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Professor W.S. Milner

THE GREEK GENIUS

AND

ITS MEANING TO US

:N LIVINGSTONE

FELLOW AND ASSISTANT TUTOR OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE
OXFORD

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1912

77
L58

HENRY FROWDE

PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK

TORONTO AND MELBOURNE

PREFACE

WHEN I began to teach Latin and Greek, a friend asked
me what I supposed myself to have learnt from them, and
what I was trying to teach others. This book was written
as an attempt to answer the question, as far as Greek
is concerned. It was written to inform, primarily myself,
secondarily my pupils. It is therefore intentionally
popular, and, like the poems of Lucilius, designed neque
indoctissimis neque doctissimis : it uses modern illustrations,
and tries, as far as possible, to put what it has to say in
a readable form. I hope it may serve as a general intro-
duction to the study of Greek literature, and for that
purpose be acceptable, not only to such students or
teachers of the classics as feel themselves to be in the
class indicated above, but also to the considerable public
who take a humane interest in what Greece has done for
the world. For my intention has been to try and make
the spirit of Greece alive for myself at the present day, to
translate it, as far as I could, into modern language, and
to trace its relationship to our own ways of thinking
and feeling.

If I do not apologize for the manner in which this
ambitious task has been executed, it is not because I
have no misgivings. Few people could write a book on
this subject, and feel satisfied with it. Still, if I am not
convincing, I shall at any rate be contentious, and
educationally the second quality is perhaps more valuable
than the first. On the same grounds I would excuse my-
self for having raised many questions which are left half-

A 2

4 PREFACE

answered : the method may stimulate readers, if it does
not satisfy them.

4 The Greek Genius ' is an unsatisfactory title for a book
which says nothing about Greek politics or Greek sculpture ;
but ' the Genius of Greek Literature ' was too narrow for
my purpose, and ' Some Aspects of the Greek Genius ',
which I should have preferred, was already appropriated :
so that the present name has been adopted, and the exact
scope of the book indicated in the introductory chapter
(see esp. pp. 13, 14). That chapter also explains who, for
my purposes, ' the Greeks ' 'have been taken to be ; it is
intended to safeguard the book against certain obvious
criticisms, and may well be omitted by general readers
who are not concerned with these points.

As I am writing for a general audience, I have either
quoted in English or else translated my quotations. For
Thucydides and Plato I have generally made use of
Jowett. Gaps in the quotations are not indicated unless
they affect the general sense of the passage. For a book
of this kind an index is of little value, and I have therefore
substituted a full table of contents.

The book owes much to my mother and sister, who
have helped me with criticism and in other ways ; to
Mr. P. E. Matheson, my former tutor, and to Mr. R. W.
Chapman of the University Press, who have corrected
the proofs and made suggestions ; and to Professor Gilbert
Murray, to whom I should like to express especial grati-
tude, not only for reading and criticizing most of the
book in draft, but also for teaching me, as he has taught
so many others, to look on Greek thought as a living
thing.1

1 I have, however, no right to imply that Professor Murray
agrees with what the book contains.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION

/ PAGE

1 . The achievement of Greece T .-. . . . . 1 1

2. Questions suggested by it, and aim of this book . 13

3. Some difficulties and the attitude taken up to them

in it .-.•'.. ... . . . 14

(a) Is there a Greek genius ?

(6) In which of the Greek races is it to be sought ?

(d) Are we to consider the ordinary man or only

the writers and thinkers ?

4. Our aim is to form some idea of Hellenism. Con-

clusions from this ... 21

CHAPTER I

THE GREEK GENIUS: THE NOTE OF BEAUTY

Various views of the Greeks . . . . . 23

A. The idea that moral striving was their great mark . 24

1. Objections to this : its absence in typical Greeks . 25

2. Plato and S. Paul 26

3. The Greeks . . . . . . . 27 -

(a) Had no sense of sin.

(b) Were not exclusively interested in the moral

side of man.

these matters.

B. The idea that the Greeks were primarily lovers of

beauty ....... 29

1 . This view not borne out by Thucydides and others . 3 1

2. But their sense of beauty was more general than ours . 34

3. Testimony of Heine and Renan to it . . . 35

4. It appears in ....... 35

(a) Their names.

(b) Their sayings.

5 CONTENTS

PAGE

(d) Their use of the word KoXd?.

5. They were more than lovers of beauty . 39

Note. A certain characteristic of Greek style . . 40

CHAPTER II
THE NOTE OF FREEDOM

1. The meaning of Greek truthfulness: Greek literature

and Irish legend contrasted . . 43

2. Primary cause of it the religious and political freedom

of Greece ...... 45

A. Religious freedom.

1 . Few attacks on free thought in Athens : contrast with

Inquisition ..... 47

2. This freedom promoted by . . . . 51

(a) Anthropomorphism of Greek religion tending to

toleration.

(b) Absence of a Bible.

and of Jgrj2mfith£us._

(d) Greek attitude to God : contrasted with Jewish

and Christian attitude.

B. Political freedom.

1. Greek instinct for political individualism : instances . 62

2. The old Comedy . . . . . .64

3. Theory of liberty in the Funeral Speech ... 66

4. Contrast with Rome : interferences with liberty

there ....... 69

5. Reasons for this difference . . . . . 72

CHAPTER III
THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS

1 . There is a further cause of Greek truthfulness . . 74

2. Directness in Greek descriptions of Nature : Alcman

and Mrs. Browning ..... 76

CONTENTS 7

V PAGE

3. Similar quality generally in Greek view of life : Greek

ideas on ....... 77

(a) Love.

(6) Children and friends.

4. Meaning of this quality : it is neither an absence of

convention, nor unerring truthfulness . 88

5 . Due to the Greeks being a primitive people . . 90

6. Consequent absence of mysticism, romanticism, senti-

mentality . . . . . .go

7. But they were not brutal realists .... 92

8. Deviations from directness in Greek literature . . 94

9. Why it persisted ....... 95

10. Definition of it ; its effects ...".. 96

11. Criticism of it and contrast with modern literature . 96

12. Instances of poetry, Latin and English, which is not

direct ....... 99

13. Directness leads to increased pleasure in common

things ....... 105

14. It is hostile to sentimentality . . . .107
Note. Further exceptions to it in Greek literature . . 108

CHAPTER IV

THE NOTE OF HUMANISM

1 . The Greeks viewed the world from a human standpoint,

and humanized . . . . . .no

(a) God.
(6) Nature.
(c) Life.

2. Greek humanism illustrated from . . . .113

(a) Their views of a future world.

(b) Three Greek definitions of happiness.

3. Humanism in practice : pictures of Greek life from

Xenophon . . . . . .116

4. Humanism and Christianity . . . . .123

5. Its significance for us . . . . . .123

8 CONTENTS

PAGE

6. Humanism leads to

(a) Stress on bodily excellence . . . .124

(i) Greek feeling for beauty,
(ii) Physical pleasures,
(iii) Their festivals,
(iv) Dread of old age.

(b) Stress on intellectual excellence . . 133

(i) Intellectual activity at Athens,
(ii) Socrates.

7. Athens and an English University . . . .137

CHAPTER V

TWO TYPES OF HUMANISM: PINDAR AND HERODOTUS ,

The difficulty of finding a typical Greek . . . 139^*

A. Pindar ......... 140

1. His ideals ........ 140

2. Gloomy view of life combined with a power of enjoy-

ing it . /. ... 142

3. His philosophy ./ . 145

B. Herodotus . '. 146

1. Not a scientific historian . . . . .147

2. Yet impartial ; Plutarch, De Malignitate Herodoti . 147

3. Omnivorous intellectual interest . . . .150

4. Not a religious nor a moral genius . . . 152

5. How he is a representative Greek . . . 154

6. Gloomy yet courageous view of life . . . .157

7. Ideas of happiness . . . . . .158

CHAPTER VI

THE NOTES OF SANITY AND MANYSIDEDNESS

Some similarities and differences of Greek and modern

ideals . ' . . . . . . 160

A. In literature.

1. Phenomena of modern literature which were mainly

absent from Greek . . . . .162

2. The Greeks attracted by broad human interests . 164

CONTENTS 9

PAGE

3. Homer and Oscar Wilde . . . . .164

4. The tragedians : absence of morbidity : the Oedipus

Tyrannus ....... 166

5. Greek sanity due to . . . . . .168

(a) Their primitiveness.

(6) Their keeping in touch with ordinary life.

6. Hence no Art for Art's sake, nor Intellect for In-

tellect's sake . . . . . .170

7 . Traces of these in Euripides and elsewhere : Daphnis

and Chloe . . . . . . .171

B. In life.

1. Modern divorce between thinking and acting un-

Greek 174

2. Greek manysidedness . . . . . 175

3. Its dangers ........ 176

4. Its advantages ....... 178 /

Connexion of the various notes of Hellenism . . 179^

CHAPTER VII

SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO

Exceptions to those notes of Hellenism . . . .180

A. Plato.

1. He is often ........ 183

(a) Not direct : theories on poetry and love.

(b) Hostile to liberty : political restrictions in the

Republic and the Laws.

political life : gospel of another world.

2. His kinship with Christianity . . . . -195

3. This seen in his mistrust of human nature . . 196

B. Other unhellenic elements in Greek literature.

1. Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries opposed to

humanism . . . . . .197

2. Extent of their influence on Greek literature limited . 199

3. Still Greece gives examples of the opposite of

humanism . . 202

io CONTENTS

CHAPTER VIII
THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER

y PAGE

1 . The fifth century and the Greek genius . ^r . . 203

2. Commencement of the age of reason : Thales . . 204

3. It reaches its acme in Athens .... 207

4. The significance of the Sophists . . . .210

5. Their teaching 211

6. Its nature as seen in Thucydides their pupil . . 213

7. Its results 216

(a) Growth of Criticism.

(6) Dawn of the spirit of Science. The Socratic

method .
(c) Interest in morality. The mission of Socrates.

8. The Greek union of thought with morality . . 224

9. Euripides typical of the fifth century . . . 226

(a) Of its critical spirit. His treatment of legend

(b) Of its moral interest. The Ion.

10. In the fifth century the Greek genius enters on a new

course ....... 236

1 1 . Why its subsequent history is less attractive . . 238

(a) Decay of Greek Life and Politics .

(b) Spiritual degeneracy of the fourth century.

Menander and Aristotle.

EPILOGUE

1. The 'modernity ' of Greek literature . . .245

2. Reasons for it ....... 247

INTRODUCTION

EUROPE has nearly four million square miles ; Lancashire
has 1,700 ; Attica has 700. Yet this tiny country has
given us an art which we, with it and all that the world
has done since it for our models, have equalled perhaps,
but not surpassed. It has given us the staple of our
vocabulary in every domain of thought and knowledge.
Politics, tyranny, democracy, anarchism, philosophy,
physiology, geology, history — these are all Greek words.
It has seized and up to the present day kept hold of our
higher education. It has exercised an unfailing fascina-
tion, even on minds alien or hostile. Rome took her
culture thence. Young Romans completed their education
in the Greek schools. Roman orators learnt their trade
from Greek rhetoricians. Roman proconsuls on their
way to the East stopped to spend a few days talking to
the successors of Plato and Aristotle in the Academy and
Lyceum. Roman aristocrats imported Greek philosophers
to live in their families. And so it was with natures
less akin to Greece than the Roman. S. Paul, a Hebrew
of the Hebrews, who called the wisdom of the Greeks
foolishness, was drawn to their Areopagus, and found him-
self accommodating his gospel to the style, and quoting
verses from the poets, of this alien race. After him, the
Church, which was born to protest against Hellenism,
translated its dogmas into the language of Greek thought
and finally crystallized them in the philosophy of Aristotle.

12 INTRODUCTION

Then for a time Greek influence on the West died down.
An intellectual and political system repugnant to its genius
mastered the world, and Hellenism, buried in Byzantine
libraries and imprisoned in a language that Europe had
forgotten, seemed to have finally passed away. A few
centuries go by ; suddenly we find Italy intoxicated with
the Greek spirit, as with new wine ; poring over it,
interpreting it, hopelessly misunderstanding it ; leaving
Pre-Raphaelite art in order to dig up its broken statues,
forgetting the magnificent monuments of Gothic archi-
tecture in order to imitate its Parthenon, deserting Dante
in order to hunt for its crabbed manuscripts, at the expense
of fortune and of life. Even then the revivifying power
of Hellenism was not spent nor its work done. Two cen-
turies later, a poor tradesman's son born among the ' ugly
Brandenburg sand-hills ' and educated in the stagnant
German universities of the day, catches a glimpse of the
meaning of Greek Art, never forgets the vision through
weary years as schoolmaster and librarian in provincial
German towns, professes Romanism that he may follow the
gleam to Italy, and there living in perpetual communion
with Greek sculpture, ' opens a new sense for the study of
art and initiates a new organ for the human spirit '.x With
Winckelmann the race starts anew, and has run unbroken
to our own day. He handed the torch of Hellenism to
Goethe, and it became the law of life and the standard of
beauty to the profoundest poet of the modern world.
Goethe passed it on to Nietzsche, and the great rebel and
prophet of our age found in pre-Socratic Greece the nearest
c likenesses to his ideal humanity. Continually laid aside —
N it is too tremendous and fatiguing for the world to live

1 Hegel, quoted in Pater's essay on Winckelmann (Renaissance
Studies).

INTRODUCTION 13

up to ; continually rediscovered — for the world cannot
live without it : that is the history of the Greek genius.
What is the nature of this genius

a paupere terra
missus in imperium magnum?

