our writers. We have had revolts and protests, and then, by reaction, more protests and revolts. However admirable in morals, this Protestantism is injurious in literature, for, like all rebellions, it ends in excess and destroys the even-balanced temper which is essential to the creation of the greatest literature. This didactic temper, often disguised as realism, has never been stronger than in our own age, when many who might have found their profession in the Churches are diverted to other paths and seek in literature an outlet that in the past would have been found in the pulpit. Messrs. Wells, Shaw, Galsworthy—to mention no others—are parsonsmanqués, who were designed by nature to write not plays or novels but sermons. Or rather they are dual personalities: clergyman and creative writer have been combined in them and the clergyman has corrupted the poet. The unsatisfied appetite for preaching which a hundred yearsago would have been quieted by writing an evangelical tract, to-day issues in a novel or a play. The moral differs, the form changes, the intention and temper are the same.

It is ungrateful to cavil at this moralizing and didactic temper, which animates a large part of the nation and is responsible for much of the British achievement. But its place is in the world of action not in that of letters, and it does not produce the greatest literature or the truest thought. The Greeks might have gained by a greater infusion of it: we, on the other hand, can learn something from their intellectual disinterestedness which in political and social controversies would make opposing views more intelligible and the path to truth easier and plainer, in literature would free us from excesses that are followed by reaction to a contrary excess, and in national life would guard us from the materialism which besets an industrial and commercial age. It is not confined to the Greeks; but by no people is the ideal of intellectual truth more clearly and universally exhibited than by those who first brought it into an indifferent world, and who built upon it their literature and art no less than their science and philosophy.

The last quality of Greek literature of which I wish to speak is not one which we should expect to find in combination with truthfulness; it is certainly very rare in modern realists. Yet the Greek instinct for beauty is beyond question. There is the evidence of Winckelmann, who, living in a world that had forgotten Greek, rediscovered it; or of Keats, who was not brought up to the familiarity with Greek that breeds obtuseness and indifference, but made acquaintance with it when he was of an age to judge. The impression made both on Keats and Winckelmann is that of a new and surpassing beauty. There is the evidence of ‘the beautiful mythology of Greece’,[122]the offspring of an untaught folk-imagination, and so farricher in the quality of beauty than the mythology of the North. Even in the sawdust of a mythological dictionary the stories of Atalanta, Narcissus, Pygmalion, Orpheus and Eurydice, Phaethon, Medusa keep their magic.

The following extract from the hymn of Demeter may illustrate this beauty, though it is not one of the greatest passages of Greek literature and its writer is unknown. It is the story of the Earth Mother and her daughter Persephone:

ἡν Αιδωνευςἡρπαξεν, δωκεν δε βαρυκτυπος ευρυοπα Ζευς,παιζουσαν κουρησι συν Ωκεανου βαθυκολποιςανθεα τ’ αινυμενην, ῥοδα και κροκον ηδ’ ια καλαλειμων’ αμ μαλακον και αγαλλιδας ηδ’ ὑακινθονναρκισσον θ’, ὁν φυσε δολον καλυκωπιδι κουρηΓαια Διος βουλησι χαριζομενη Πολυδεκτη,θαυμαστον γανοωντα· σεβας το γε πασιν ιδεσθαιαθανατοις τε θεοις ηδε θνητοις ανθρωποις·του και απο ῥιζης ἑκατον καρα εξεπεφυκει,κωζ’ ἡδιστ’ οδμη, πας δ’ ουρανος ευρυς ὑπερθεγαια τε πας’ εγελασσε και ἁλμυρον οιδμα θαλασσης.ἡ δ’ αρα θαμβησας’ ωρεξατο χερσιν ἁμ’ αμφωκαλον αθυρμα λαβειν· χανε δε χθων ευρυαγυιαΝυσιον αμ πεδιον, τη ορουσεν αναξ Πολυδεγμωνἱπποις αθανατοισι.[123]{hên Aidôneushêrpaxen, dôken de baryktypos euryopa Zeus,paizousan kourêsi syn Ôkeanou bathykolpoisanthea t' ainymenên, rhoda kai krokon êd' ia kalaleimôn' am malakon kai agallidas êd' hyakinthonnarkisson th', hon physe dolon kalukôpidi kourêGaia Dios boulêsi charizomenê Polydektê,thaumaston ganoônta; sebas to ge pasin idesthaiathanatois te theois êde thnêtois anthrôpois;tou kai apo rhizês hekaton kara exepephykei,kôz' hêdist' odmê, pas d' ouranos eurys hyperthegaia te pas' egelasse kai halmyron oidma thalassês.hê d' ara thambêsas' ôrexato chersin ham' amphôkalon athyrma labein; chane de chthôn euryagyiaNysion am pedion, tê orousen anax Polydegmônhippois athanatoisi.}

