THE RELIGION OF A MAN OF LETTERS

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

TO THE CLASSICAL ASSOCIATION

JANUARY 8, 1918

RELIGIO GRAMMATICI

THE RELIGION OF A MAN OF LETTERS

GILBERT MURRAY

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY GILBERT MURRAY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PUBLISHED IN SEPTEMBER 1918

THE RELIGION OF A MAN OF LETTERS

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IT is the general custom of this association to choose as its president alternately a clas- sical scholar and a man of wide eminence outside the classics. Next year you are to have a man of science, a great physician who is also famous in the world of learning and literature. Last year you had a states- man, though a statesman who is also a great scholar and man of letters, a sage and coun- sellor in the antique mould, of world-wide fame and unique influence. ' And since, be- tween these two, you have chosen, in your kindness to me, a professional scholar and teacher, you might well expect from him

i Sir William Osier and Lord Bryce.

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an address containing practical educational advice in a practical educational crisis. But that, I fear, is just what I cannot give. My experience is too one-sided. I know little of schools and not much even of pass-men. I know little of such material facts as curric- ula and time-tables and parents and exam- ination-papers. I sometimes feel, as all men of fifty should, my ignorance even of boys and girls. Besides that, I have the honour at present to be an official of the Board of Education; and in public discussions of cur- rent educational subjects an officer of the Board must in duty be like the heroine of Shelley's tragedy, " He cannot argue, he can only feel."

I believe, therefore, that the best I can do, when the horizon looks somewhat dark, not only for the particular studies which we in this society love most, but for the habits of mind which we connect with those stud- ies, — the philosophic temper, the gentle

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judgment, the interest in knowledge and beauty for their own sake, — will be simply, with your assistance, to look inward and try to realize my own confession of faith. I do, as a matter of fact, feel clear that, even if knowledge of Greek, instead of leading to bishoprics, as it once did, is in future to be regarded with popular suspicion as a mark of either a reactionary or an unusually feck- less temper, I am nevertheless not in the least sorry that I have spent a large part of my life in Greek studies, not in the least penitent that I have been the cause of others doing the same. That is my feeling, and there must be some base for it. There must be such a thing as religio grammatici, the special religion of a man of letters.

The greater part of life for both man and beast is rigidly confined in the round of things that happen from hour to hour. It is eVl o-u/^opcus, exposed for circumstances to beat upon; its stream of consciousness

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channelled and directed by the events and environments of the moment. Man is im- prisoned in the external present ; and what we call a man's religion is, to a great ex- tent, the thing that offers him a secret and permanent means of escape from that prison, a breaking of the prison walls which leaves him standing, of course, still in the present, but in a present so enlarged and enfran- chised that it is become, not a prison, but a free world. Religion, even in the narrow sense, is always looking for Soteria, for es- cape, for some salvation from the terror to come, or some deliverance from the body of this death.

And men find it, of course, in a thousand ways, with different degrees of ease and of certainty. I am not wishing to praise my talisman at the expense of other talismans. Some find it in theology; some in art, in hu- man affection, in the anodyne of constant work, in that permanent exercise of the in-

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quiring intellect which is commonly called the search for truth ; some find it in care- fully cultivated illusions of one sort or an- other, in passionate faiths and undying pug- nacities ; some, I believe, find a substitute by simply rejoicing in their prison, and liv- ing furiously, for good or ill, in the actual moment.

And a scholar, I think, secures his free- dom by keeping hold always of the past, and treasuring up the best out of the past, so that in a present that may be angry or sordid he can call back memories of calm or of high passion, in a present that re- quires resignation or courage he can call back the spirit with which brave men long ago faced the same evils. He draws out of the past high thoughts and great emotions ; he also draws the strength that comes from communion or brotherhood.

Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides, And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old,

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come back to comfort another blind poet in his affliction. The Psalms, turned into strange languages, their original meaning often lost, live on as a real influence in hu- man life, a strong and almost always an en- nobling influence. I know the figures in the tradition may be unreal, their words may be misinterpreted, but the communion is quite a real fact. And the student, as he realizes it, feels himself one of a long line of torch-bearers. He attains that which is the most compelling desire of every human be- ing, a work in life which it is worth living for, and which is not cut short by the acci- dent of his own death.