What qualities made it great and give it permanence ?
Why did it attract men so various as Cicero, S. Paul, Pico
della Mirandola, Nietzsche ? Why does it attract us ?
How does its literature stand to ours ? What were the
secrets of its success ? Are they secrets of value to us,
or have we far outstripped it ? What view of life, if
any, does Greece represent ? Is Hellenism identical with,
or antagonistic, or complementary to Christianity ? Are
any of us Hellenists now, and what is Hellenism ? Has
it a genuine message for us, or are its ideals as dead as
its language ? What relation has it to modern thought,
and in particular to that spirit of science which we regard
as peculiarly the child of our own tunes ? What changes
came over Greece, as the years passed ? How far are
Homer and Herodotus, Herodotus and Thucydides,
Thucydides and Aristotle, really akin ? What spiritual
development transformed the sixth into the fifth century
and the fifth into the fourth ?

These are obvious questions which we might naturally
expect every student of Greece to have answered, in some
sort, by the time he leaves his public school : they are
so obvious indeed, that if he has no answer to them he
may reasonably be said to have hitherto studied in his
sleep. Yet many persons survive to a far later stage
than their schooldays, and gain a real acquaintance with
Greek literature, and receive in examinations the official
stamp of success, and yet remain in a comfortable vague-
ness about both the questions and the answers to them.

14 INTRODUCTION

To such people the following book may be of use ; for
it was written with the idea of helping its readers, by
agreement or disagreement, to give some definiteness and
coherency to the fleeting impressions, which are often
all that is left after ten years' study of the Greeks. It
does not deal directly with all the questions mentioned
above, but it touches on most of them. For it is an attempt
briefly to suggest what are the qualities that make Greece
notable, to outline the main elements in its genius, so
far as that genius is revealed in its literature. Of politics
we shall not attempt to treat.

The most obvious cavil against any attempt to define
the genius of a race is that races have no genius, and least
of all that race which we compendiously call The Greeks.
Are we going to label with a chill and narrow formula
that wide range of glowing activity ? Phidias and Cimon
and Alcibiades and Aristotle, Hesiod on his Boeotian
farm, Pindar celebrating athletic victories, Socrates
questioning in the market-place, Archilochus blackening
the characters of his enemies ; or again, the common
Athenian following Xenophon from Cunaxa with the
Ten Thousand, listening to the tragedies at the Great
Dionysia, drinking himself drunk in honour of the god,
walking in the mystic procession to Eleusis, voting for the
Sicilian expedition or for the condemnation of Pericles ?
Could any race be summed up in a few phrases ? And
shall we attempt it in the case of the Greeks ? No doubt
it is a rash attempt to make. Yet there is such a thing
as the English character, though there are many English-
men and though they behave in very different ways. It
is true to say that Englishmen are lovers of law and
custom, though Shelley was English ; that they are sober

INTRODUCTION 15

and unexcitable, though the story of the South Sea
Bubble would not lead one to suppose it. So too there is
a definite Greek character, which no one would confuse, for
instance, with the Roman.

If we agree to this, our next difficulty is to decide whom
we mean by the Greeks : do we mean Dorians, lonians,
Aeolians; or, narrowing the field to the larger communities,
Athenians, Spartans, Thebans, Asiatic Greeks ? Again, are
we thinking of the average citizen, or of the philosopher
and poet and artist : in Athens, for example, do we take
account of Cimon and Thrasybulus, and the ordinary
man whom we meet in the private speeches of the orators,
or only of Thucydides and Plato and their peers ? Again,
from what ages are we taking our ideas of the Greek
spirit : are we excluding everything before Homer and
after Demosthenes ? If so, are not our conclusions
valueless, for they ignore half the manifestations of that
stupendous elan vital : and if not, how shall we bring
into one fold Thucydides the historian and Aristides
the rhetor, the audience of the Funeral Speech and the
Graeculus esuriens of the Roman empire ? Here are three
difficulties at the outset, which may be taken in turn.

Firstly : by the Greek genius we shall mean a spirit
which manifested itself in certain peoples inhabiting lands
washed by the Aegean sea : it appears to have been only
partly determined by race : Athens was its heart, and little
or nothing of it is to be seen at Sparta : but Pindar
possessed it though he was a Theban, Aristotle though he
came from Stagira, Thales though he was born and lived
in Asia, and Homer though his birthplace is not known.
Perhaps this definition evades the difficulty : but it seems
to suit the facts.

Secondly : in defining this spirit we shall keep our

16 INTRODUCTION

eyes fixed on what is admitted to have been its most
brilliant season of flower, the years between 600 and 400
B. c. ; without forgetting that a hundred years passed
before the most influential philosophies of Greece came
to birth and its far-reaching permeation of the world
began.

This of course is an arbitrary limitation, and many books
about the Greeks have stumbled and many criticisms on
them blundered, because their makers have either tacitly
stopped at Aristotle, and omitted developments subse-
sequent to him, or have forgotten that there were move-
ments in Greece which have left no literature behind, or
at best only a literature of fragments. They deny that
the Greeks were mystics, and Neoplatonist ghosts rise to
confront them ; or that they were ascetics, and there are
the Orphics with their fast-days and Pythagoras with
his beans ; or that they were austere moralists, and the
Stoics give them the lie ; or that they had a missionary
spirit, and Cynic philosophers wander over the face of
the earth preaching ; or that they cared for scenery,
and the best poems of Theocritus deal with little else ; or
that they practised Art for Art's sake, and the New
Sophists have anticipated the freaks of symbolist litera-
ture, and Aelius Aristides shows more than the literary
austerity of Flaubert. For in fact the Greeks were
parents alike of ribaldry and of high moral endeavour, of
rationalism and of emotional worship, of Socrates and of
Pythagoras, of Aristophanes and of Zeno. They are the
epitome of human nature. Quemvis hominum secum attulit
ad nos : the Greek has brought us all humanity wrapped
up in himself. And any one who attempts a book on his

INTRODUCTION 17

genius will learn in the writing to beware of denying him
any quality.

But if the Greeks are so many-sided, if their genius
expands over so many ages, why are we confining ourselves
to a few particular manifestations of it ? Why are we
saying so little of Alexandrian savant, of Stoic and
Neoplatonist philosopher ?

For several reasons ; under most of which lies the fact
that we are writing not a history of the Greeks, not even
a history of the Greek genius, but an account of its sig-
nificance to us. Now certain achievements of Hellenism are
legacies to the world for ever. But others are not ; either
they are of no value, or they are of little value, or they are
to be found elsewhere in a purer and better form. These
we shall briefly notice or entirely omit — among them
are Neoplatonism, Orphism, the mysteries, Alexandrian
science. Further, in every race some individuals embody
the national genius, others stand aloof from it, and are
by-products, ' sports,' rebels, aliens. In speaking of the
genius of the race, we emphasize the former and pass
over the latter. Thus in a history of the English genius
we should say little of Crashaw, Pope, Blake, Keats,
Shelley, Clough, Pater, but much of Chaucer, Milton,
Johnson, Dickens, Borrow, Macaulay, Browning. We shall
make analogous omissions in the case of Greece. We
shall concentrate on a certain age, which did the greatest
work and has not been called classical for nothing. The
merchant of Xeres has a cask of choice nectar, which he
uses to give body and flavour to his wine : he calls it the
madre vino. The years between 600 and 400 B. c. are the
madre vino of Hellenism. For all their greatness, Plutarch
and Lucian, Zeno and Epicurus, are not the Greeks of the
earlier age. They themselves are different ; and more,

1358 B

i8 INTRODUCTION

their circumstances are changed. Hellenism still flowers,
but not in the same perfect soil. And other elements
are crossed with it : the original strain is weakened, aged ;
though, to paraphrase the words of Longinus, if old age,
it is still the old age of Greece.

Thirdly and finally, when we speak of Greeks, we
shall have in mind primarily the thinkers and writers ;
and the average Athenian only for certain purposes to
be hereafter defined. If any one conies to these pages
looking for a portrait of the ordinary Greek, he will be
disappointed. He will find, for instance, that they treat
of the Greek nation without a criticism of its practical
capacity for politics ; without a hint of the Greek
colonies, the Persian wars, the Corcyrean massacres, the
Mytilenean debate ; without a mention of the honest Cimon,
the patriotic Thrasybulus, the mercurial Alcibiades, the
brilliant Themistocles, the coarse and unscrupulous
Aeschines. Plato says that his citizens had ' an insatiable
love of money ',*• and that in their lawsuits half the
people were perjured.2 You would not guess it from
the following pages : they ignore all the vices and
frailties, and some of the virtues of the Greeks.

A critic finding this to be so, might well clamour for
more ' historical background ' ; and certainly such methods
need justification. Perhaps the following analogy will
give it.

Suppose that, instead of Hellenism, I were ambitious
enough to essay a book on the genius of Christianity. I
might speak of it as a religion which put before all things
the peremptory claims of the service of God, which
found the principal obstacle to such service in individual
selfishness, whether it took the form of lust for pleasure
1 Laws, 831. * Ib., 948.

INTRODUCTION 19

or for great possessions, which hated mere rules and
forms because it was the gospel of the spirit of life, and
which therefore drew most of its disciples from the poor,
the sinful, the rejected, and the despised ; and I might
cite, as the completest expression of its nature, the Beati-
tudes and the chapter on Love in the first epistle to the
Corinthians. Then, for instances, I might range through
the centuries, selecting from all ages persons in whom this
spirit seemed to have been embodied, men, women, kings,
slaves, anchorites, millionaires, philosophers, soldiers,
bringing history and life under contribution, and coupling
with famous names the more obscure virtues of unnoticed
saints. In fact, I should omit the ' historical background ',
or insert one that was arbitrary and (in a sense) untrue.

Yet, if a writer did try to narrate the story of what
Christianity had actually been through the centuries
since its Founder's death, balancing the high lights by
dark shadows from the histories of the various churches,
would his revised version be a truer picture of the meaning
of Christianity than the ideal and unreal sketch of which
I first spoke ? Ceteris paribus, it would not.

No, if we were trying to understand the genius of
Christianity, we should not consider all those who
professed it, and in their generation served God and
Mammon, and before the eyes of a lenient world were
entitled to claim its promises and share its Kingdom ;
we should study the lives of its saints. It is the same
with Hellenism. To understand its genius, we must
look, not at the men in whom some faint tincture of
it was mixed with alien or indifferent things, but at
those in whom it was most fully realized, at its ' saints ' ;
and in these, must fix our eyes, not on their weakness but
on their strength : not on what they were but on what

20 INTRODUCTION

they were tending to be, in the expressive Greek phrase,
8 t8vvavTo clvai, their meaning.

The saints of Christianity have been drawn from all
classes, yet the book of the Recording Angel would probably
show that most of them were drawn from the ' fools of
this world ' and had led poor, dull, illiterate lives. The
saints of Hellenism were drawn from another class.
They are Pindar and Pericles and Thucydides and
Socrates, and those men before whose minds had passed
visions of art or the conception of science, or the dream
of a race of beings living a beautiful, complete, and
human life.

Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity.

The men who built and based Hellenism were thinkers
and artists : these are the people with whom we shall
have to deal. In so far as the Greek was enterprising,
dishonest, or superstitious, we are not interested in him :
for these qualities are not part of the Greek gift to Europe.
We shall not discuss his Orphism, nor his Chthonian
worships, nor his anthropology, nor his political failures,
nor his commercial morality, nor his military efficiency,
nor his attitude to barbarians, slaves, and women. The
ordinary Greek only interests us so far as he shared in
the genius of his race and was a particle in that great
wave which flung itself so high on the shores of the world :
or in so far as he was capable of the life which the thinkers
and artists of his race conceived : or in so far as he was
the audience necessary to them, the milieu without which
they could hardly have been, their e<roy \op-nyia, as
Aristotle might have said. But otherwise he does not

INTRODUCTION 21

concern us. We are trying, not to write a history of the
Greeks, but to form some idea of Hellenism.

Even in the greatest Greeks there is much that we must
ignore. Supposing Plato and Pindar to have a vein of
Orphism, and Pythagoras queer ideas on numbers ;
supposing Aeschylus to be touched with mysticism and
Euripides with mysticism and morbidity, the student
of the Greek genius has a right to disregard these pecu-
liarities, if he feels that he has his hand on an essential
quality in Hellenism and that they are inconsistent
with it. For he is not concerned with the clothes that
from time to time were assumed by Hellenism, but in
the end were laid aside and wore to dust ; nor with the
diseases that attacked it, disfigured it, and impaired its
strength ; his business is to see it in the full health of
its vital powers, and anything hostile or alien to these
he may disregard.

No doubt this leaves him a wide discretion and puts
powers in his hands which he may misuse. But that is
inevitable. There are no mechanical tests for ascertaining
what the Greek spirit was ; there is no test except the one
of which Aristotle speaks ; the Greeks are o>y 6 Qpovipos
av opio-ftev, they are what the sensible man would decide
them to be. And every man must be his own 0p6i/t/*oy.
The only thing we can do is to give our views as clearly
as possible, and leave the reader to assent or disagree.
The following pages attempt that task, but in elucidation
of the position there taken up, I may state the principle
which I have followed. I seem to find the Greek spirit
at its purest in Homer, the lyric poets before 450,
Herodotus and Aristophanes ; in Sophocles and Thucy-
dides, though otherwise unchanged, it has lost its first
freshness ; in Aeschylus, Euripides, and Plato elements

22 INTRODUCTION

alien to it are present. In the fourth century a certain
weariness, a sense of the complexity of life, impairs its
energy in the thinkers, while the orators are dragged
down by their audience to a conventional standard of
thought, and have about them something of the political
hack. After 336 B. c. free Athens is dead ; Hellenism
itself is middle-aged, and both for pleasure and profit
we turn the pages a century back. This is substantially
the view taken by Nietzsche ; the Greeks have had no
acuter critic.