{hên Aidôneushêrpaxen, dôken de baryktypos euryopa Zeus,paizousan kourêsi syn Ôkeanou bathykolpoisanthea t' ainymenên, rhoda kai krokon êd' ia kalaleimôn' am malakon kai agallidas êd' hyakinthonnarkisson th', hon physe dolon kalukôpidi kourêGaia Dios boulêsi charizomenê Polydektê,thaumaston ganoônta; sebas to ge pasin idesthaiathanatois te theois êde thnêtois anthrôpois;tou kai apo rhizês hekaton kara exepephykei,kôz' hêdist' odmê, pas d' ouranos eurys hyperthegaia te pas' egelasse kai halmyron oidma thalassês.hê d' ara thambêsas' ôrexato chersin ham' amphôkalon athyrma labein; chane de chthôn euryagyiaNysion am pedion, tê orousen anax Polydegmônhippois athanatoisi.}

Turn from this to some parallel poem in English literature,such asOenoneorTithonus. Beautiful as Tennyson is, the Greek has a better beauty, a beauty not of words or metaphors or highly-wrought art, but simpler, more spontaneous and more instinctive, as though not man but nature herself was speaking. Two writers, who are qualified to judge by being themselves among the great poets of the world, and who knew and appreciated other literatures, but speak in this way about Greek alone, have testified to the uniqueness of this beauty. Goethe says stiffly but precisely: ‘in the presence of antiquity the mind feels itself placed in the most ideal state of nature; and even to this day the Homeric hymns have the power of freeing us, at any rate, for moments, from the terrible burden which the tradition of many hundreds of years has rolled upon us.’ In these words Goethe has touched on the simplicity and the naturalness of Greek beauty, in contrast to the more exotic and elaborate beauty of which mediaeval and modern art and literature are full. Keats writing about the Grecian urn also had in his mind the liberating power of Greek beauty:

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thoughtAs doth eternity; Cold Pastoral!When old age shall this generation wasteThou shalt remain, in midst of other woeThan ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is allYe know on earth and all ye need to know.

These words point to another trait of Greek beauty, which any one who has seen Greek statues must have felt: it does not provoke speculation just as it does not excite desire, because no elements are mingled with it that might stir such feelings. It has no admixture, but is mere beauty, sought for itself.

Not only is Greek beauty different in quality from our own, but it is more abundant. This surely would be the verdict of an impartial critic who compared Homer, the lyrists, the tragedians, Plato, Theocritus, the epigrammatists, with thecorresponding names in modern literatures. It amounts to a different way of viewing the world; the Greeks were more sensitive to beauty than we are, just as some people are more sensitive than others to colours or sounds, to moral or intellectual issues. This is curiously illustrated in their treatment of tragic themes. There is no want of tragedy in Homer or the dramatists—their view of life is probably darker than our own—and they have been praised for a pessimism that faced and admitted the black truth. Yet the cloud of evil is continually broken by rays of beauty. Thus Homer lights up the tragic parting of Hector and Andromache by the story of the child and the nodding plumes, yet does not use the incident, as many writers would have used it, to heighten the tragedy, which indeed it neither emphasizes nor diminishes: it is merely a gratuitous touch of delight in children, as accidental and natural as the brighter moments which, in life if not in realistic novels, diversify the darkest hours. Thus too Aeschylus preludes the bloody slaughter of Salamis with the white horses of the dawn, the echoes in the cliffs, the foam whitening beneath the oars, and when he speaks of the island where the Persians are butchered, does not forget the dances in which Pan rejoiced there of old. Thus, again, one of the most tragic moments in theHippolytusis followed by the song,