It is in that sense that I understand re- ligio. And now I would ask you to consider with me the proper meaning of grammatike and the true business of the man of letters or grammaticus.

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n

A VERY, very long time ago — the palaeon- tologists refuse to give us dates — mankind, trying to escape from his mortality, in- vented grammata, or letters. Instead of be- ing content with his spoken words, eVea 7TT€/>oez/ra, which fly as a bird flies and are past, he struck out the plan of making marks on wood or stone or bone or leather or some other material, significant marks which should somehow last on, charged with meaning, in place of the word that had per- ished. Of course the subjects for such per- petuation were severely selected. Vastly the greater part of man's life, even now, is in the moment, the sort of thing that is lived and passes without causing any particular regret, or rousing any definite action for the purpose of retaining it. And when the whole process of writing or graving was as diffi- cult as it must have been in remote antiquity, the words that were recorded, the moments

that were, so to speak, made imperishable, must have been very rare indeed. One is tempted to think of the end of "Faust" : was not the graving of a thing on brass or stone, was not even the painting of a rein- deer in the depths of a palaeolithic cave, a practical, though imperfect, method, of say- ing to the moment, ^F'erweile dock, Du bist so schon " (" Stay longer, thou art so beau- tiful ") ? Of course the choice was, as you would expect, mostly based on material con- siderations and on miserably wrong consid- erations at that. I suppose the greater num- ber of very ancient inscriptions, or gram- mata, known to the world consist either of magical or religious formulae, supposed to be effective in producing material welfare ; or else titles of kings and honorific records of their achievements ; or else contracts and laws in which the spoken word eminently needed preserving. Either charms or else boasts or else contracts ; and it is worth re-

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membering that so far as they have any interest for us now, it is an interest quite different from that for which they were en- graved. They were all selected for immor- tality by reason of some present personal urgency. The charm was expected to work ; the boast delighted the heart of the boaster; the contract would compel certain slippery or forgetful persons to keep their word . And now we know that the charm did not work. We do not know who the boaster was, and, if we did, should probably not admire him for the thing he boasts about. And the slip- pery or forgetful persons have long since been incapable of either breaking or fulfill- ing the contract. We are in each case only interested in some quality in the record which is different from that for which peo- ple recorded it. Of course there may be also the mere historical interest in these things as facts ; but that again is quite different from the motive for their recording.

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In fact, one might say to all these records of human life, all these grammata that have come down to us, what Marcus Aurelius teaches us to say to ourselves : t//v^aptov et fiaa-rd^ov veitpov, or, each one is " a little soul carrying a corpse. " Each one, besides the material and temporary message it bears , is a record, however imperfect, of human life and character and feeling. In so far as the record can get across the boundary that separates mere record of fact from philoso- phy or poetry, so far it has a soul and still lives.

This is clearest, of course, in the records to which we can definitely attribute beauty. Take a tragedy of ^Eschylus, a dialogue of Plato; take one of the very ancient Baby- lonian hymns or an oracle of Isaiah. The prophecy of Isaiah referred primarily to a definite set of facts and contained some definite — and generally violent — political advice ; but we often do not know what

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those facts were, nor care one way or an- other about the advice. We love the proph- ecy and value it because of some quality of beauty, which subsists, when the value of the advice is long dead, because of some soul that is there which does not perish. It is the same with those magnificent Baby- lonian hymns. The recorders were doubt- less aware of their beauty, but they thought much more of their religious effectiveness. With the tragedy of ^Eschylus or the dia- logue of Plato the case is different, but only different in degree. If we ask why they were valued and recorded, the answer must be that it was mainly for their poetic beauty and philosophic truth, the very reasons for which they are read and valued now. But even here it is easy to see that there must have been some causes at work which de- rived their force simply from the urgency of the present, and therefore died when that present faded away.

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And similarly an ancient work may, or indeed must, gather about itself new special environments and points of relevance. Thu- cydides and Aristophanes' "Knights" and even Jane Austen are different things now from what they were in 1913. I can imagine a translation of the ' ' Knights ' ' which would read like a brand-new topical satire. No need to labour the point. I think it is clear that in any great work of litera- ture there is a soul which lives and a body which perishes ; and further, since the soul cannot ever be found naked without any body at all, it is making for itself all the time new bodies, changing with the times.

