Religio grammatici; the religion of a man of letters

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

2034619

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.

[4]

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

t*]

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

[6]

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-

[r]

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,

[ 8]

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.

[9]

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-

[II ]

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.

C 12]

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

[ 13 ]

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.

[ 14 ]

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

[ 15 ]

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.

[ 16 ]

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

[ 17]

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

[ 18]

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-

[19]

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.

[20]

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

[21 ]

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

[22]

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-

[23 ]

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

[24 ]

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:—

[25 ]

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

[26]

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

[27]

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

[28 ]

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

[29]

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

[ 30]

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

[ 31 ]

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

[ 32 ]

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

[ 33 ]

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

[34]

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.

[35]

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

[ 36 ]

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,

[37]

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-

[ 38 ]

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

[ 39]

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-

[41 ]

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

[43 ]

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

[44]

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

[45 ]

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

[46 ]

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

[47]

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

[48 ]

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

[49 ]

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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