Could I take me to some cavern for mine hiding,In the hill-tops where the Sun scarce hath trod;Or a cloud make the home of mine abiding,As a bird among the bird-droves of God!Could I wing me to my rest amid the roarOf the deep Adriatic on the shore,Where the water of Eridanus is clear,And Phaëthon’s sad sisters by his graveWeep into the river, and each tearGleams, a drop of amber, in the wave.[124]

The union of beauty and tragedy may be a paradox, but no reader can miss its power. The mere story of Hector’s death as told by Homer is poignant, even when read in an English translation: the magic of the original language and metre doubles the effect. The combination of these two apparently inconsistent things, which is one of the marks of Greek poetry, is, of course, found in other literatures; the description of Ophelia’s death inHamletis an instance of it. But no drama except Greek has that regular interweaving of tragedy with exquisite lyrics by which some of its most powerful effects are secured.

Effect is the wrong word to use, for we have here no literary trick, but a view of life, which is naturally complete and clearsighted, which is sensitive to the beauty that no evil can destroy, which sees the splendour in tragedy itself, and remembers that though the days of darkness are many it is a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold the sun. This philosophy, implied throughout Greek literature, commends it to many people. Those who disagree with the philosophy will not quarrel with the beauty itself. Hellenism is one of the forces which are continually being buried and re-found, and which, like talismans, have a disturbing power when they fall afresh into human hands. Those who read the literature of the age which rediscovered Greek will see that it brought above all a sense of liberation and expansion. At the Renaissance as in the eighteenth century, Greece found the world in chains, and broke them and threw down the prison walls. The fetters of the two epochs were different, but freedom was brought, at the Renaissance partly, and in the age of Winckelmann entirely, by the vision of beauty which Greece exhibited. Our own age has many chains and knows well the burden of which Goethe spoke. It has multiplied ugliness far faster than beauty, and its writers, prolific, interesting, and thoughtful as they are, do not help it here. It may well find, as other ages havefound, in this quality of Greek literature a healing and liberating power.

English literature is surpassed by none, but its defects or dangers are at points where Greek is strong. Greek simplicity recalls us to the central interests of the human heart. Greek truthfulness is a challenge to see the world as it is and shun the emptiness of mere music, the falsities of rhetoric or sentiment, the incompleteness of writers who, instead of seeing life as a whole, ignore or emphasize a part of it as their own sympathies dictate. Greek beauty is a memorial of an aspect of the universe to which ages of thought are often blind. Greek technique is a lesson in ‘form’ and a reminder of its place in literature.

Nor is the study of Greek a danger to our national genius. Contact with highly developed foreign models may warp or cramp a literature in its infancy, but cannot harm it when full grown and robust. The native character is then too firmly established to be corrupted, and it is pure gain to have another standard for comparison, for detection of weaknesses and their cure. A reference to English literature will support this view and show that though the influence of Greek there has often been great, it has not been distorting. Consider the English poets who owe most to Greece—Milton, Gray, Shelley, Keats, Landor, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, Bridges. It would puzzle any critic to find a common denominator between these men, or to trace back to Greece any universal feature in their poetry, except perhaps perfection of form. Technical perfection is not so serious or frequent a vice in English writers, that it can be complained of, and even this common element vanishes, if we add to the poets already quoted the Brownings, who prized and understood Greek and the Greek spirit as well as any of them.

At first sight it may seem strange that Shelley and Keats, Arnold and Swinburne, who were not merely passionate admirersof Greece but drew their chief inspiration from her, should be so different in style and matter. The explanation is simple. Some influences are tyrannous; they impose themselves, they dominate, they enslave. But there is a better and rarer type of influence, which stimulates and inspires yet leaves the poet free to develop his own genius with enlarged horizons and quickened sensibilities. Greek influence on our writers has been of this kind; perhaps because its literature is singularly free from the artifice and mannerism which lend themselves to mimicry and seems like Nature with her many voices speaking.