Ill

BOTH soul and body are preserved, imper- fectly of course, in grammata, or letters ; in a long series of marks scratched, daubed, engraved, written, or printed, stretching from the inscribed bone implements and

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painted rocks of prehistoric man through the great literatures of the world down to this morning's newspaper and the manu- script from which I am reading — marks which have their own history also and their own vast varieties. And * ' the office of the art grammatike is so to deal with the gram- mata as to recover from them all that can be recovered of that which they have saved from oblivion, to reinstate as far as possible the spoken word in its first impressiveness and musicalness." * That is not a piece of modern sentiment. It is the strict doctrine of the scribes. Dionysius Thrax gives us the definition : 17 rpa/z/zari/of is ifjar&pta Tig 015 eVi TO TroXu r(av Trapa TTOI^TCUS TC KOL (TvyypafavcrL \eyo^ev(av\ an e/ATretpta, a skill produced by practice, in the things said in poets and prose- writers; and he goes on to divide it into six parts, of which the first and most essential is reading aloud

1 Rutherford, History of Annotation, p. xa.

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Kara 7r/>oo-&>Siai>, with just the accent, the cadences, the expression, with which the words were originally spoken before they were turned from Xdyot to y/aa/^ara, from "winged" words to permanent letters. The other five parts are concerned with anal- ysis ; interpretation of figures of speech ; explanation of obsolete words and customs; etymology ; grammar in the narrow mod- ern sense ; and lastly K/attrts Trot^/tarGJi/, or, roughly, literary criticism. The first part is synthetic and in a sense creative, and most of the others are subservient to it. For I suppose, if you had attained by study the power of reading aloud a play of Shake- speare exactly as Shakespeare intended the words to be spoken, you would be pretty sure to have mastered the figures of speech and obsolete words and niceties of gram- mar. At any rate, whether or no you could manage the etymologies and the literary criticism, you would have done the main

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thing. You would, subject to the limita- tions we considered above, have recreated the play.

We intellectuals of the twentieth cen- tury, poor things, are so intimately accus- tomed to the use of grammata that probably many of u s write more than we talk and read far more than we listen. Language has be- come to us primarily a matter of grammata. We have largely ceased to demand from the readers of a book any imaginative trans- literation into the living voice . But mankind was slow in acquiescing in this renuncia- tion. Isocrates in a well-known passage (5, 10) of his ' ' Letter to Philip, ' ' laments that the scroll he sends will not be able to say what he wants it to say. Philip will hand it to a secretary, and the secretary, neither knowing nor caring what it is all about, will read it out " with no persuasiveness, no indication of changes of feeling, as if he were giving a list of items." The early

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Arab writers in the same situation used to meet it squarely. The sage wrote his own book and trained his disciples to read it aloud, each sentence exactly right; and generally, to avoid the mistakes of the or- dinary untrained reader, he took care that the script should not be intelligible to such persons.

These instances show us in what spirit the first grammatici, our fathers in the art, conceived their task, and what a duty they have laid upon us. I am not, of course, overlooking the other and perhaps more ex- tensive side of a scholar's work — the side which regards a piece of ancient or foreign writing as a phenomenon of language to be analyzed and placed, not as a thing of beauty to be re-created or kept alive. On that side of his work the grammaticus is a man of science or Wissenschaft, like another. The science of language demands for its successful study the same rigorous exact-

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itude as the other natural sciences, while it has for educational purposes some ad- vantages over most of them. Notably, its subject-matter is intimately familiar to the average student, and his ear very sensitive to its varieties. The study of it needs al- most no apparatus, and gives great scope for variety and originality of attack. Lastly, its extent is vast and its subtlety almost infinite ; /or it is a record, and a very fine one, of all the immeasurable varieties and gradations of human consciousness. In- deed, as the grammata are related to the spoken word, so is the spoken word itself related to the thought or feeling. It is the simplest record, the first precipitation. But I am not dealing now with the grammaticus as a man of science or an educator of the young ; I am considering that part of his function which belongs specially to religio or pietas.

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IV

ON these lines we see that the scholar's spe- cial duty is to turn the written signs in which old poetry or philosophy is now enshrined back into living thought or feeling. He must so understand as to re-live. And here he is met at the present day by a direct frontal criticism. "Suppose, after great toil and the expenditure of much subtlety of intel- lect, you succeed in re-living the best works of the past, is that a desirable end? Surely our business is with the future and present, not with the past. If there is any progress in the world or any hope for struggling hu- manity, does it not lie precisely in shaking off the chains of the past and looking stead- ily forward?" How shall we meet this question ?