CHAPTER I

THE GREEK GENIUS : THE NOTE OF BEAUTY

As to the Greek genius the critics have always been in
the strangest disagreement. Goethe thought that it was
placid, stately and in repose like its sculpture, and pictured
the Greeks as an Olympian humanity living in an ideal
world, whose very passions were tranquil and profound.
Other writers see a world of Naiads and Bacchantes and
wine and love, reeling in an ecstasy of drunken abandon-
ment to every gusty desire and instinct of the flesh,
nakedly animal. To Hobbes a classical education seemed
to promote Rebellion against Monarchy, especially in
' young men and all others that are unprovided of the
Antidote of solid Reason, receiving a strong and delightful
impression of the great exploits of warre, atchieved by
the Conductors of their Armies ' ; Bentham, expressing
much the same opinion in the language of a later age,
thought that the study of Greek might lead men to
imitate the legislation of Solon and Lycurgus, and so
impair the security of property ; Johnson, in a petulant
paradox, described the audience of Demosthenes as ' a
barbarous people, an assembly of brutes ' ; an eighteenth-
century translator of Herodotus fears that ' indolence was
the characteristic feature of the Athenians ' ; that ' they
were lovers of their ease and averse to labour ' : while
to-day if you ask an undergraduate (who has probably
been studying their language for some ten years) what

24 THE GREEK GENIUS : CH.

are the peculiar characteristics of the Greeks, he is apt,
after a moment of hesitation, to hazard the suggestion
that the ancients were less sensitive to the beauties of
scenery than ourselves. Quot homines. . . .

None of these theories of Hellenism need engage our
attention long. Some of them have been generally and
justly abandoned ; others are clearly narrow and incom-
plete ; with one we shall deal hereafter. But there is
a view of the Greek genius which seems to be gaining
ground at the present, and which is so important that we
must not overlook it. To-day our attention is being
called to the moral genius of the Greeks, to their
deliberate, laborious and triumphant battle for virtue.
We are asked to see in them a race of men who, emerging,
like other nations, from their primitive state with a con-
ventional code of morality and clinging shreds of barbarism
became conscious of these, and quietly corrected or put
them aside, and, using no art but what every one possesses,
confessing no standard but what every one admits, felt
after, found, and securely possessed themselves of, the
rational principles of justice, mercy, humanity, and
truth. The study of these men and their writings can
give us, we are told, if not an eyayylAtoi/ in the Christian
sense, yet a rule by which we can live ; and their admirers,
prizing the Greek spirit in its graver and more serious
aspects, turn to Greek literature as other men turn to
the Bible. I am thinking here of certain expressions
used by Professor von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff : but
passages in Professor Murray's book on Homer seem
to lend colour to this view.

There is much to support this theory. The severest
critic of Hellenism can hardly deny that a nation which
produced the Aristotelian doctrine of the Mean and the

I THE NOTE OF BEAUTY 25

Stoic ideal of virtue, which gave to the Roman Empire
a philosophy of life, and to the Christian religion a frame-
work of ethics, stands among the moral benefactors of
mankind ; nor is it surprising that some persons are
inclined to see the greatest achievement of Greece in its
struggle out of barbarism to a rational virtue. Certainly
it was a great achievement. Yet before it dazzles us into
believing that the central quality in the Greek spirit was
its moral genius, let us reflect. Is moral genius really the
essential, exceptional, unique gift of the race ? Is it the
character with which the whole nation is stamped, the
quality we think of when we think of the Greeks, the gift
which stares out at us from their literature and history,
the power which inspired the imaginations of their
philosophers and the thoughts of their politicians, which
took form under the hands of their sculptors and on
the lips of their writers, which embodied itself in the
prose and poetry, the art and monuments of Greece ?
Surely not.

The essential qualities of a race should be found in its
most eminent representatives. But a passion for morality
is very subordinate (to say the least) in the genius of some
of the greatest Greeks. To judge by their remaining
fragments, there was none in Sappho and her peers. It
is not conspicuous in Homer or Herodotus : we shall not
learn mercy and righteousness from Achilles or Odysseus.
Aristophanes, a Greek of Greeks, lends even less coun-
tenance to the view which sees in Hellenism a superior type
of Christianity, purged of dogma and adorned with all the
graces and gifts of culture ; and it is at tunes chastening
to remember, as it is in general better to forget, that many
of the most graceful Greek vases are offerings dedicated
to unnatural vice, and many of the most beautiful Greek

26 THE GREEK GENIUS : CH.

statues are figures modelled from notorious courtesans.
Unless we are prepared to ignore the Aphrodites, and to
put Herodotus and Aristophanes on an index librorum
prohibitomm, we must look for some wider generalization
to include them.

Even with men like Socrates and Plato, men very
different from Aristophanes and Herodotus, it may be
questioned how far moral striving was the centre of their
souls. It is not that on certain points their standard is other
than ours. But their whole moral atmosphere is different
from that of a man like S. Paul. Turn to the close of one
of his epistles, where with warning and encouragement,
with argument and exhortation, the Apostle is urging
on some infant community the practice of the Christian
virtues. One on the heels of another, his precepts come
tumbling out, breaking impetuously into questions, rein-
forced by quotations, by adjurations, by appeals to his
personal experience, by prayers, by tears. It is difficult
to select single instances from S. Paul, for the whole of
his epistles are instinct with a feeling which, except perhaps
for certain passages in Plato and Euripides, is absent from
Greek literature ; a passionate hunger for righteousness,
a passionate indignation against those who frustrate it.
He overflows in enthusiastic denunciations. Of sexual
vice he writes ' let it not be once named among you '.
Of avarice he says that the covetous man has no inheri-
tance in the Kingdom of God. Of the chief Christian
virtue he writes in a splendid paradox that though a man
bestow his goods to feed the poor, and have all knowledge
and all faith, yet if he has not charity ' it profiteth him
nothing '. Everywhere he is instant in season and out
of season, without regard of consequences to condemn
evil. For him Christ can have no concord with Belial.

i THE NOTE OF BEAUTY 27

He is exceedingly jealous for the Lord. Very different,
surely, from this is the atmosphere of a Platonic dialogue ;
in passing to it the thermometer seems to have fallen
many degrees. Even if the same conclusions are there,
they are urged with comparative coldness. After S. Paul
there seems something opportunistic about the morality of
Plato and his master.

Partly it was that the Greeks had no real sense of sin.
They regarded their offences as shortcomings and called
them dfjiapriai, 'bad shots.' Such things were bound
to happen, and when they happened were best forgotten.
Useless to spend thought and remorse on bad shots : it
is best to go forward and improve the aim for next time.
But to S. Paul departures from the path of righteousness
are not shortcomings or misses or frailties or failures,
but sins; and sin is something haunting, irreparable
(except for Divine intervention), and, once committed,
standing as ' all eternity's offence '. ^

Partly it was that the Greek was not interested in
the moral side of humanity so exclusively as S. Paul.
He did not concentrate his energies on the virtues,
without which man cannot know God ; nor would he
have been content if he could have made the world j
chaste, sober, charitable, truthful, full of loving kindness
and mercy. He was not always particular about these
qualities, and in any case he required much beside them.
There were other things in life, he thought, as well as
morality ; politics, art, knowledge, feast-days demanded
his attention ; and S. Paul, always playing a single
theme, would have seemed to him one-sided.

Partly it was a difference in method between the Greek
and the Jew. Even when a Greek was deeply interested
in morality, his attitude to it was one of reason rather than

28 THE GREEK GENIUS : CH.

of passion. Here is a passage — not remarkable in itself—
which illustrates this. In a fit of jealousy a woman tries
to poison a youth whom she supposes to be her stepson.
The plot is discovered and he in his turn proposes to kill her.
The priestess of Apollo checks him. ' Did you hear,' he
says, ' that she planned to kill me ? ' ' Yes/ replies the
priestess, ' yet your savage temper is wrong.' ' May I
not kill those who try to kill me ? ' he objects. And how
does the priestess answer him ? Not with indignation,
not with protests against such impious talk, not with
an appeal to feelings or sentiment, but simply with quiet
reason ; ' women, you know, always do hate a stepson.'
And the boy does homage to common sense and lays
his cbpoTTjs aside.1 That is very Greek. Not to be
furious and indignant, but keeping the eye on reason to
trust in that ; not to denounce and threaten, but to point
out the irrationality of sin, knowing that human beings
cannot rest in the irrational ; not to be Isaiah or S. Paul,
but to be Socrates.

But reasonableness, which makes the best moral
thinkers, does not make the best moral reformers. Nor
does the want of a sense of sin make them ; nor does
manysidedness make them. These qualities are un-
favourable to the concentration — I had almost said the
intolerance — without which effective campaigns against
the deeper weaknesses of human nature are hardly to
be fought. So that in spite of their achievements as moral
philosophers, we may well hesitate to place any Greeks
as moralists by the side of the greatest Christians. And
yet, as I write the words, the figures of Zeno and Panaetius
and Poseidonius and the Stoic teachers, with their gospel
of uncompromising and unconditioned virtue, rise to
1 Eur. Ion, 13263.

I THE NOTE OF BEAUTY 29

protest. So dangerous is it to deny any gift to this
manysided people.

Every one has his magnum secretum which will explain
every riddle and unlock every door : and I am inclined to
think that there is one elemental quality from which most
things in the Greek genius may be derived : though it
is not a love of beauty or a passion for righteousness.
But of this more later. At present it will be safer to assume
that the Greeks were as manysided as they seem. We
will therefore pick out certain salient qualities in them,
what in theological language may be called the Notes
of Hellenism : we will define these and indicate the
significance of each separately. That done, it will be
time enough to see whether there is any common factor
in them, whether they can be traced back to any single
source. As the greater part of the book will be occupied
in discussing these separate qualities, it will be well to
plunge at once in medias res. My first Note is the Note
of Beauty : which, if not the most important, is at least
the most obvious characteristic of Hellenism.

At the outset let us guard against a common mis-
conception. The modern interest in Hellenism really dates
from Winckelmann, and Winckelmann drew his ideas
of the Greeks mainly from their art. Hence came a con-
ception of them such as a man might form who had merely
seen the Elgin Marbles and the Aphrodites, and had
never corrected his view of their creators by the study
of Greek history and literature. The Greeks, it appeared,
were beyond all things beauty-lovers. They stripped at
their sports ; they gave prizes for beauty ; Lais fascinated
them ; they spent their days in games and festivals ;

30 THE GREEK GENIUS : CH.

they studied to ' observe propriety both in feature and
action ', so that ' even a quick walk was regarded as
opposed to their sense of decorum '.x Winckelmann had
looked on the tranquil beauty of Greek art, on Niobe and
her daughters unmoved and beautiful in the anguish of
death, on the placid and passionless features of the tur-
bulent goddess of love ; till he was led almost to fancy
that the serene figures of the Parthenon marbles were
portraits of the ordinary Greek, and that the streets of
Athens were full of well-draped statuesque men pacing
reposefully through an august life.

This view (Goethe himself at times encourages it)
coloured the glasses through which Europe looked at
Greece for many generations, and has been corrupted
into a watery aestheticism, very different from what
Winckelmann meant by it. Fifty years ago most people
would have said that the remarkable thing about the
Greeks was their sense of beauty. Towns composed of
beautiful buildings, temples adorned with beautiful
statuary, a population almost entirely consisting of
beautiful young men, who spent their lives in admiring
the beauty around them — such was Athens to the eyes
of the Mid- Victorians ; such it is probably still to most
educated persons who have only a casual knowledge of
Greek culture ; and some well-known paintings perpetuate
the mistake by portraying young Athenians as limp forms,
requiring only a slight change of dress to pass for women
out of a picture by Burne- Jones.

We may make up our minds at once that the Greeks
were not like Jellaby Postlethwaite or the aesthetes in
Patience or Sir William Richmond's young men. Gaping
in wonder at the masterpieces of Phidias was not the daily

1 Winckelmann, Hist, of Greek Art (tr. Lodge), pt. 2. c. 3. § 5.

i THE NOTE OF BEAUTY 31

occupation of Athenians. Indeed, if we could speak to
one of them, there might be several preliminary misunder-
standings to clear up. Imagine, for instance, Thucydides
and Mr. Swinburne meeting in the lower world. We
may suppose the Victorian turning the conversation to
Aeschylus and the Parthenon, and explaining how he and
his friends had looked back with infinite longing to Athens,
out of a world from which beauty had vanished. Doubt-
less Thucydides would receive his rhapsody with politeness,
but he would also feel a touch of wonder at a civiliza-
tion which set exclusive store on these things ; a little
too airpdyp-oav, too indolent, he might call it. ' Yes,' one
may fancy him saying, ' those temples we built with im-
perial money were beautiful, and Aeschylus was a grand
old fighter and poet — I felt more drawn to Euripides my-
self.— But there were greater things in Athens than these.
You have forgotten, I think, our empire and the spirit
that made it ; the eternal glory of Athens rests on that.
One day in the ecclesia, after the plague and the strain
of war had begun to tell, Pericles declared the achieve-
ments by which Athens expected to be remembered
among men — perhaps you have read the words in my
history. He did not mention our poetry, our architecture,
our statuary ; he said nothing of Aeschylus or Phidias ;
but he wished our epitaph in the cemetery of the nations
to be this : " Know that our city has the greatest name
in all the world because she has never yielded to mis-
fortunes, but has sacrificed more lives and endured
more hardships in war than any other. Even if we
should be compelled at last to abate something of
our greatness, yet will the recollection live, that of all
Hellenes we ruled over the greatest number of Hellenic
subjects ; that we withstood our enemies, whether

32 THE GREEK GENIUS : CH.

single or united, in the most terrible wars, and that we
were the inhabitants of a city endowed with every sort
of wealth and greatness. The indolent may criticize,
but the enterprising will emulate, and the unsuccessful
envy us." ' *•

The fifth-century Athenian was no more a Mid- Victorian
aesthete than he was a Cobdenite Liberal. His real
peculiarity was an overpowering energy, that was always
busy at something. With a childish delight he threw
himself on the world that opened before him, travelling,
trading, prospecting, fighting, founding small settlements,
sending out small armies, planning expansion abroad,
executing reform at home, an elector, a voter, an
administrator, a public servant, yet not too busy for
recreation or religion when the calendar brought the feast-
day round, and taking art and literature as two among the

thousand occupations of his caleidoscopic life. In 458 B. c.
this tiny town, whose total citizen population was not so
large as that of Portsmouth, lost citizens fighting in Cyprus,
Egypt, Phoenice, Halieis, Aegina, Megara. The Corinthian
envoy summed up the Athenian character well when he
said : ' They are revolutionary, equally quick in the con-
ception and in the execution of every new plan. They
are always abroad. For they hope to gain something by
leaving their homes. To do their business (TO. StovTa)
is theh" only holiday, and they deem the quiet of inaction
to be as disagreeable as the most tiresome occupation. If
a man should say of them that they were born neither
to have peace themselves nor to allow peace to others
he would simply speak the truth.'2 And Xenophon
gives the Athenians a similar character. After saying
that in international singing contests no one could surpass
1 Thuc. 2. 64. * Ib. i. 70.

i THE NOTE OF BEAUTY 33

them, he adds : ' yet it is not in beauty of voice or in
stature or strength that they are superior to other people,
but in the ambition that fires them to noble and honour-
able achievement.' * There is no ornamental aestheticism
in these people.