R. W. Livingstone.

Ancient Greek society perished at least as long ago as the seventh centuryA. D.Many historians would date its death a good many centuries earlier, and all would agree that even if there are symptoms that life still lingered in the body down to this time, its mental and physical energies had long failed, and that the change from lethargy to death was hardly perceptible when it came. Thus even on the most cautious reckoning, there is an interval of thirteen centuries between the close of Greek history and our own times, and the great age of Greek history—the time when Ancient Greek society was in its prime, when it was shaping its own destiny and deflecting the destiny of its neighbours—is separated from our generation by more than two thousand years. What legacy has come down, through these great periods of time, from Ancient Greek society to the contemporary world? Before trying to answer this big question, let us consider a smaller one: What is the legacy of Ancient Greek History to our own society? That portion of contemporary humanity which inhabits Western Europe and America constitutes a specific society, for which the most convenient name is ‘Western Civilization’, and this society has a relationship with Ancient Greek society which other contemporary societies—for instance, those of Islam, India, and China—have not. It is its child.

This description of the relationship between Ancient Greeceand the modern Western world may be something more than a metaphor, for societies like individuals are living creatures, and may therefore be expected to exhibit the same phenomena. At any rate the metaphor illustrates the facts. To begin with, the histories of the two societies overlap. The origins of modern Western society may be traced back a century or two before the Christian era, when the lands and races of Western Europe came into contact with the Levant, where Greek society had grown up and was then in its maturity. The germ of Western society first developed in the body of Greek society, like a child in the womb. The Roman Empire was the period of pregnancy during which the new life was sheltered and nurtured by the old. The ‘Dark Age’ was the crisis of birth, in which the child broke away from its parent and emerged as a separate, though naked and helpless, individual. The Middle Ages were the period of childhood, in which the new creature, though immature, found itself able to live and grow independently. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with their marked characteristics of transition, may stand for puberty, and the centuries since the year 1500 for our prime. The metaphor works out sufficiently well to throw light on our particular problem: the legacy bequeathed to the Modern West by Ancient Greece.

Children ‘inherit’ from their parents in several senses of the word. There are features and instincts physically transmitted from the one to the other. There are imitations in early childhood of the parent’s speech and gesture which are not perhaps strictly predetermined by the relationship, but which are yet performed subconsciously and are in fact so inevitable that the child is never aware that it is exercising choice in the matter. And there is deliberate and conscious imitation at a later stage when the child is sufficiently mature to appreciate its parent’s character. These several forms of ‘legacy’ from parent to child differ primarily in the extentto which the acceptance and use of them depends upon the child’s own will, and it will probably be admitted that the legacies which are the less certain to be transmitted are also the more important if the transmission happens to take place. For example, a child’s life and character are more affected by deliberate imitation of its parent at a relatively advanced age than by the unchosen inheritance of some particular colour of hair and eye or shape of chin or pitch of temperament. On the other hand, while the inheritance of these latter characteristics from one among a limited number of ancestral strains is inevitable, the voluntary legacy may never be transmitted at all. The child will not claim it unless he knows his parent and admires or respects him. The parent’s premature death or removal or the lack of sufficient sympathy between the parent and the child can in this case inhibit the transmission, and the potential legacy, with its momentous possibilities of influence upon the child’s career, will never in fact be bequeathed.

These considerations may guide us in an analysis of the legacy which we have received from our parent society—the civilization of Ancient Greece. First, has Ancient Greece transmitted to us anything comparable to the physical and psychological legacy of an individual human parent to her child? This is a difficult question for us to answer, just as it is difficult for members of the same family to appreciate the ‘family likeness’ between them. A Moslem or Hindu or Chinaman could judge better than we. But it is certainly possible that the comparative similarity of climatic conditions and the comparative unity of racial stock has created a closer relationship between these two societies than between either one of them and any other. The poetry and philosophy and social life and political institutions of Ancient Greece and the Modern West may conceivably constitute a single species when contrasted with the institutions of other civilizations.A modern West European or American may have a greater innate appreciation for Homer than for the Old Testament or for Sokrates than for Buddha or Confucius. The parallel which historians so often draw, or imply, between the conflict of Ancient Greece with the Ancient East and that of the Modern West with the Modern East may rest on a real kinship between the two Occidental civilizations as contrasted with their respective Oriental neighbours. But this is uncertain and on the whole unprofitable ground. When we come to the ‘subconsciously chosen’ type of legacy, the analogy with the relationship between parent and child becomes more evident.