First, we may say, the chains of the mind are not broken by any form of igno- rance. The chains of the mind are broken by understanding. And so far as men are

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unduly enslaved by the past, it is by under- standing the past that they may hope to be freed. But, secondly, it is never really the past — the true past — that enslaves us ; it is always the present. It is not the conven- tions of the seventeenth or eighteenth cen- tury that now make men conventional. It is the conventions of our own age, though, of course, I would not deny that in any age there are always fragments of the uncom- preh ended past still floating like dead things pretending to be alive. What one always needs for freedom is some sort of escape from the thing that now holds him. A man who is the slave of theories must get outside them and see facts ; a man who is the slave of his own desires and prejudices must widen the range of his experience and imagination. But the thing that enslaves us most, nar- rows the range of our thought, cramps our capacities, and lowers our standards, is the mere present — the present that is all round

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us, accepted and taken for granted, as we in London accept the grit in the air and the dirt on our hands and faces. The material present, the thing that is omnipotent over us, not because it is either good or evil, but just because it happens to be here, is the great jailer and imprisoner of man's mind; and the only true method of escape from him is the contemplation of things that are not present. Of the future ? Yes ; but you can- not study the future. You can only make conjectures about it, and the conjectures will not be much good unless you have in some way studied other places and other ages. There has been hardly any great for- ward movement of humanity which did not draw inspiration from the knowledge or the idealization of the past.

No : to search the past is not to go into prison . It is to escape out of prison, because it compels us to compare the ways of our own age with other ways. And as to prog-

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ress, it is no doubt a real fact. To many of us it is a truth that lies somewhere near the roots of our religion. But it is never a straight march forward ; it is never a result that happens of its own accord. It is only a name for the mass of accumulated human effort, successful here, baffled there, misdi- rected and driven astray in a third region, but on the whole and in the main produc- ing some cumulative result. I believe this difficulty about progress, this fear that in studying the great teachers of the past we are in some sense wantonly sitting at the feet of savages, causes real trouble of mind to many keen students. The full answer to it would take us beyond the limits of this paper and beyond my own range of knowl- edge. But the main lines of the answer seem to me clear. There are in life two elements, one transitory and progressive, the other comparatively, if not absolutely, non-pro- gressive and eternal, and the soul of man is

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chiefly concerned with the second. Try to compare our inventions, our material civi- lization, our stores of accumulated knowl- edge with those of the age of ^Eschylus or Aristotle or St. Francis, and the compari- son is absurd. Our superiority is beyond question and beyond measure. But com- pare any chosen poet of our age with JEs- chylus, any philosopher with Aristotle, any saintly preacher with St. Francis, and the result is totally different. I do not wish to argue that we have fallen below the stand- ard of those past ages ; but it is clear that we are not definitely above them. The things of the spirit depend on will, on effort, on aspiration, on the quality of the individ- ual soul, and not on discoveries and mate- rial advances which can be accumulated and added up.

As I tried to put the point some ten years ago, in my inaugural address at Ox- ford:—

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One might say roughly that material things are superseded, but spiritual things not; or that every- thing considered as an achievement can be super- seded, but considered as so much life, not. Nei- ther classification is exact, but let it pass. Our own generation is perhaps unusually conscious of the element of change. We live, since the opening of the great epoch of scientific invention in the nine- teenth century, in a world utterly transformed from any that existed before. Yet we know that behind all changes the main web of life is perma- nent. The joy of an Egyptian child of the First Dynasty in a clay doll was every bit as keen as the joy of a child now in a number of vastly better dolls. Her grief was as great when it was taken away. Those are very simple emotions, but I be- lieve the same holds good of emotions much more complex. The joy and grief of the artist in his art, of the strong man in his fighting, of the seeker after knowledge or righteousness in his many wanderings; these and things like them, all the great terrors and desires and beauties, belong somewhere to the permanent stuff of which daily life consists; they go with hunger and thirst and love and the facing of death. And these it is that make the permanence of literature. There are many elements in the work of Homer or iEschylus

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which are obsolete and even worthless, but there is no surpassing their essential poetry. It is there, a permanent power which we can feel or fail to feel, and if we fail the world is poorer. And the same is true, though a little less easy to see, of the essential work of the historian or the philosopher.