The aesthetic idea of the Athenian came from attri-
buting to the fifth century what became common in the
third. Later Hellenism is interested in Art for Art's
sake, describes pictures, statues, objets de vertu at length.
But the attitude of the classical age to these things is
more nearly expressed in the words of the Socrates of
Xenophon : ' It gives me far more pleasure to hear about
the good qualities of a living woman than to see a beautiful
one painted for me by Zeuxis.' 2 A striking sentiment
from the fellow countryman of Phidias ! Even more
definite is Plato. (If Xenophon's words should be
inscribed over every picture gallery, Plato's should be
at the entrance to every theatre.) He says that in the
ideal state tragic poets are not required, ' for we also accord-
ing to our ability are tragic poets, and our tragedy is the
best and most beautiful ; our whole state, you know, is an
imitation of the best and most beautiful life.' 3 The Greeks
were lovers of literature and art ; but their ideal of exis-
tence was not a round of literary and artistic small-talk.
They went to their theatre ; but they knew that it was
better themselves to enact the drama of life than to see it
on the stage. They were more interested in life than in
art.

The Greeks then were not aesthetes, and they had many
qualities besides a love of beauty. Yet they are the authors
of the most beautiful statues, the most beautiful buildings,

1 Xen. Mem. 3. 3. 13. * Xen. Oec. 10. i.

* Laws, 817.

1368 C

34 THE GREEK GENIUS : CH.

and the most beautiful poems in the world. In mere
beauty their art and literature has never been equalled.
If so, it is worth considering what kind of feeling for beauty
produced them.

The modern man has a just and well- trained sense
for beautiful things. Our millionaires, though they
may make their money in unlovely ways, have a
fine taste for Holbeins and old china: and the most
impoverished of us are ambitious to fill villas with
a mixture of Chippendale and old oak. We live in an
atmosphere of sweetness and light. We are all lovers of
beauty now. Only there is this weakness about our love.
It is little more than a feeling for isolated bits and frag-
ments of beauty. It is narrow and local. If we have our
good picture, or our graceful furniture, or our occasional
glimpse of fine scenery, we ask no more. We live cheer-
fully in an ugly villa, we watch the local builder providing
angular tenements for our poorer neighbours, we are
content to read books cheaply bound and badly printed,
we study the newspapers without a qualm at the style of
their articles, we are called Hogg or Ramsbottom or Mudd
or Peabody, and nobody minds. It is not merely that we
endure these things as necessary evils ; they do not
distress us. We have what I may call a picture-gallery
sense of beauty ; a sense that can be turned on and off
like a tap. We go into the National Gallery out of the roar
of the motor omnibus ; and our sense of beauty is turned
on and we enjoy the pictures. It is turned off again, and
we go out through the motor omnibus arena, to a place
called an Aerated Bread Shop. In fact we have (and
considering the circumstances of our lives are happy to
have) a beauty nerve which only is sensitive when we
want it to be so. Now the Greeks were different. Their

i THE NOTE OF BEAUTY 35

sense of beauty ran through their whole life, and like
a ferment transformed it.

This is easier to say than to prove, for the human beings
that were the best evidence of it have long been mingled
with the dust of the Cerameicus, and their life is easier
to praise than to understand. Shall we invoke the witness
of great men of letters ? Heine who with extraordinary
bitterness contrasts what he calls the ' dismal, meagre,
ascetic, overspiritual Judaism of the Nazarenes ', with
* Hellenic joyousness, love of beauty, and fresh delight in
life ' ; 1 Renan who avowed, ' The impression Athens
made on me is far the strongest I have ever felt : there is
one place where perfection exists : there is no other ;
that place is Athens : ' and he goes on to speak of it as
' a thing which has existed only once, which has never
been seen or will be seen again, yet of which the effect
will last eternally, a type of eternal beauty sans nulle
tache locale ou nationale ' ? 2

Judgements such as these carry weight : but it is better
to go direct to the literature of the Greeks and there see
for ourselves how all-pervasive their sense of beauty was.
Consider their names : 3 and compare in respect of
beauty Aristocrates (Noble Power), Cleomenes (Famous
Might), Aristonoe (Noble Mind), Aspasia (Welcome),
with Fabius (Beanman), Piso or Cicero (Peaman), Nae-
vius (Warty), Capito (Greathead). Consider the casual
unpremeditated expressions of the Greeks and see how
an unconscious grace informs them. No doubt Mr. Roose-
velt's emotions when he saw New York after his

1 Goiter im Exit.

* Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, p. 59 f .
8 See Weise, Language and Character of the Roman People
(tr. Strong), p. 31 f.

36 THE GREEK GENIUS : CH.

travels round the globe were much the same as those
of Xenophon's soldiery, when after their wanderings
in Anatolia they caught sight of the familiar sea ; yet
there is all the difference in the world between their
respective exclamations, ' Say, boys, that's bully/ and
OdXarra, OdXarra.1

Thus the Greeks touched every incident of life, however
f amiliar or unlikely, with beauty. It might be a nickname.
It might be, as Pater has remarked, an event which takes
place every hour of the day in a seaside village, without
our noticing anything remarkable in it. ' Homer had said

ol 8' ore 8r) At/ieVo? TroXvftfvOeos eWcy IKOVTO,
IffTia fj.\v (TTtiXavTO, $€o~av 8' kv vrjl peXaivrj,
£K 8e KOI avrol ftouvov ttrl pijyfjuvi 6aXd(ro-7)$.

And how poetic the simple incident seemed, told just thus !
Homer was always telling things after this manner.' 2
And Homer is not alone in this. It is the same with
every Greek poet. Sappho describes an apple left un-
gathered on its tree.

olov TO yXvKvpaXov epevOfrai aicpw tif vo~8a>
&Kpov eV' aKpOTdra' XeXdOovro 8k /taXo
ov p.av fxXfXddovT , dXX' OVK k^vvavr e

The subject is trifling, the language simple : yet these
three lines are enough to make the fortune of a poet.
Translate them into English, and they are faded and

1 Vide the daily papers on Mr. Roosevelt's return home. Cf.
Fitzgerald, Letters, ii. 49 (Eversley ed.) : ' The sea . . . likes to be
called Bakao-a-a and TTOVTOS better than the wretched word
" Sea ", I am sure.'

* ' When they came within the deep harbour, they furled their
sails, and laid them in the dark ship, and themselves disembarked
on the beach of the sea.' Quoted in Marius the Epicurean, i. 100.

' fr. 93, ' As the sweet-apple reddens on a bough's end, at its
very end ; the gatherers have forgotten it ; nay they did not
forget but could not reach it.'

i THE NOTE OF BEAUTY 37

colourless, like the gold in the fairy story which turned to
withered leaves.

This touch of beauty explains a feature of Greek
literature which we do not always adequately appreciate,
its sustained perfection of style. In variety and range,
in power of imagination, in play of fancy, our own is at
least its equal : but unlike the Greek it does not keep at
one high unsinking level of perfect style. How much
ill-finished work have Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tenny-
son, Browning left ! Shakespeare himself is not blame-
less ; of all our great poets perhaps only Milton and Pope
can boast unfailing excellence of style. But the Greek
poets are all like Pope and Milton — it is only of style in
the narrow sense that I am speaking. Even when the
thought is trifling and the language undistinguished, the
workmanship is nearly always good. The sawdust of the
workshop has been brushed away from their verse, the
edges have been trimmed and rounded, the whole has been
painted and polished. And this artistic excellence holds
almost throughout Greek literature. In general the
Greeks' sense of beauty revolted against any kind of
slovenliness : and we shall agree with Horace — a good
judge of such things — when he pointed to them as the
supreme masters of artistic eloquence, and said to his
young pupils

Vos exemplaria Graeca
nocturna versate manu, versate diurna.

Let me bring this point out more clearly by comparing
an English with a Greek writer, Scott with Homer.
If we had not been well brought up, it would be
possible to argue that in a sense Scott was the greater
of the two — I am only thinking of Scott's prose.

38 THE GREEK GENIUS : CH.

Wandering Willie's tale, the death of Elspeth in The
Antiquary, the curse of Meg Merrilies, the meeting of
Clara and Tyrrell in the wood, the parting of Diana Vernon
and Frank Osbaldiston on the heath, the agonizing of
Balfour of Burley in the cave above the linn, certain
passages from The Heart of Midlothian, the hags of The
Bride of Lammermoor, and indeed the whole of that most
tragic of tales — if it came to the weighing of passages
things might go hard with Homer. But where the Greek
stands so far above the Scottish writer, is in what Shelley
calls his ' sustained grandeur ', in what I should like
to call his sustained perfection. Great tracts of Homer
are dull ; the action (at least in the Iliad] progresses very
slowly ; and we tire of hearing in how many different
ways an ancient warrior could be killed. But there is
hardly a bad line in the whole, hardly a passage lacking
distinction ; for with his unsleeping Greek instinct for
beauty the writer could not be careless or slovenly in execu-
tion. Sometimes ' bonus dormitat Homerus ' — so thought
Horace ; still it is a very rare failing in him, and Homer
is beautiful even in sleep. No one can say as much for
Scott : his hours of slumber are prolonged and unlovely.
All this is testimony to the extraordinarily heightened
power of beauty in the Greek. But there is one bit of
evidence which we have left to the end ; I mean what is
ordinarily known as the ' aesthetic morality ' of Hellenism.
Practically we confine beauty to personal appearance,
landscape, literature, and something called art. The
Greek gave it a much wider scope. He extended it to
morals. Where we speak of good, he was ready to say
beautiful ; where we speak of evil, he was ready to say
ugly. It was beautiful, icaXov, in his eyes, if a citizen
died for his country, if a man showed respect for piety,

i THE NOTE OF BEAUTY 39

if a government was excellent. Victory, temperance,
eloquence, the punishment of vice, frankness, wisdom,
and readiness to listen to wisdom, were not merely good,
they were ' beautiful '. An Englishman would admire
these qualities and praise them. A Greek spoke of them
as if they gave him the same emotions as the sight of
a beautiful human being.

We must not push this argument too far. KaXoy in
time almost lost its original significance, and the Greeks
used it as an indefinite term of praise, just as we use the
word ' fine '. But the mere fact that it was used in an
extended sense shows a certain temperament, a certain way
of feeling towards life, a tendency to find beauty in things
in which we should not think of finding it, and to see it
and expect it everywhere. Just as some people are more
sensitive than others to atmospheric conditions, to a
change of wind, to sunless weather, to an increase of
electricity in the air, so the Greeks were more sensitive
to beauty than we are, responding to its presence more
readily, and more painfully conscious of its absence.

With evidence like this before them, it is not surprising
if our forefathers concluded that the Greeks were above
all else aesthetes. It was a natural view to hold, and so
far true, that one great difference between us and the
Greeks lies in our inferior sense of beauty. But those who
held it forgot three things : first, that in history the Greeks
were obviously occupied with many things other than, and
many things alien from, beauty ; second, that some of their
greatest writers (Herodotus and Thucydides for instance),
show no exceptional aesthetic sense ; third, that a nation,
which was principally remarkable for its sense of beauty,
would have little interest for the modern world. These
three considerations are quite enough to dispose of the

40 THE GREEK GENIUS : CH.

idea that the genius of Hellenism is a love and a power
of beauty.

NOTE

Those who are more accustomed to English than to
Greek literature, may feel a certain baldness in many
passages of the latter which are held up to their admira-
tion ; and as we have already quoted some such passages
and shall later have occasion to quote more, a word on the
point may not be out of place. The classic is apt simply
to take us to a scene and leave us amid its beauty, the
modern is determined that we shall be thrilled with the
proper emotions.1 Thus Sappho addresses the evening
star simply : ' Hesperus, bringing all things that bright
Dawn scattered, you bring the goat, you bring the sheep,
you bring the child back to its mother.' 2 But Byron,
taking the same idea, writes :

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'erlaboured 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.

Byron has not added anything essential to his original.
He has merely amplified it, commented on it, elicited the
feelings which it should convey, and put them on paper
so that we cannot miss them. Sappho simply stated the
facts, and left them to diffuse of themselves their inner
beauty and power.

1 Of course there is some ' modern ' writing in classical, and
much ' classical ' writing in modern literature.

* fr. 95 Ft<rirep(, irdvra (ptpatv, otra (paivoXis fV*ce8ao-' u$a>s,
(ptpfis olv} (pepts alya, (ptptts anv fiarepi TratSa.