Legacies of this type from Ancient Greek society are prominent in the Middle Ages—the childhood of modern Western civilization which followed the ‘Dark Age’ crisis of birth. One of the first needs of our young Western society as it struggled to its feet was a symbol of its unity—something corresponding to the attainment of self-consciousness by the individual human being—and for this it borrowed the last constructive idea of the Ancient Greek world. The mediaeval ‘Holy Roman Empire’ had quite a different purpose and function, in the childhood of modern Western civilization, from the purpose and function of the Roman Empire in the old age of Ancient Greece. But the young civilization did not think of inventing a new institution for its individual needs. In its subconscious pursuit of its own development it conceived itself to be reviving one of the customs of its venerable parent. The political thinkers of Charlemagne’s day never imagined that the idea of world unity could be embodied in any other form.

Again, a century or so later, certain portions of Western society, especially the populations of North and Central Italy and the Low Countries, had outdistanced the rest in economic development and needed institutions of local self-government to give their economic vitality free play. In this case, again, Western civilization reverted to an Ancient Greek institutionand revived the ‘city-state’. A little later still, the rapidly growing and differentiating body of Western civilization was impelled towards territorial expansion, and sought it, like Ancient Greece in a similar period, round the shores of the Mediterranean. This mediaeval movement of expansion, which is commonly called the Crusades, but which made itself felt in Spain and Sicily and the Aegean as well as in the ‘Holy Land’, is a remarkable parallel to the propagation of Ancient Greek city-states round the same shores between about 750 and 600B. C.In drifting back upon the Mediterranean, the mediaeval West was searching for new realms to conquer, but it was really captured by the romance of its ancestral home.

Here, then, are three prominent features in mediaeval Western history—the Holy Roman Empire, the Flemish and Italian communes, and the Crusades—which were legacies from Ancient Greek history in the sense of being subconscious reversions to the habits of the parent society. But have these mediaeval legacies from Ancient Greece been really important constituents in our history viewed as a whole? Have they not rather been false growths which led to little or nothing? The Holy Roman Empire was never more than a mirage. The sense of unity in the modern Western world is derived not from this but from a really original institution, the early Papal Church, in which any legacy from Ancient Greece would be hard to discern. The national states of modern Europe and America are derived not from mediaeval Ghent or Bruges or Florence or Venice but from the new, though clumsy, feudal communities of mediaeval England and France. And the expansion of Western society has not followed the direction indicated by the Crusades. The false trail of the Mediterranean was practically abandoned after less than three centuries’ trial. The true domain of modern Western civilization has been found in regions which Ancient Greece hardly explored: Northern Germany and Scandinavia and the British Isles, theNorth Sea and the Baltic, the Atlantic and the continent of America. Thus our mediaeval legacies from Ancient Greece—the subconscious reversions of childhood—are historical curiosities rather than vital links between the two civilizations. Our really important legacy from Ancient Greece was adopted with full consciousness and deliberation when we stood on the threshold of our own maturity.

The legacy of this third type which we have received from Ancient Greece has been given the general name of the Renaissance. It was a determined and successful attempt, on the part of our society, to learn everything that the literary and artistic remains of our great predecessor could teach us. It lay within our choice to study these remains or to pass them by, and the fact that we chose to study them has been one of the greatest and the most fortunate decisions in the career of our civilization. The several aspects of this acceptance of what Ancient Greece had to offer have been treated already in the other chapters in this volume. Here it is merely necessary to point out that the Renaissance was a study and assimilation not only of Ancient Greek literature and art, but of architecture, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, political ideas, and all the other higher expressions of a great society. The absorption of this vast current of life largely accounts for the wonderful impetus which has revealed itself in Western civilization during the last four centuries.

Has the current now spent its force? Has the legacy adopted four centuries ago been used up and exhausted? Under the inspiration of Ancient Greece, has the modern West now created a literature, art, architecture, science, mathematics, philosophy, and political thought which equal or surpass the Ancient patterns and turn them from an inspiration into an encumbrance? That seems to be the fundamental question behind the controversy about the study of Ancient Greek life in England to-day. Perhaps the answer may be found—if wemay go back to our metaphor—in the uniqueness of the individual personality.