You will say, perhaps, that I am still denying the essence of human progress ; denying the progress of the human soul, and admitting only the sort of progress that consists in the improvement of tools, the discovery of new facts, the re-combining of elements. As to that I can only admit frankly that I am not clear.

I believe we do not know enough to an- swer. I observe that some recent authorities are arguing that we have all done injustice to our palaeolithic forefathers when we drew pictures of them with small brain-pans and no chins. They had brains as large and perhaps as exquisitely convoluted as our own, while their achievements against the

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gigantic beasts of prey that surrounded them show a courage and ingenuity and power of unselfish cooperation which have perhaps never since been surpassed. As to that I can form no opinion ; I can quite im- agine that by the standards of the last judg- ment some of our modern philanthropists and military experts may cut rather a poor figure beside some nameless Magdalenian or Mousterian who died to save another, or, naked and almost weaponless, defeated a sabre-tooth tiger or a cave bear. But I should be more inclined to lay stress on two points. First, on the extreme recentness, by anthropological standards, of the whole of our historic period. Man has been on the earth perhaps some twenty-odd thousand years, and it is only the last three thousand that we are much concerned with. To sup- pose that a modern Englishman must nec- essarily be at a higher stage of mental de- velopment than an ancient Greek is almost

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the same mistake as to argue that Brown- ing must be a better poet than Wordsworth because he came later. If the soul, or the brain, of man is developing, it is not devel- oping so fast or so steadily as all that.

And next I would observe that the mov- ing force in human progress is not wide- spread over the world. The uplifting of man has been the work of a chosen few ; a few cities, a few races, a few great ages, have scaled the heights for us and made the upward way easy. And the record in the grammata is precisely the record of these chosen few. Of course the record is redun- dant. It contains masses of matter that is now dead. Of course, also, it is incomplete. There lived brave men before Agamemnon . There have been saints, sages, heroes, lov- ers, inspired poets in multitudes and mul- titudes, whose thoughts for one reason or another were never enshrined in the record, or, if recorded, were soon obliterated. The

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treasures man has wasted must be vastly greater than those he has saved. But, such as it is, with all its imperfections, the rec- ord he has kept is the record of the triumph of the human soul — the triumph, or, in Aristotle's sense of the word, the tragedy.

It is there. That is my present argument. The soul of man , comprising the forces that have made progress and those that have achieved in themselves the end of progress, the moments of living to which he has said that they are too beautiful to be allowed to pass — the soul of man stands at the door and knocks ; it is for each one of us to open or not to open.

For we must not forget the extraordinary frailty of the tenure on which these past moments of glory hold their potential im- mortality. They live only in so far as we can reach them ; and we can reach them only by some labour, some skill, some im- aginative effort, and some sacrifice. They

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cannot compel us ; and if we do not open to them, they die.

V

AND here perhaps we should meet another of the objections raised by modernists against our preoccupation with the past. " Granted, they will say, that the ancient poets and philosophers were all that you say, surely the valuable parts of their thought have been absorbed long since in the com- mon fund of humanity. Archimedes, we are told, invented the screw ; Eratosthenes invented the conception of longitude. Well, now we habitually operate with screws and longitude, both in a greatly improved form. And when we have recorded the names of those two worthies and put up imaginary statues of them on a few scientific labora- tories, we have surely repaid any debt we owe them. We do not go back laboriously, with the help of a trained grammaticus, and

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read their works in the original. Now, ad- mitting, what is far from clear, that JE&- chylus and Plato did make contributions to the spiritual wealth of the human race com- parable to the inventions of the screw and of longitude, surely those contributions have been absorbed and digested, and have become parts of our ordinary daily life? Why go back and labour over their actual words ? We do not most of us want to re- read even Newton's l Principia.' '

This argument raises exactly the point of difference between the humane and the physical. The invention of the screw or the telephone is a fine achievement of man ; the effort and experience of the inventor make what we have called above a moment of glory. But you and I, when using the telephone, have no share whatever in that moment or that achievement. The only way in which we could begin in any way to share in them would be by a process which is

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really artistic or literary — the process of studying the inventor's life, realizing ex- actly his difficulties and his data, and imag- inatively trying to live again his triumphant experience. That would mean imaginative effort and literary study. In the mean time we use the telephone without any effort and at the same time without any spiritual gain at all — merely gain, supposing it is a gain, in practical convenience.