I THE NOTE OF BEAUTY 41

Perhaps this is not a fair illustration ; perhaps Byron
is deliberately expanding a given sentiment. Still the
difference between his lines and those of Sappho represent
a real divergence of practice. The classic gives the text,
the modern expounds it. The classic shows us the scene,
the modern explains what feelings it should evoke. Indeed,
the modern is sometimes so bent on this, that he fails to
ensure that we shall actually see the scene itself. It is
so, in this description of the declining year :

In the mid-days of autumn, on their eves
The breath of Winter comes from far away,
And the sick west continually bereaves
Of some gold tinge, and plays a roundelay
Of death among the bushes and the leaves.

Keats suggests to us the sighing winds, the faded colours,
he melancholy atmosphere of autumnal decay, but he
brings nothing definite before our senses : unlike Tennyson
who, writing in the classical manner, makes us both see
and hear

Through the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground.

And so, to a lesser extent, with Shelley's lines on the

moon :

Pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, —
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy.

Shelley makes us feel the moon's weird isolation, but
he does so, not by simply showing us the moon, but by
saying repeatedly how desolate she is. Homer, on the
other hand, makes no comments ; he simply speaks of
' the stars appearing very clear around the bright moon,

42 THE GREEK GENIUS CH. I

when the heaven is windless ' : x and Virgil simply describes
the trembling path of her light on the sea :

Splendet tremulo sub lumine pontus.

So far the classic goes, but no further : he shows us the
scene, generally without much detail, but leaves us to
supply the appropriate emotions ; and because many
readers have no emotions to supply, they are apt to find
the classic unfeeling and cold.

Another result of the ' classical ' method may be briefly
indicated. It is partly answerable for the view that the
Greeks did not care about the beauties of nature. They
did care, but they did not rhapsodize about them. And
Homer writes so quietly of

Xeifjuoves aXbs noXioio nap' oj(6a,s
vSpijXol [taXaKoi,
or of

km. Kparbs Xtpevos pf€i ayXabv vStop,
Kpijvr) VTTO (rrreiovs,
or of

Kvpara fiaKpa wXivSopfva Trporl \€p<rov,z

that we do not mark the words or observe how perfectly
they suggest the charm of water-meadows, and clear
springs, and long rollers on the Aegean beaches.

1 //. 8. 555-

2 Od.g. 132-3, 140-1, 147 :

Meadows by the banks of the grey sea, soft water-meadows.'
'At the harbour head flows bright water, a spring from under

a cave.'
'Long breakers rolling to the land.'

CHAPTER II
THE NOTE OF FREEDOM

GOETHE was as responsible as any one for the idea that
the Greeks were before all things lovers of beauty. Yet he
himself supplies a corrective for this view of Hellenism.
He says somewhere that the distinguishing mark of the
Greeks was the passion, not for beauty, but for truth.
Goethe did not mean, of course, that the Greeks always
spoke the truth : patently, few nations have a history
so full of unblushing lies, and in later days Graeca levitas
supplanted Punica fides as a byword with the honest
Roman. Nor did he mean that the Greeks were always
right : truthfulness in this sense is not given to man.
He meant rather that the Greeks did on the whole look
straight at life, and see it as in fact it is ; that they had
what Matthew Arnold called ' an unclouded clearness of
mind '. And taken in this sense Goethe's words are not
difficult to justify.

Certainly in reading Greek literature, we keep tasting
in it, as a perpetually recurrent ingredient, some quality
which we are tempted to call truthfulness, though the
name hardly covers the thing. We are conscious of looking
at a picture which is a faithful portrait : of gazing in a
crystal that reveals life not cloudily or confusedly, but
with the colour exact and the lines unblurred. Not
many literatures are of this kind. In the Irish stories
of Finn and Cuchulain there is a great deal of beauty
and heroism and romance : but their world is palpably
unreal and inhuman. Hills which emit white birds and

44 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

unwoundable pigs, thistle-stalks and fuzzballs which take
the appearance of armies, witches who shoot heroes through
a hole in a leaf, dogs that turn men to ashes by their breath,
or produce out of their mouths quantities of gold and
silver, harps that spring to their owners and kill nine men
on the way, shields that roar to each other and are
answered by the Three Waves of Ireland ; themes like
these may be found in Homer, but the Irish writer is
utterly given over to them. The bizarre and the super-
natural infinitely predominate in him over the natural
and the human. His is no picture of the real world
and the actual life men live in it : an illusive, unreal
dream, a merely quaint and fanciful beauty, passes before
our eyes.

Greek literature is very different. No doubt the
historic Greek had absurd and superstitious ideas ; we
are beginning with difficulty to discover their nature
from stray allusions to them. But the obscurity of the
whole subject shows how little it affected Greek literature,
and that literature is all which matters to us. In it the
Greek appears as looking at life with much the same
eyes as our own. We should be lost in the world of Irish
legend : we should not know what to say to Finn or
Cuchulain ; we might accommodate ourselves politely
to their views, but we could never enter into them. But
who would not be at home, and feel some community
of soul, with Nestor or Achilles or Ulysses ? Still more
so, when we pass from epic heroes and come to Alcaeus
and Simonides and Sophocles and the rest. We feel that
they saw the world truthfully, not as an arena for spells
and witchcraft and conventional heroism, but as the
world really is.

And when we leave the rough and tumble view of life

ii THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 45

held by more or less ordinary men and come to the thinkers
of Greece, it is just the same. We find their speculations
about the nature of God and man reasonable, just and
surprisingly modern. Euripides writes :

Thou deep Base of the World, and thou high Throne,
Above the World, whoe'er thou art, unknown
And hard of surmise, Chain of Things that be
Or Reason of our Reason : God, to thee
I lift my praise, seeing the silent road
That bringeth justice, ere the end be trod.1

And we observe that he is roughly summing up in the third
and fourth of these lines the two modern philosophies
of materialism and idealism, and in the whole himself
expressing a modern creed of optimistic agnosticism.
Plato writes : ' God is never in any way unrighteous —
he is perfect righteousness ; and he of us who is the most
righteous is most like him.' 2 And we recognize an idea
of Deity as sublime as that of Christianity. When we
turn to the Republic we find the deepest questions of
politics discussed with a freedom and profundity and
acuteness which no subsequent age has surpassed. In
fact, the Greeks take quite as reasonable a view of the
world as we do ; and this is due to what Goethe called
their truthfulness.

When we analyse further, and ask why the speculations
of Euripides and Plato had advanced as far as our own,
we find two causes, two ingredients in this quality of
truthfulness. The first of these is a practically unbounded
licence to religious, moral, and political speculation.
Our own age enjoys an equal liberty. But it is astonishing
that a nation should have possessed it so early in the

1 Troades, 884 f . (tr. Murray).
1 Theaet. 176 c.

46 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

history of mankind. We may call it the Note of Freedom ;
a Greek would have called it Ilapprjoria.

The life of some nations is largely determined by
theological considerations. They exist to serve God.
Certain actions, sometimes whole sides of life, are ex-
cluded because they seem inconsistent with this purpose.
The God they worship is a jealous God. The
Mohammedan is forbidden to paint or carve the human
form, because sculpture and painting lead to idolatry.
The Jew must abstain from work and pleasure one day
in the week, because the Sabbath is holy. The Christian
of the Dark Ages was forbidden to believe in the ' anile
fable ' of the Antipodes, and given a ' Christian Topo-
graphy of the universe, established by considerations
from Divine Scripture concerning which it is not lawful
for a Christian to doubt ' ; 1 he was hampered in com-
merce because the Law of Moses forbade usury ; and his
late descendants 2 were discouraged from adopting the
theatrical profession by the eternal damnation attached
to the status of actor.

The life of other nations is determined by political
considerations. Art and literature are looked on with
suspicion as dangerous to the welfare of the state. Inno-
cent social amusements are forbidden. Family life takes
a peculiar colour for political reasons;, the husband acquires
a peculiar predominance ; the wife is turned into a machine,
bearing children for the good of the state. The state
which Plato sketched in his Republic is an extreme
instance of this enslavement of the individual to the

1 Cosmas, Topographia Christiana, quoted in Lecky, Hist, of
Rationalism, i. 269 (1910 ed.).

' As late as A.D.[i694 (ibid. ii. 318).

ii THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 47

interests of the community ; but the history of Sparta
and Rome and, indeed, of most countries is full of such
examples. From the various follies and sins and ruinous
excesses to which he is so prone, man is in most cases
guarded on the grounds that it is his duty to fear God and
serve his country. Whole classes of actions are forbidden
him. He moves in a narrow and carefully watched
round of existence. He may not do this, he must do that.
Maimed and mutilated, with one hand or one eye, he
enters into the kingdom of heaven. This is true of nearly
every nation except Greece. Here alone man was not
sacrificed to his god or his country, but allowed to ' see
life steadily and see it whole '. Elsewhere, reasons of
state or reasons of religion perverted inquiry or narrowed
its field ; men were forbidden to think at all on some
subjects, or compelled to hold certain prescribed views
on them. Whole provinces of life were withdrawn from
discussion — with many excellent consequences, but also
with a restriction of the scope of truth, with a limitation
of her chances of finding herself and coming by her own.
But for the Greeks there were no barriers, no domains
set apart where he might not trespass ; everywhere he
was free to act and think, to find truth or fall into error,
to do right or to sin. In Greece neither religion nor politics
were forces preventing him from seeing things as they are.
We are not, indeed, to suppose that free thought in
religion went entirely unresented. Four notable prosecu-
tions prove to us that the Athenians were jealous for
their religion. Socrates was executed and Anaxagoras
exiled for attacking traditional beliefs : Protagoras and
Diagoras of Melos fled to avoid the consequences of a
prosecution. But compare this record with the tale of
the religious prosecutions of fifty years of the Italian

48 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

Renaissance. Between 1566 and 1619 ' Carnesecchi was
burned alive ; Paleario was burned alive ; Bruno was
burned alive ; these three at Rome. Vanini was burned at
Toulouse. Valentino Gentile was executed by Calvinists
at Berne. Campanella was cruelly tortured and im-
prisoned for twenty-seven years at Naples. Galileo was
forced to humble himself before ignorant and arrogant
monks, and to hide his head in a country villa. Sarpi
felt the knife of an assassin. ... In this way did Italy
. . . devour her sons of light '-1 These, of course, are
famous victims. Symonds estimates that in Spain alone,
between 1481 and 1525, 234,526 persons were condemned
for heresy by the Inquisition.2 Compare with this
assiduous and sterilizing tyranny the occasional infractions
of liberty of thought in Greece, and you will feel that the
position of a Greek thinker was not worse than the position
of Hobbes in the seventeenth century, not worse than
that of Marmontel, who, in the Age of Reason, was sent
to the Bastille for a supposed pasquinade on a duke, and
hardly worse than that of German philosophers, who
a century ago were chased from their chairs for unortho-
doxy, and who even to-day are forbidden to profess
publicly the doctrines of Social Democracy.
This Greek freedom of thought has several causes. For

1 Symonds, The Catholic Reaction, ii. 138.

* Ibid. i. 196. Aristotle was threatened with a prosecution,
nominally for atheism, really because of his Macedonian sym-
pathies. If the prosecution of Diagoras fell in 41 5 B. c., as Diodorus
says, it may have had political grounds, for he was a Melian.
The Athenian indignation with the mutilators of the Hermae is
not an instance against the view in the text, for it is not a per-
secution of free thought. If to-day some people denied the
altars in all the churches of London, it would excite popular
indignation ; but such indignation would not prove a general
interference with liberty of speculation.

ii THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 49

one thing, Greek philosophy was unendowed, and free
speech is less easy to repress when it does not come from
the pulpits and lecture-rooms of the state. But there
are more fundamental reasons than this, reasons that lie
in the nature of Greek religion itself.

Here we are on dangerous ground. The beliefs of
sixth and fifth century Greece are not as yet fully ascer-
tained. The country is but partially mapped out, and
any one who sets foot in it risks losing his way. Once it
was supposed that Greek religion was summed up in the
worship of Zeus and Hera and the Olympian gods. Now
we know of other worships ; of Orphic mysteries, with
a highly spiritual teaching ; of a Dionysiac religion,
emotional and enthusiastic, brought to Greece from the
North. Even the Olympians are not quite what they
seemed. Apollo, the seducer of Daphne and the patron
of Troy, became through his prophets at Delphi a wide
influence for good in Greek morals and politics. Finally
we are told to-day that the most powerful religion in
Athens was the propitiation of formidable Cthonian
deities. Clearly we must define what we mean by Greek
religion.

We are not trying to give a complete sketch of it. In
fact, we shall have at present to ignore its noblest side
altogether. We are simply asking why thought was free
in Athens during the years when persecution might have
been expected, that is during the fifth and fourth centuries.
Hence we can ignore religions which were of later date.
Further, we can ignore those which were held only by small
sections of the community. If a religion is to persecute
it must command a majority in the state. Quakers or
Unitarians could never persecute. Nor (had they wished
it) could Platonists, Peripatetics, or Stoics have done so.

1358 D

50 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

Hence we are not here concerned with religions or philo-
sophies such as these. We are concerned with the state
religion, which Athenians learnt to reverence as children,
which permeated the national literature, which crowned the
high places of the city with its temples, which consecrated
peace and war and everything solemn and ceremonial
in civic life, which by its intimate connexion with these
things acquired that support of instinctive sentiment
which is stronger than any moral or intellectual sanction.
Orphism does not satisfy these conditions ; nor do the
Chthonian deities. The religion we are looking for is
the Olympian worship.