If one considers the relations of a parent and child, or indeed of any two human beings, it is evident that the one could never exhaust all that could be learnt from the personality of the other. The one might acquire every physical, mental, and moral attainment that the other could display, and yet the other’s unique individuality would remain—an inexhaustible subject of study, throwing perpetual new light upon the life of the observer himself and of his fellow human beings. This is true of any two human beings, but if the two happen to be people of commanding character and genius it becomes a truism which it would be almost ludicrous to question. Let us apply this to the study not of one individual but of one society by another, and let us take the case in point, in which the two societies happen to be great civilizations. The study of a great civilization has a unique value, not merely for members of another civilization which stands to it in the relation of child to parent, but for every seeker after knowledge who has a civilization of his own. This ultimate and most precious legacy of Ancient Greece is at the disposal of Moslems, Hindus, and Chinese, as well as Westerners. For receiving it there are two qualifications: a good understanding and an open mind.

Civilizations are the greatest and the rarest achievements of human society. Innumerable societies have been coming into being and perishing during many hundreds of thousands of years, and hardly any of them have created civilizations. One can count the civilizations on one’s fingers. We have had perhaps three in Europe: the Minoan in the Aegean Islands(the dates 4000-1100B. C.roughly cover its history); the Greek or Graeco-Roman round the coasts of the Mediterranean (its history extends between the eleventh centuryB. C.and the seventh centuryA. D.); and our modern Western civilization round the coasts of the Atlantic, which began to emerge from twilight in the eighth centuryA. D.and is still in existence. Then there are the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Lower Mesopotamia, which were first dominated by Ancient Greece and then amalgamated into the single Middle Eastern civilization of Islam; and there are the civilizations of India and China. Even if we count as civilizations the societies existing in Mexico and Peru before the Spanish Conquest, the total number of known independent civilizations, compared with the total number of known human societies, is very small. And it is so because the achievement is astonishingly difficult. There are two constant factors in social life—the spirit of man and its environment. Social life is the relation between them, and life only rises to the height of civilization when the spirit of man is the dominant partner in the relationship—when instead of being moulded by the environment (as it is in the tropical forests of Central Africa and Brazil), or simply holding its own against the environment in a kind of equilibrium (as it does on the steppes of Central Asia or Arabia, among the nomads), it moulds the environment to its own purpose, or ‘expresses’ itself by ‘impressing’ itself upon the world. The study of a civilization is not different in kind from the study of a literature. In both cases one is studying a creation of the spirit of man, or, in more familiar terms, a work of art.

Civilization is a work of art—in the literal meaning of the phrase and not merely by a metaphor. It is true that works of art are made by individuals, civilization by a society. But what work of art is there in which the individual artist owes nothing to others? And a civilization, the work of countless individuals and many generations, differs in this respect from a poem or a statue not in kind but only in degree. It is a socialwork of art, expressed in social action, like a ritual or a play. One cannot describe it better than by calling it a tragedy with a plot, and history is the plot of the tragedy of civilization.

Students of the drama, from Aristotle onwards, seem to agree that nearly all the great tragedies in literature are expositions of quite a few fundamental plots. And it is possible that the great tragedies of history—that is, the great civilizations that have been created by the spirit of man—may all reveal the same plot, if we analyse them rightly. Each civilization—for instance, the civilization of Mediaeval and Modern Europe and again that of Ancient Greece—is probably a variant of a single theme. And to study the plot of civilization in a great exposition of it—like the Hellenic exposition or our own Western exposition—is surely the right goal of a humane education.