If we take, on the other hand, the inven- tion, or creation, of " Romeo and Juliet,'* it is quite clear that you can in a sense by using it — that is, by reading it — recap- ture the moment of glory ; but not with- out effort. It is different in kind from a tele- phone or a hot- water tap. The only way of utilizing it at all is by the method of grammatike; by reading it or hearing it read and at the same time making a definite effort of imaginative understanding so as to re- live, as best one can, the experience of the

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creator of it. (I do not, of course, mean his whole actual experience in writing the play, but the relevant and essential part of that experience.) This method, the method of intelligent and loving study, is the only way there is of getting any sort of use out of ' ' Romeo and Juliet. " It is not quite true, but nearly true, to say that the value of ' ' Romeo and Juliet ' ' to any given man is exactly proportionate to the amount of lov- ing effort he has spent in trying to re-live it. Certainly, without such effort " Romeo and Juliet ' ' is without value and must die. It may stand at the door and knock, but its voice is not heard amid the rumble of drums of Santerre. And the same is true of all great works of art or imagination, especially those which are in any way re- moved from us by differences of age or of language. We need not repine at this. The fact that so many works whose value and beauty is generally recognized require effort

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for their understanding is really a great benefit to contemporary and future work, because it accustoms the reader or spectator to the expectation of effort. And the un- willingness to make imaginative effort is the prime cause of almost all decay of art. It is the caterer, the man whose business it is to provide enjoyment with the very minimum of effort, who is in matters of art the real assassin.

VI

I HAVE spoken so far of grammatike in the widest sense as the art of interpreting the grammata and so re-living the chosen mo- ments of human life wherever they are re- corded . But of course that undertaking is too vastfor any human brain, and furthermore, as we have noticed above , a great mass of the matter recorded is either badly recorded or badly chosen . There has to be selection , and selection of a very drastic and ruthless kind.

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It is impossible to say exactly how much of life ought to be put down in grammata, but it is fairly clear that in very ancient times there was too little and in modern times there is too much. Most of the books in any great library, even a library much frequented by students, lie undisturbed for generations. And if you begin what seems like the audacious and impossible task of measuring up the accumulated treasures of the race in the field of letters, it is curious how quickly in its main lines the enterprise becomes possible and even practicable. The period of recorded history is not very long. Eighty generations might well take us back before the beginnings of history -writing in Europe; and though the beginnings of Accad and of Egypt, to say nothing of the cave drawings of Altamira, might take one almost incalculably farther in time, the ac- tual amount of grammata which they pro- vide is not large. Thus, first, the period is

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not very long ; and, again, the extension of literature over the world is not very wide, especially if we confine ourselves to that continuous tradition of literature on which the life of modern Europe and America is built. China and India form, in the main, another tradition, which may stimulate and instruct us, but cannot be said to have formed our thought.

If you take any particular form of litera- ture, the limits of its achievement become quickly visible. Take drama: there are not many very good plays in the world. Greece, France, England, Spain, and for brief periods Russia, Scandinavia, and Ger- many, have made their contributions ; but, apart from the trouble of learning the lan- guages,'a man could read all the very good plays in the world in a few months. Take lyric or narrative poetry, philosophy, his- tory: there is not so very much first-rate lyric poetry in the world, nor yet narrative,

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nor much first-rate philosophy, nor even history. No doubt when you consider the books that have to be read in order to study the history of a particular modern period, say the time of Napoleon or the French Revolution, the number seems absolutely vast and overwhelming ; but when you look for those histories which have the special gift that we are considering — that is, the gift of retaining and expressing a very high quality of thought or emotion — the num- ber dwindles at an amazing rate. And in every one of these forms of literature that I have mentioned, as well as many others, we shall find our list of the few selected works of outstanding genius begin with a Greek name.