The Olympians have of late fallen into undeserved
discredit, because we are surprised that a fellow citizen
of Aeschylus could still worship such queer divinities.
But our surprise proves nothing. The religious beliefs
of nations are always disappointing those who apply
to them the tests of absolute reasonableness. One can
only judge of them by seeing what members of the nation
say and do. In any epoch different stages of belief
coexist. Propositions which would not command intel-
lectual assent are still supported by sentiment and
habit. Dead beliefs, like dead men, never die, but by
a law of heredity haunt the blood of late-descended
generations. So it was in Athens. The devout Pindar,
who rejects a story of divine cannibalism, represents
Apollo as a dissembler and a seducer.1 The devout
Aeschylus, who created for himself so lofty a theism, in
some passages speaks of God as deceitful and cruel.2 The
devout Sophocles, who wrote that magnificent hymn to
the eternal laws, calls one member of the Pantheon ' the

1 Pyth. 9.

* Fragment quoted by Plato, Rep. 383 ; and P. V. passim.

ii THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 51

god whom gods dishonour ' and invites his fellow deities
to annihilate him.1 Such inconsistencies will not surprise
us when we remember how men with the New Testament
in their hands have allowed themselves to be inspired
by the barbarities of the Old. Anyhow, the fact remains.
The names of the Olympians fill the pages of Greek tragedy.
They, and not any Chthonian worship, excite the attacks
of Euripides. Plato, when he wishes to plan an ideal
education, deals before anything with the active dangers
to the morality of the young, which according to him
the Olympian theology affords. Finally, the Olympians
continue to be worshipped in Greece as long as paganism
survives, and their frailties remain effective weapons
in the hands of sceptics within the fold like Lucian, and
of enemies, like Augustine, without it.

And now, to return to our main question — Why did this
religion leave thought so free ?

Firstly, it was anthropomorphic, and anthropomorphic
religions are essentially plastic. They admit of criticism
and remodelling. They almost invite it. A glance at
the Greek gods will show us why.

Homer and Hesiod, says Xenophanes, ' ascribed the
vices of mankind to the gods.' They made deities in their
own image, in the likeness of an image of corruptible man.
Sua cuique deus fit dira cupido. ' Each man's fearful
passion becomes his god.' Yes, and not passions only,
but every impulse, every aspiration, every humour,
every virtue, every whim. In each of his activities the
Greek found something wonderful, and called it God :
the hearth at which he warmed himself and cooked his
food, the street in which his house stood, the horse he
rode, the cattle he pastured, the wife he married, the
1 O. T. ist chorus.

52 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

child that was born to him, the plague of which he died
or from which he recovered, each suggested a deity, and
he made one to preside over each. So too with qualities
and powers more abstract. Violence, Fear, Revolution,
Sport, Drunkenness, Democracy, Madness, Envy, Revel-
ling, Persuasion, Sleep, Hunger, are personified and in
some cases worshipped. Everything has its worship,
even ' the Unknown God '. (That is why, viewing his
religion, it is possible to represent the Greek as a miracle
of vice or of virtue.) A Greek wished to be drunk, Dionysus
was his patron ; to be vicious, and he turned to Aphrodite
Pandemos. He was a thief, and could rely on the help
of Hermes ; he had a passion for purity, and there was the
worship of Artemis. Gods enough ; but they are not
original beings with independent powers. They are the
shadows of the man who made them, called into existence
to patronize the actions of their creator, to utter the words
which he puts into their mouth, to smile to order on his
faults and virtues with benignant and unfaltering com-
plaisance.1

This is enough to explain why there was no religious

) tyranny in Greece. Gods of this kind were unlikely to

I have a drastic influence on men's lives. Their origin and

character weakened, without actually destroying, their

power over their devotees. They were after all only the

work of men's hands, and the men instinctively took

liberties with their creations. Aristophanes, who was a

1 According to Mr. Bent (The Cyclades, p. 373), there is at the
present day in Paros a convent dedicated to the Drunken S. George.
' On November 3, the Pariotes usually tap their new-made wine,
and get drunk ; they have a dance and a scene of revelry in
front of this church, which is hallowed by the presence of the
priests.' The spirit which created the Olympians is not dead
yet.

ii THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 53

supporter of the established religion, exhibits Dionysus
on the stage before the assembled Athenian public in
the mixed character of a blusterer, a coward, and a
buffoon;1 and Dionysus was, as Miss Harrison points
out, the god of a genuinely spiritual worship. He treats
Zeus with equal disrespect, connecting him in one place
with an intolerably blasphemous theory of rain, in another
arguing with admirable gravity that Heracles is sure to be
disinherited as an illegitimate son of the King of Heaven.2
So with writers less reckless than Aristophanes, and on
stages less light-hearted than that of Comedy. It is told
of Agesipolis that ' after consulting the oracle at Olympia,
he went on to ask the God at Delphi whether he was of
the same mind as his father, implying that it would be dis-
graceful to contradict him '.3 And Theognis, in remarking
on the inequalities of divine justice, addresses Zeus thus,
ZeO <f>t\f, Oavpafa <re, ' Dear Zeus, I wonder at you.' 4 It
is the tone in which a boy might speak of his elder
brother — Pindar thought the gods were our brothers — and
it suggests that, on occasions when heaven said one thing
and the people wished another, the Greek gods would bow
to public opinion.

This was the penalty which the Greeks paid for seeing i
divinity hi many forms. They gained in breadth but lost /
in intensity. .Their God was too much the creation of his
worshirjgers ever to.become. absolute. He was a constitu-
tional monarch whose subjects never quite forgot that
they had put him on his throne. In theory their king,
he was in fact their representative, bound to carry out
their desires. And among these was the desire to
be free.

1 Frogs. 2 Birds, 1649 f.

3 Ar. Rhet. 2. 23 (tr. Welldon). 4 fr. 78.

54 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

That is one influence which made Greek religion work
loose. A second is akin to it. There was no Greek
Bible.

^fhis makes for liberty at the outset. A Bible has
immense advantages for those who can use it, but for
the world at large it has its dangers. Think how easily the
written word, interpreted with the rigour of ignorance,
can cramp truth. The Psalmist had said that the sun
' runneth about from one end of heaven to the other '
and that ' the foundations of the round world are so
firmly fixed that they cannot be moved '. How then
could Galileo maintain that the earth moves about the
sun ? Here was the plain warrant of Holy Writ for the
contrary. S. Paul had told us that ' men are made to live
on the face of the earth. It follows that they do not
live on more faces than one or upon the back. With such
a passage before his eyes, a Christian should not even
speak of the Antipodes '-1 So mediaeval theologians
argued, using the Bible not to make alive but to petrify.
And in countless ways less gross than these, casual
remarks misunderstood, crude conceptions of a primitive
age, moral precepts applicable to a primitive people,
were invested with divine authority and forged into
fetters for liberty of thought, simply because they were
found in a sacred book.

From such dangers the Greeks were free. They had no
Bible. We often call Homer the Greek Bible ; but the
phrase is misleading, for Homer had not the peremptory
authority of a Law once ordained and for ever binding,
but the subtle influence of a great book which is in
every one's hands. The Delphic oracles come nearest to
the Jewish Law, for they were the direct commands of
1 Op. cit. quoted in Lecky, Hist, of Rationalism, i. 267 ft.

II THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 55

Apollo. But they never became engines of tyranny,
for they were delivered to meet special situations, and
were strictly temporary in their application. The Orphic
cult had, it is true, sacred writings. But there was no
Book of the great Olympian gods, or of any other deities
worshipped in Greece. Of Apollo and Zeus many legends
were current, but no one had troubled to harmonize them,
and their worshippers, without insisting on precise
definition, were content with a general fva-tfitia. Hence
Plato could invent an account of Creation to support
a particular polity, because as he says, ' we do not know
the truth about antiquity.' * His words may remind us
how differently the Jew was situated, with his book
of Genesis, and its hard-and-fast account of the origin of
the world. And so generally ; thought in Greece could
work unchecked, for there was no exact standard by
which to check it.

From this came an attitude to religion very unlike that
of the Jews. The Jew accepted the God that was revealed -'.

to him : the Greek thought his gods out. If the Jew
was in doubt, it was easy for him to decide. His God
had issued commands, and were they not written in the
books of Moses ? But the Greek had no such authorities
to appeal to. He was thrown back on his own reason,
his own sense of what was right and true. This was the
workshop in which his beliefs were hammered out. That
is why we find Plato expurgating the heavenly records,
giving them new turns and new interpretations, making
and unmaking theology to his liking. If something in
traditional theology offends his moral sense, he openly
discards it.2 And so with writers less rationalistic than

1 Republic, 382, 414 f.

* e.g. in Republic, books 2 and 3 passim.

56 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

Plato. Pindar was orthodox and conservative. Yet coming
across an ugly legend about the gods, he simply denies
it. 'I will speak contrariwise to them that have gone
before me. ... To me it is impossible to call one of the
blessed gods cannibal ; I keep aloof.' 1 He will have
nothing to do with a story that revolts his moral sense.
Though it have all tradition on its side, still it must be
false : Pindar trusts his own instincts and throws it over.
Such an attitude may be matched in Hebrew literature,
but it is not common there. On the whole the Jew sub-
mitted to tradition, while the Greek trusted in himself
and his reason.

Let us take one famous example. Greek and Hebrew
literature each contain a story of a just man who was
visited by heaven with undeserved misfortune. Job,
' a perfect and upright man that feared God and eschewed
evil,' lost his goods, his family, and his health by a sudden
decree of heaven. Prometheus, the great Titan, who saw
the human race perishing unregarded, pitied it, risked
the divine anger, gave fire to men, and in punishment
was nailed by Zeus to a precipice on the Caucasus. The
two sufferers are in much the same case : Prometheus
suffers, because he followed the dictates of mercy ; Job
suffers in spite of his purity of life. If either of them
deserved his fate, it was Prometheus. And each story
follows the same course. Both men lament their sufferings
and proclaim their innocence. Friends visit them and
counsel submission to the will of heaven. Prometheus
replies that his offence was deliberate and that he will
never yield to Zeus ; Job insists that he has done no
wrong. So far the stories coincide. But observe how
different are the morals which the Greek and the Hebrew

1 Pyth. I. S3-

ii THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 57

writer draw respectively from their misfortunes. A whirl-
wind comes up out of the desert, and a Voice out of it speaks
to Job, ' convincing him,' as the chapter's heading quaintly
says, ' of ignorance and imbecility.' What is he with his
knowledge that he should question the dispensations of
God ? Where was Job when God laid the foundations
of the world ? Can he make snow or ice or rain : can he
guide and order the constellations ? What does he know
of the Almighty and His ways ? And Job meekly accepts
the sentence. ' Behold, I am vile. ... I have uttered
that I understood not, . . . things too wonderful
for me, which I knew not . . . Wherefore I abhor
myself, and repent in dust and ashes.' Observe that
God has not justified his punishment nor Job admitted
his guilt. The man has simply retracted and humbled
himself. His sufferings remain mysterious and un-
explained. But who is he that he should question God's
ways ?

This solution, we may safely prophesy, would have been
unintelligible to the Greek ; Aeschylus does not adopt it.
' God convinceth Job of ignorance and imbecility : '
there is no trace of such a finale in the case of Prometheus.
When Zeus commands and threatens, Prometheus retorts
with an insulting defiance : he does what Job will not
do, he curses God. And he curses him with impunity or
something more. Unlike the Jew, Aeschylus concluded
his story, not with the unconditional surrender of the
weaker party, but with his practical justification. Time
and fate bring Hercules who kills the tormenting vulture ;
Zeus is persuaded to strike the chains off Prometheus,
and receives in return information of a secret danger
that menaces his throne. But the Titan is not abased nor
the god exalted : a treaty is struck between the two, and

58 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

they come to terms.1 From first to last it never occurs
to Aeschylus that Prometheus may have had a narrow
view of justice, and that when the accounts were summed
Zeus might turn out to have been right after all. Without
a suspicion that it might be fallible, he brings God and
the Titan before the bar of human reason. He judges
the two in that court without a presumption in favour
of either, and when God appears unjust, unhesitatingly
condemns him.2

How different in all this from the deities of Hellenism
is Jehovah ! How different a position He occupies in the
life of His people ! He is a jealous and arbitrary God :
He dominates and dwarfs His worshippers. Jehovah IS
before His people were, they know Him only by His
revelation of Himself, and they are in the hollow of His
hand. The Greek said of Apollo and Zeus, they are :
Jehovah said to His people, I AM : Jewish writers show
a self -submission and self-abasement to Him which is quite
un-Greek. They are obsessed with the sense of Him. He
is the inspiration of all that is great and memorable
in their writings. There are thirty-nine books in the
Old Testament. All but one are continually occupied
with the relations of God to man ; nineteen — the Book
of Job, the Psalms, the prophetic books — have no other
subject. It is not so with Greek literature. There does
not lie behind that as an unchanging background, a
struggle between the will of man and the will of God.

1 Perhaps it is rash to base an argument on the plot of the
Prometheus Unbound which is lost. But no modern writer, so
far as I know, has suggested that it justified the original conduct
of Zeus.

1 I have ventured to borrow the idea of this illustration from
the late Professor Butcher's Harvard Lectures, giving it a different
application.

ii THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 59

It has no repeated protests against a backsliding people,
whose ears continually wax dull and their hearts gross.
And this is not due to any exceptional righteousness of
the Greeks. Rather it is because religion was not the
same thing for Homer or Aeschylus as for Moses or Isaiah.
In their scheme of the world God was not everything. He
was a part of their life, an important part, but not more.
He was there to lend His countenance to their occupations
and interests, but not to direct, dominate, and override
them. So it is even with the most religious Greeks. When
Plato constructs his ideal city, the first word in his pages
is not God, the first thought of the writer is not how he
shall please Him. Much later in the treatise do we come
to such considerations. Read the Republic by the side of
one of the prophetic books, and the difference of temper
is apparent.