But of course one asks: Why study Ancient Hellenic civilization rather than ours? The study of any one civilization is so complex, it demands so many preliminary and subordinate studies—linguistic, institutional, economic, psychological—that it is likely to absorb all one’s energies. The greatest historians have generally confined themselves to the study of a single civilization, and the great Greek historians—Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius—concentrated on their own, and only studied others in so far as their own came into contact with them. Clearly, people who are going to be historians, not for life, but as an education for life, must make their choice. They must practically confine themselves to studying one civilization if they are to reap the fruits of study at all, and in this case it is natural to ask: Why study Hellenism rather than our own history? There are two obvious arguments in favour of studying modern history. It seems more familiar and it seems more useful. And it would be a mistake to misrepresent these arguments by stating them only in their cruder forms. ‘Familiar’ does not mean ‘easy’, and to say that modernhistory seems more useful than ancient does not mean that the study of it is a closer approximation to a Pelman course. There is an exceedingly crude view of education among some people just now—perhaps it is largely due to the war, and may disappear like other ugly effects of the war—which inclines to concentrate education on applied chemistry, say, or engineering, with a vague idea that people whose education has been devoted to these subjects will be more capable of competing with foreigners in the dye industry or of working in munition factories in the next emergency. In the same way, conceivably, concentration on modern history might be supposed to equip a student for securing concessions abroad for a firm, or for winning a parliamentary election. Of course, this attitude, though it is rather widespread just now, is absurd. The fallacy lies in confusing the general theoretical knowledge of a subject acquired through being educated in it with the technical knowledge and personal experience which one must have to turn the same subject to practical account in after life. There is no difference of opinion on this point between ‘humanists’ and ‘scientists’. The issue is between people who do not appreciate the value of the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself, and those who do appreciate it and who therefore understand what education means. True lovers of knowledge and true believers in education will be found on the same side in this controversy, whether the subject of their study happens to be the spirit of man or the laws of its environment. But apart from that crude utilitarianism, which is as unscientific as it is un-humane, a serious argument for studying modern rather than ancient history can also be stated from the humane and the scientific point of view. It may be argued that the direct experience we have of our own civilization makes it possible for us to have a deeper, and therefore a more humane and scientific, understanding of it than we can ever have of Ancient Greece. And one might go on to argue, on groundsof humanism alone, that such a comprehension of the character and origins of our civilization would have a more profound humanizing influence upon its development than a less intimate study of a different civilization could produce. This argument is bound to appeal to the generation which has experienced the war. The war is obviously one of the great crises of our civilization. It is like a conflagration lighting up the dim past and throwing it into perspective. The war makes it impossible for us to take our own history for granted. We are bound to inquire into the causes of such an astonishing catastrophe, and as soon as we do that we find ourselves inquiring into the evolution of Western Civilization since it emerged from the Dark Age. The shock of the Peloponnesian War gave just the same intellectual stimulus to Thucydides, and made him preface his history of that war with a critical analysis, brief but unsurpassed, of the origins of Hellenic civilization—the famous introductory chapters of Book I. May not these chapters point the road for us and counsel us to concentrate upon the study of our own history?

This question deserves very serious consideration, not merely from the utilitarian, but from the scientific and humane point of view. But the answer is not a foregone conclusion. There is a case for studying the civilization of Ancient Greece which can be summed up in four points, as follows:

(i) In Greek history the plot of civilization has been worked out to its conclusion. We can sit as spectators through the whole play; we can say: ‘This or that is the crisis; from this point onwards the end is inevitable; or if this actor had acted otherwise in those circumstances the issue would not nave been the same.’ We can grasp the structure of the tragedy and divide it into acts. But in our own history we are like players in the middle of the piece, and though we may be able to say ‘This is the third act or the fourth act’, we cannot say ‘This is the last act or the last but one’. Wecannot foretell the future; the work of art we are studying is incomplete, and therefore we cannot possibly apprehend it as an artistic whole, however vivid may be our experience of isolated scenes and situations. The first point in favour of Greek history is its completeness and its true perspective from our point of view.

(ii) The second is that the historical experience of the Greeks has been more finely expressed than ours. Its expression is in all Greek art and literature—for it is a great mistake to suppose that historical experience is expressed in so-called historical records alone. The great poets of Greece are of as much assistance in understanding the mental history of Greece (which is after all the essential element in any history) as the philosophers and historians. And Greek historical experience or mental history is better expressed in Greek literature than ours is in the literature of modern Europe. Without attempting to compare the two literatures as literatures it can be said with some confidence that the surviving masterpieces of Greek literature give a better insight into the subjective side of Greek history—into the emotions and speculations which arose out of the vicissitudes of Greek society and were its most splendid creations—than any insight into the subjective side of modern history which we can obtain by studying it through modern literature.

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