"That depends," our modernist may say, * ' on the principles on which you make your selection. Of course the average gram- maticusof the present day will begin his se- lected historians with Herodotus and Thu-

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cydides, just as he will begin his poets with Homer, because he has been brought up to think that sort of thing. He is blinded, as usual, with the past. Give us a Greekless generation or two and the superstition will disappear." How are we to answer this? With due humility, I think, and yet with a certain degree of confidence. According to Dionysius Thrax, the last and highest of the six divisions of grammatike was KpL- <rt? TToi^/Aarcw, the judgment or criticism of works of imagination. And the voice of the great mass of trained grammatikoi counts for something. Of course they have their faults and prejudices, — the tradition con- stantly needs correcting, — but we must use the best criteria that we can get. As a rule, any man who reads Herodotus and Thucydides with due care and understand- ing recognizes their greatness. If a partic- ular person refuses to do so, I think we can fairly ask him to consider the opinions of

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recognized judges. And the judgment of those who know the grammata most widely and deeply will certainly put these Greek names very high in their respective lists.

On the ground of pure intellectual merit, therefore, apart from any other considera- tions, I think any person ambitious of ob- taining some central grasp on the gram- mata of the human race would always do well to put a good deal of his study into Greek literature. Even if he were father- less, like Melchizedek, or homeless, like a visitor from Mars, I think this would hold. But if he is a member of our Western civ- ilization, a citizen of Europe or America, the reasons for studying Greek and Latin increase and multiply. Western civiliza- tion, especially the soul of it as distin- guished from its accidental manifestations, is, after all, a unity and not a chaos ; and it is a unity chiefly because of its ancestry, a unity of descent and of brotherhood. (If

[40]

any one thinks my word "brotherhood'7 too strong in the present state of Europe, I would remind him of the relationship be- tween Cain and Abel.)

vn

THE civilization of the Western world is a unity of descent and brotherhood ; and when we study the grammata of bygone men we naturally look to the writings from which our own are descended. Now, I am sometimes astonished at the irrelevant and materialistic way in which this idea is in- terpreted. People talk as if our thoughts were descended from the fathers of our flesh, and the fountain-head of our present literature and art and feeling was to be sought among the Jutes and Angles.

"Paradise Lost" and "Prometheus Unbound ' ' are not the children of ' * Piers Ploughman" and "Beowulf"; they are the children of Virgil and Homer, of ./Es-

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chylus and Plato. And "Hamlet" and "Midsummer Night's Dream" come mainly from the same ancestors, though by a less direct descent.

I do not wish to exaggerate. The mere language in which a book is written counts, of course, for much . It fixes to some extent the forms of the writer's art and thought. "Paradise Lost" is clearly much more English in character than the " Pharsalia " is Spanish or the ' ' City of God ' ' African. Let us admit freely that there must of ne- cessity be in all English literature a strain of what one may call vernacular English thought, and that some currents of it, cur- rents of great beauty and freshness, would hardly have been different if all Romance literature had been a sealed book to our tradition. It remains true that from the Renaissance onward — nay, from Chaucer and even from Alfred — the higher and more massive workings of our literature

[42]

owe more to the Greeks and Romans than to our own un-Romanized ancestors. And the same is true of every country in Europe. Even in Scandinavia, which possesses a really great home literature in some ways as noble as the Greek or the Hebrew, the main currents of literary thought and feel- ing, the philosophy and religion and the higher poetry, owe more to the Grasco- Roman world than to that of the Vikings. The movements that from time to time spring up in various countries for reviving the old home tradition and expelling the foreigner have always had an exotic char- acter. The German attempts to worship Odin, to regard the Empire as a gathering of the German tribes, to expel all non-Ger- manic words from the language by the help of an instrument called — not very fortu- nately— a "Centralbureau," have surely been symptoms of an error only not ridicu- lous because it is so deeply tragic. The

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twisting of the English language by some fine writers, so that a simple Latin word like ' ' cave ' ' gives place to a recondite old English " stoneydark " ; the attempts in France to reject the ' ' gaulois ' ' and become truly "critique," are more attractive, but hardly in essence more defensible. There is room for them as protests, as experi- ments, as personal adventures, or as re- actions against a dominant main stream. They are not a main stream themselves. The main stream is that which runs from Rome and Greece and Palestine, the Chris- tian and classical tradition. We nations of Europe would do well to recognize it and rejoice in it. It is in that stream that we find our unity, unity of origin in the past, unity of movement and imagination in the pres- ent ; to that stream that we owe our com- mon memories and our power of under- standing one another, despite the confusion of tongues that has now fallen upon us and

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the inflamed sensibilities of modern nation- alism. The German Emperor's dictum, that the boys and girls in his empire must "grow up little Germans and not little Greeks and Romans,' ' is both intellectually a Philistine policy and politically a gospel of strife.