The two towns Athens and Jerusalem well reflect the
respective character of their religions. Glorious are the
temples that crown the Acropolis and give a consecration
to the life that moved beneath them. But they are there
only as elements in a harmonious whole, one beauty
among many others. The view from the Mount of Olives
suggests very different thoughts. Across the valley on
its hill lies Jerusalem, a confused mass of domes and
towers and flat roofs, so closely huddled that the eye
sees no trace of open spaces or intersecting streets. For
a moment the city looks like one of the less attractive
Eastern towns, a city of burrows scraped out for a people
without imagination or ideal or sense of beauty. So it
looks, or would look but for certain open spaces, just
within the city wall and before the houses begin, huge
courtyards with domed buildings and a few cypresses
rising from their pavement. They are the only great

60 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

thing which the eye sees ; Jerusalem is dwarfed beside
them ; and the huge mosques within them seem lost in
their spaces. These are the Temple Courts. This is the
spot which the Jew, while he kept his town mean and
unlovely, consecrated to the worship of Jehovah ; these
are the courts of the House of his God.

It is difficult to speak in this way without giving the
impression that the Greeks were irreligious. Of course,
as a whole they were quite the reverse ; witness their
consternation at the mutilation of the Hermae. But
they were religious in the way in which the average
churchgoer of to-day is religious. Perhaps they would
not have gone so far as to agree with the late Rev. Mark
Pattison that religion is a good servant but a bad master ; 1
but there were many other interests in their life besides
God. None of them were religious as Augustine or Pascal
or Newman or Tolstoi understood the word. It is hard to
parallel from Greek literature passages like the following :
' there are two Gods. There is the God people generally
believe in — a God who has to serve them (sometimes in
very refined ways, perhaps by merely giving them peace
of mind). This God does not exist. But the God whom
people forget — the God whom we all have to serve — does
exist and is the prime cause of our existence and of all
that we perceive ; ' 2 or, again, the Psalmist's words :
' so foolish was I and ignorant, even as it were a beast
before thee. . . . Whom have I in heaven but thee, and
there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of
thee. My flesh and my heart faileth ; but God is the

1 Memoirs, p. 97.

3 Tolstoi. I have been unable to re-identify the passage.
Contrast Homer's argument for religion, ' all men have need
of the gods.' Od. 3. 48.

ii THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 61

strength of my heart and my portion for ever.' What
Greek ever thought of his religion as Pascal thinks of
Conversion 1 : ' La veritable conversion consiste a s'aneantir
devant cet etre universel, qu'on a irrite tant de fois, et
qui peut vous perdre tegitimement a toute heure ; a
reconnaitre qu'on ne peut rien sans lui, et qu'on a me'rite'
rien de lui que sa disgrace ' ? or as Newman thinks of
Catholicism : ' I speak of it as teaching the ruined nature
of man ; his utter inability to gain heaven by any-
thing he can do himself ; the moral certainty of his losing
his soul if left to himself ; the simple absence of all rights
and claims on the part of the creature in the presence
of the Creator ; the illimitable claims of the Creator on
the service of the creature ' ? 2 and so forth.

These passages are conceived in the genuine temper of
Isaiah and of S. Paul, but where shall we match them in
Greek ? The nearest we can come is Plato's saying that
men are the ' chattels of God ' ; 3 or the famous hymn of the
Stoic Cleanthes. With Plato we shall deal later. As for the
hymn, it must be remembered that Stoicism was a third-
century growth, its founders and chief teachers of Asiatic
origin, and the God of Cleanthes an impersonal power.
And I think that most people who read the hymn will
feel that, in spite of a surface resemblance, its words are
infinitely removed from the intellectual self-abnegation
of Newman or the intense passion of the Psalmist.

Here, then, are three influences which fostered irapprjo-ia
in Athens ; the absence of a Bible ; an instinct for ration-
alism ; and the temper engendered by an anthropomorphic

1 Pensges, 508 (ed. Brunschvigg).
* Scope and Nature of University Education, c. 7.
1 Phaedo, 62.

62 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

religion. They pass into one another, and together they
explain why, if anything prevented the Greek from seeing
life as it is, it was not his gods.

If religion left the Greeks free, so did politics. Though
civic life and private life so nearly coincided, though the
Greek state claimed from its citizens so much more than
does our own, yet the individual never became a mere
cipher on a census paper, but kept and asserted his own
individuality.

Political individualism is writ large across the history
of Greece. At its worst it appears in the want of self-
control, the inability to unite, the reckless selfishness,
which were so disagreeably common. It was not rare
for an expelled citizen to join his city's enemies and
attempt to ruin her. Oligarchs and democrats assaulted
the homes from which they had been banished ; Greek
exiles instigated and accompanied both Persian invasions ;
Alcibiades one day commanded an Athenian fleet, the
next was pointing out at Sparta the weak places in his
country's defences. As he pleasantly says, ' Having been
once distinguished as a lover of my country, I now cast
in my lot with her worst foes, and attack her with all my
might.' l

But Greek individualism took better forms than these.
Once it brought 10,000 Greeks back from the Euphrates
to their homes. Nothing is more instructive in that
history of Xenophon which has introduced so many
schoolboys to Greek, than the organization of the army ;
nothing is more characteristically Greek. It is not an
army on the march, but a parliament of 10,000 members.
If a crisis arises, the soldiers meet in assembly, the generals
1 Thuc. 6. 92.

ii THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 63

lay the situation before them, speakers argue pro and con,
the army votes, and the march is resumed. Generals
who are incompetent or suspect are publicly impeached ;
the army acquits, fines, or puts them to death. It sounds
like a dream of Gilbert and Sullivan. Yet the Ten
Thousand marched and voted themselves in wintry
weather over many miles of the most difficult country
in the world. That was individualism too.

This spirit, present doubtless from the beginning,
became active in the seventh and following centuries,
when the growth of tyrannies made Greece feel how much
was lost with freedom. Herodotus, who recounts the rise
and fall of many of these princedoms, tells why they
were unpopular. They were oppressive. ' The tyrants
upset ancestral customs, and do violence to women, and
put men to death without a trial.' 1 But they were also
alien to the temper of the Greeks. The Athenians, says
Herodotus, while the Peisistratidae ruled them, were no
better fighters than their neighbours, but when set free
they immediately surpassed them : which ' shows that
in their subjection they were purposely slack, because
they were toiling for a master, but when they obtained
liberty each man eagerly worked for himself '.2 It is
noticeable that the word he uses for liberty is la-qyoptr] —
' freedom of speech ' — they were not content with mere
freedom of action. The same craving is audible in the
quaint reply of the Spartans to a Persian governor, who
urged them to submit to Xerxes : ' you do not know what
you are advising us to do, Hydarnes, for you know
what it is to be a slave, but the sweetness of freedom you
have never tasted. If you felt it, you would tell us to
fight for it, not with spears only but with axes.' 3
1 Hdt. 3. 80. 2 Id. 5. 78. 3 Id. 7. 135.

64 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

But it was Pericles and the democracy which developed
the conception of irapprja-ia, on which indeed any real
democracy must depend. Under written laws, says
Euripides,

Weak men cast back the lie
On prosperous calumny ; the poorer sort,
If justice back their plea, confound the strong ;
And freedom in our parliament proclaims,
' Who can depose wise counsel for the state ? '
Then he that will, sits silent ; he that will,
Speaks, and wins glory. Can equality
Go further ? *

These words are put into the mouth of a king of Athens,
and Euripides, who put them there, speaks elsewhere of
free speech as the ' one great thing ', and shudders at
the thought of a man whose tongue is tied. ' A slave is
he that may not speak his thought.' 2 A few years before
Euripides wrote these words, a defeated and dispirited
Athenian fleet was trapped far away from home. As the
sailors embarked for a last attempt to break through
the enemy, their commander made a final appeal to the
captains. His first words to them are significant. ' He
reminded them that they were the inhabitants of the
freest country in the world, and how in Athens there
was no interference with the daily life of any man.' 3

Certainly there was little interference with what any
man said. Greek Comedy gives an idea of the lengths
to which trapprja-ia might go unchecked. The criticisms
of the late South African War which drew on the heads of
Mr. Lloyd George and others the ready missiles of angry
crowds, were mild in comparison with those which
Aristophanes was permitted to make in the State Theatre

1 Suppl. 433 f. * Phoen. 391. Cp. Ion, 672 ; Hipp. 422.
* Thuc. 7. 69.

ii THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 65

on the struggle of his countrymen against the Peloponne-
sians. Suppose that it was the custom in this country
for plays to be presented to the public ' on Easter Monday,
in the Albert Hall, under the patronage of the State,
and before an audience comprising not merely ministers
of all kinds and degrees, but students from the Universities
and pupils from the Schools '. 1 Suppose that while
England was engaged in a desperate war, some poet
exhibiting at this festival advocated peace and denounced
war in no measured terms, charged Mr. Chamberlain
with peculation, displayed John Bull as a fat, greedy,
credulous, ignorant old man, cheated and robbed by the
government in power ; suppose that Lord Roberts was
brought in person on the stage, caricatured as a dressy
braggart, publicly flouted by an impertinent crowd, and
finally carried off to hospital desperately wounded, while
the peace-party, with derisive shouts at his misfortunes,
retired to a luxurious dinner ; suppose that a modern
author dared to write such a play, would an English
public tolerate it for a moment? And yet during the
Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes, presenting on the stage
the Athenian public, its chief statesmen, and one of its
most eminent generals, caricatured them in no less gross
a way.2

No doubt Comedy had peculiar licence in Greece. But
that does not alter the fact of the licence. The rule of
•rrapprjd-ta held always in Athens. Not in the tunes of
worst disaster, not when Athens was fighting no longer
for victory but for life, not when the timbers of her fleet

1 Verrall, Four Plays of Euripides.

* The criticisms on Cleon passim, on Demos in the Knights,
and on Lamachus in iheAcharnians are the basis of the preceding
analogy.

1358 £

66 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

were breaking up on the beach at Syracuse and her army
rotting in its quarries, not after Aegospotami itself, was
free speech restricted. The ecclesia still met, the herald
still asked TIS dyopevfiv ftovXerai ; — Who wishes to speak? l

This was the practice of Athens. It followed a defi-
nite, deliberate, and clearly-expounded theory. All the
rx>litical thinkers of Greece, with the exception of Plato,
speak of the state as existing for the individual. One
of them, a friend and admirer of Pericles, who knew from
within the politics on which he wrote, has left in writing
the ideal of the Athenian democracy. It remains to us
unaged as the charter of democracy, the New Testament
of Liberalism.

In the Funeral Speech which he puts in the lips of
Pericles, Thucydides makes him declare his conception
of what Athens is and what every state ought to be. The
complete freedom of the Athenian citizen strikes us at
once in reading the speech, the absence of any attempt to
make-Jaim good by law, the absence of any safeguards
against want of patriotism, and indeed of any fear of it.
We are taken into an atmosphere very differenf from
modern political thought. There is no talk of class
jealousy and class selfishness, to be remedied by a system
of checks and balances and counterbalances, no talk
of compulsory military service necessary to inculcate

1 Certain attempts were, however, made to restrict comic
licence. A law was passed in 440 forbidding the treatment of
cotemporary politics, but was repealed in 437. There was a
similar enactment in 416, forbidding wopaarl Kw/iwSely, personal
attacks : yet in 414 Aristophanes wrote the Birds. There was
possibly another restricting law at the end of the fifth century :
but in any case Comedy then abandons its licence. It is charac-
teristic of the Thirty Tyrants that they made certain restrictions
on intellectual freedom (Xen. M^w. i. 2. 31).

ii THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 67

patriotism and to discipline and direct the irregular
energies of the mob, no talk of contributory pensions
desirable to breed an idea of thrift, of a licensing bill
designed to protect citizens from drunkenness, of Church
schools and a religious education, without which man
will relapse into the mud from which he came. Pericles^ ^
lives in an ideal, perhaps a too ideal, world. It has not'
occurred to him to fear that amusements will distract
the Athenian from his duty, and any suspicion of them is
totally absent from his speech. He regards such things
as an essential element in national life. ' We provide
plenty of means for the mind to refresh itself from business ;
we have regular games and sacrifices throughout the
year.'1 Nor is he afraid that culture and education will
sap the roots of character, making men effeminate,
better at thinking than deciding. ' We cultivate refine-
ment without extravagance, and knowledge without
effeminacy.' 2

There was a state in Greece, where such things were
thought dangerous. Sparta was organized on more than
Roman principles, and its citizens were brought up by
a series of drills, messes and petty regulations to be devoted
servants of the state. Athens must have seemed a strange
place to a Spartan visitor. To start with, it would be
odd that he should be there so freely, for in his own
country they were apt to have gevijXao-iai, periodical
expulsions of foreigners. And then how different was the
life of an Athenian from that to which he was accustomed
at home ! At the age of seven he had been taken away

1 Thuc. 2. 38. i.

1 Ibid. 40. i. Newman (University Sketches) paraphrases the
words thus : ' They cultivated the fine arts with too much taste
to be expensive, and studied the sciences with too much point to __
become effeminate.'

68 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

from his family to the Syssition, a kind of ancient public
school, and thenceforward ' lived habitually in public,
always under the fetters and observances of a rule partly
military, partly monastic — estranged from the indepen-
dence of a separate home — seeing his wife, during the first
years after marriage, only by stealth, and maintaining little
peculiar relation with his children. The supervision not
only of his fellow-citizens, but also of authorized censors
or captains nominated by the state, was perpetually
acting on him ; his day was passed in public exercises
and meals, his nights in the public barrack to which he
belonged '^ Bare feet, a single coat summer and winter,
floggings at a local shrine (he had seen boys die under
them), stinted food, and for recreation hunting and
dancing — these had been his lot since a child. After all,
thought the Spartans, you must make men patriotic, and
what other way is there of doing it ?