I trust no one will suppose that I am pleading for a dead orthodoxy or an en- forced uniformity of taste or thought . There is always a place for protests against the main convention, for rebellion, paradox, partisanship, and individuality, and for every personal taste that is sincere. Prog- ress comes by contradiction. Eddies and tossing spray add to the beauty of every stream and keep the water from stagnancy. But the truegrammaticus, while expressing faithfully his personal predilections or spe- cial sensitiveness, will stand in the midst of the grammata not as a captious critic nor yet as a jealous seller of rival wares, but as

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a returned traveller amid the country and landscape that he loves. The traditio, the handing-down of the intellectual acquisi- tions of the human race from one genera- tion to another, the constant selection of thoughts and discoveries and feelings and events so precious that they must be made into books, and then of books so precious that they must be copied and re-copied and not allowed to die — the traditio itself is a wonderful and august process, full, no doubt, of abysmal gaps and faults, like all things human, but full also of that strange half-baffled and yet not wholly baffled splen- dour which marks all the characteristic works of man. I think the grammaticus, while not sacrificing his judgment, should accept it and rejoice in it — rejoice to be the intellectual child of his great forefathers, to catch at their spirit, to carry on their work, to live and die for the great unknown pur- pose which the eternal spirit of man seems

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to be working out upon the earth. He will work under the guidance of love and faith, not, as so many do, under that of ennui and irritation.

VIII

MY subject to-day has been the faith of a scholar, religio grammatici. This does not mean any denial or disrespect toward the religions of others. A grammaticus who cannot understand other people's minds is failing in an essential part of his work. The religion of those who follow physical sci- ence is a magnificent and life-giving thing. The traditio would be utterly imperfect without it. It also gives man an escape from the world about him — an escape from the noisy present into a region of facts which are as they are and not as foolish human beings want them to be ; an escape from the commonness of daily happenings into the remote world of high and severely

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trained imagination ; an escape from mor- tality in the service of a growing and dur- able purpose, the progressive discovery of truth. I can understand the religion of the artist, the religion of the philanthropist. I can understand the religion of those many people, mostly young, who reject alike books and microscopes and easels and committees, who forget both the before and the hereafter, and live rejoicing in an actual concrete present, which they can en- noble by merely loving it, as a happy man may get more beauty out of an average field of grass and daisies than out of all the land- scapes in the National Gallery.

All these things are good, and those who pursue them may well be soldiers in one army or pilgrims on the same eternal quest. If we fret and argue and fight one another now, it is mainly because we are so much under the power of the enemy. I sometimes wish that we men of science and letters could

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all be bound by some vow of renunciation or poverty, like monks of the Middle Ages; but of course no renunciation could be so all-embracing as really to save us from that power. The enemy has no definite name, though in a certain degree we all know him. He who puts always the body before the spirit, the dead before the liv- ing, the avayKalov before the /caXoz/ ; who makes things only in order to sell them ; who has forgotten that there is such a thing as truth, and measures the world by adver- tisement or by money ; who daily defiles the beauty that surrounds him and makes vulgar the tragedy ; whose innermost reli- gion is the worship of the lie in his soul. The Philistine, the vulgarian, the great sophist, the passer of base coin for true, he is all about us and, worse, he has his out- posts inside us, persecuting our peace, spoiling our sight, confusing our values, making a man's self seem greater than the

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race and the present thing more important than the eternal. From him and his influ- ence we find our escape by means of the grammata into that calm world of theirs, where stridency and clamour are forgotten in the ancient stillness, where the strong iron is long since rusted, and the rocks of granite broken into dust, but the great things of the human spirit still shine like stars pointing man's way onward to the great triumph or the great tragedy; and even the little things, the beloved and ten- der and funny and familiar things, beckon across gulfs of death and change with a magic poignancy, the old things that our dead leaders and forefathers loved, viva ad- huc et desidcrio pulcriora.1

1 «« Living still and more beautiful because of our longing."

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