Pericles thought that there were other ways, and by
name condemns this Spartan system. * In the matter
of education, whereas they (the Spartans) from early
youth are always undergoing laborious exercises which
are to make them brave, we live at ease, and yet are
equally ready to face the dangers which they face. If
we prefer to meet danger with a light heart and without
laborious training, with a courage which is gained by
habit and not enforced by law, are we not greatly the
gainers ? ' 2 ^Leave the individual to himself, and he can
be trusted to do his duty, is the idea of Pericles ; coercion,
restriction, prohibition are words not found in his political
theory! Trust in the people tempered by caution, was
Mr. Gladstone's definition of Liberalism. Leave out the
last three words and you have the principles of Pericles.

1 Grote, Hist, of Greece, ii. 298. * Thuc. 2. 39. §§ 2. 3.

ii THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 69

That was the Greek ideal— •urtrfistrict.ed liberty. Is it
wonderful that with such principles the Greek mind
remained undistorted ?

This freedom was a rare privilege in antiquity. Think
for a moment of Rome. Plutarch said of its people that
they ' were of that mind, that they would not have men
marry, beget children, live privately by themselves, and
make feasts and banquets at their pleasure, but that
they should stand in fear to be reproved and inquired
of by the magistrates ; and that it was not good to give
every one liberty to do what they would, following his own
lust and fancy '.*

This was Plutarch's view of the Romans, and this, too,
was the view of the consul who mounted the rostra one
morning in the year 186 B. c. and announced to his hearers
the measures which the senate proposed to take for the
suppression of the Bacchanalia. It was a question of
a religious society for the worship of Dionysus, which
had used its meetings for gross indecency and, further,
for a conspiracy against social order. A bad business,
doubtless ; and the consul justly regarded it as a menace
to morality and subversive of the state. But note the
terms in which he rates his audience. ' Your ancestors
were unwilling that even you should meet accidentally or
at random ; unless it was the army led out for election
purposes, or an assembly of the people summoned by
tribunes, or a meeting called by a magistrate. Where
a crowd was gathered, they were of opinion that there
should be a regular officer to control them.' 2 We are very
far away here from the ideals of Pericles.

,l Vit. Catonis, 16 (tr. North). ! Livy, 39. 15.

70 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

The consul's next words are also instructive. ' There
is nothing more specious or more fallacious than a vicious
piety. When divine authority is made an excuse for
crime, we become afraid to punish human wickedness,
lest in doing so we violate some law of heaven with which
it is associated.' These sentiments tempt us to compare
the Roman view of the Bacchanalia with the fortunes of
Dionysus in Hellas, and to draw a moral from the contrast.
In Greece, too, the god's worship was an advecta religio,
which had thrust itself in among the primitive religions.
There, too — though free from the gross immorality and
political Mafia of the Italian Bacchanalia — it was cele-
brated with revels on the hills, of which drunkenness was
a general and immorality a not uncommon feature. Yet
when Pentheus, taking the consul's point of view, forbade
the women of his city to go roaming the hills, an Athenian
dramatist represented him on the stage as rewarded for his
ill-timed love of order by being torn in pieces at his
mother's hands. Though they may not represent the
poet's own view, the words are striking which Euripides
gives to the speakers who oppose the action of Pentheus.
They remind him that he is coming in conflict with a
god, that, after all, wine makes man forget his sorrows,
and that, if women want to be immoral, they will be so
without going on the mountains :

Receive this spirit, whosoe'er he be
To Thebes in glory. Greatness manifold
Is all about him ; and the tale is told
That this is he who first to man did give
The grief-assuaging vine. Oh, let him live ;
For if he die, then Love herself is slain
And nothing joyous in the world again.1

So, with a mixture of sensuous Epicureanism and the
1 Bacchae, 769 f . (tr. Murray).

ii THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 71

time-honoured arguments of Liberalism, the Bacchanals
are defended. Imagine the grim face of the Roman
consul as he listened to such a plea.

We must not press this parallel too closely. A wide
gulf lay between the Greek and Italian worships of
Bacchus, and Euripides was not a statesman, but a poet.
But the different attitude of Romans and Greeks in these
matters is incontestable. The Romans did not encourage
novelties in thought or religion or applaud specious phrases
about toleration. Pleas for freedom of inquiry, for an
untrammelled Art, for the rights of Literature, fell unheard
on their ears. Time and again foreign religions were sent
packing from Italy to their homes across the sea. Cato
would have done as much for Greek ambassadors, and
begged the senate to dismiss them. ' He openly found
fault in the senate, that the ambassadors were long there
and had no despatch ; considering also they were cunning
men and could easily persuade what they would. And
if there were no other reason, this alone might persuade
them to determine some answer for them, and so to send
them home again to their schools, to teach their children
of Greece, and to let alone the children of Rome, that
they might learn to obey the laws and the senate, as they
had done before. Now he spake this to the senate because
he generally hated philosophy, and of ambition despised
the muses and knowledge of the Greek tongue.' l

Censorious interference with private liberty on grounds
like these was common at Rome. In 161 B.C. the
praetors were empowered to dismiss from Rome Greek
philosophers and rhetoricians. Some Epicurean teachers
were expelled — probably in 184. As late as 92 B. c.
the censors issued the following edict : ' We have
1 Plutarch, Vit. Cat. 22 (tr. North).

72 THE NOTE OF FREEDOM CH.

been informed that there are men who have insti^
tuted a new form of teaching, and that the young go
to their schools : that these persons have described
themselves as Latin rhetoricians : that young men waste
whole days with them. Our fathers decided what their
sons should learn and what schools they should frequent.
These new schools, which are against the custom and
tradition of our fathers, seem to us neither desirable
nor right. We therefore think it proper to indicate our
sentiments to the owners of these schools and their pupils.'
The stiff sentiments and curt diction take us into a world
where the state was first and the individual nowhere.
His rights did not go further than the duty to obey.

This contrast between Greece and Rome is easy of ex-
planation. Many causes may have been at work, but chief
among them is the different history of the two peoples.
For 600 years, almost without a breathing-space, re-
peatedly defeated and struggling each moment for
existence, Rome fought her way through to victory.
From their low town her early citizens could see the hills
of their enemies and the fortresses which barred each
pass. Etruscans, Latins, Aequians, Volscians, Hernicans,
Veientines, Samnites, Gauls — she had to meet and beat
them all ; and after them greater antagonists, Pyrrhus,
Hannibal, Philip, Antiochus, and the armies of Africa
and the East. This age-long struggle did not mould
a tolerant character. Constancy, energy, resolution,
massive weight were the qualities required from Roman
citizens. Their strength was not to be the strength of
pliancy ; they were to be iron men. It was not for them
to talk, still less to doubt. They were not to quibble
about the existence of the gods whom they needed to
give victory or about the rights of the individual against

ii THE NOTE OF FREEDOM 73

the state, when the city might be sacked in the next
twenty-four hours ; or about the nature of the universe,
while the Hernicans were burning the crops. Action was
wanted, and not argument, which would only weaken
action.

Greece was more — or less — happy. Doubtless she had
had her period of stress, but it had passed easily and briefly
into the chequered peace, of historical times^No memories
linger in fifth-century Athens of ages of fiery trial, for
Greek history was not populi iam octingentesimum bellantis
annum res,1 ' the story of a people who had been 800 years
at war.' And the character of the Greeks was the softer
for it. They had not been obliged to practise restraint
and self-suppression, till restraint and self-suppression
became a second nature. They were more instinctive
and natural, and therefore more free. On the face of
Roman life, as on the grim features of Roman statesmen,
is stamped the hardness, the instinct to control and forbid,
which we observe in people to whom the world has been
hard. But the face of Greece has something of the
serenity which her sculptors loved to portray*)

We have been betrayed into a comparison of Greece
and Rome. But it is not a criticism. Our sympathies
here will go according to our nature, and it does not con-
cern us which was right. The important thing is that in
theory and, on the whole, in practice the Greek state
avoided interfering with its citizens. Here, too, the Greek
was left free, free to see life steadily and see it whole.
Neither priests nor politicians tyrannized over him.

1 Livy's description of Rome, 9. 18.

CHAPTER III

THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS

FREEDOM from political and religious restraint is almost
necessary to the highest development of thought. Philo-
sophy and science are impossible unless the human mind
is free to go sounding on its perilous way : and literature
as a whole is likely to gain by such liberty. But literature
can thrive very well in an air where philosophy and
science would sicken. Some of the greatest historical
writing in the world was done under a strict theocracy
and is coloured with the prejudices of a close priesthood.
In Greece itself genius is found apart from freedom of
thought. Pindar was a member of a priestly house ; any-
thing but speculative in his outlook on life ; orthodox
almost to narrowness in religion and politics ; a strong
adherent of tradition ; a firm believer in the high preroga-
tive of birth and wealth. Yet though he could never
have made the hazardous speculations of Democritus or
Anaxagoras, he is among the greatest poets of the world ;
in spite of narrowness, his poems are a truthful ' criticism
of life '. So when Matthew Arnold or Goethe tells us that
the Greeks were singularly ' truthful ', we must not
suppose that they were so, only because they enjoyed
trapprja-ia : we must look further than we have done for
the quality that enabled them to see life steadily and see
it whole.

In his chapter on ' Classical Landscape ' Ruskin has
drawn attention to a certain quality in the Greeks which
determined their view of nature. While the modern
painter endeavours to ' express something which he, as

CH. in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 75

a living creature, imagines in the lifeless object ', the
Greeks were ' content with expressing the unimaginary
and actual qualities ' of scenery. A wave to Homer
' from the beginning to the end of it, do what it might,
was still nothing else than salt water. . . . Black or
clear, monstrous or violet-coloured, cold salt water it is
always, and nothing but that '. And so it is at all times,
when he speaks of nature. The Greek sees no more in
a landscape than is obviously there. To him a mountain
is a mountain, a tree a tree, a flower a flower.

Ruskin has given some admirable illustrations of this,
which may be read in Modern Painters.1 Here I only
propose to give one of my own ; it is an effective illustra-
tion, because it allows a comparison between the practice
of an ancient poet and a modern poetess. Mrs. Browning
in one of her poems describes a seagull thus :

Familiar with the waves and free
As if their own white foam were he,
His heart upon the heart of ocean
Lay learning all its mystic motion,
And throbbing to the throbbing sea.

And such a brightness in his eye
As if the ocean and the sky
Within him had lit up and nurst
A soul God gave him not at first,
To comprehend their majesty.

The bird is captured and taken to an inland garden,
where it dies.

But flowers of earth were pale to him
Who had seen the rainbow fishes swim ;
And when earth's dew around him lay
He thought of ocean's wing£d spray,
And his eye wax6d sad and dim.

1 See the chapters Of the Pathetic Fallacy, and Of Classical
Landscape.

76 THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

Then One her gladsome face did bring,
Her gentle voice's murmuring,
In ocean's stead his heart to move
And teach him what was human love —
He thought it a strange, mournful thing.

He lay down in his grief to die,
(First looking to the sea-like sky
That hath no waves !), because, alas !
Our human touch did on him pass,
And with our touch, our agony.

No one would deny that this poem has a certain grace
and charm. But go down to the cliffs and watch the white
birds hovering between you and the sea, filling the air
with their hungry clamour, or skimming over the water
near the rocks where they nest. Then read the italicized
lines above and ask if these wild children of nature have
really had or could ever have the emotions and experiences
which the poetess attributes to her seamew. Down by
the water, where we are in touch with the thing described,
Alcman's lines would surely occur to us, not only as a
more faithful picture of truth, but also as a far more sym-
pathetic rendering of the seabird's charm. He, too, had
watched the seabird off the rocks of his home, but saw in
it only the bird ' that flies over the blossom of the swell
in the halcyon's company, with a careless heart, the sea-
purple bird of spring '.1

We need not discuss the difficult question how far
Mrs. Browning's treatment of her subject is justified. All
we have to notice is the Greek directness of Alcman. A
bird is a bird to him and nothing more. These lines of his
are literal descriptions of fact, except for two touches. But
no one who has seen the foam breaking white on the crest
of a green swell, will object that the poet likens it to the

1 fr. 26. or T* <V« Kvparos avdos ap d\Kv6vf(r(n irorarai
vr)\tyis yTOp f^cov, &\iir6p<pvpos flapos opvis.

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 77

blossoming of a plant among its leaves : and no one
who has ever watched seagulls flying will complain that
he allows them ' a careless heart '. For the rest, he sees
the seagull as it looks — we will not beg the question by
saying ' as it is '. He takes it at its surface value, and
sees what an unspoilt and happy child might see in it.
In Ruskin's words, he is content with ' expressing the
unimaginary and actual qualities of the object itself '.
He looks at it with directness.

Ruskin was satisfied with tracing the influence of this
' directness ' on the Greek's view of nature. But we
must trace it further than that. We shall find that it
affects his attitude to more important things than scenery
or seamews. It was a way of thought, a manner of looking
at life. It guided the eyes of the Greeks and drew their
attention to certain aspects of things. It afforded a focus,
within which they saw everything in strong relief, outside
which they saw only darkness and confusion. It deter-
mined their whole idea of the world. For everywhere
they took things at their obvious value, and saw them,
so to speak, naked.

Consider the Greek attitude to love. People are apt
to complain that there is no love-poetry in Greek, and,
if by this is meant that Greek has nothing like the Sonnets
from the Portuguese, or the love-poetry of Browning, the
statement is true. But love-poetry of a sort it has in
plenty, and not a Greek play fails to mention Aphrodite
and her works ; Sappho and Anacreon have a reputation
as love-poets ; and few of the lyrists are without allusions
to the subject, reputable or otherwise. Indeed, it would
have been odd, if the greatest interest of humanity had
escaped this very human people. Only, Greek love-
poetry is not the love-poetry of the Brownings.

78 THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

There are several aspects under which we may think
of love. Physical in its origin, in first resort it is a passion
of the body. At the same time it is the most powerful
of spiritual and intellectual tonics ; like wine it percolates
through the body to the springs of thought and emotion,
and becomes a stimulus to wit, imagination, feeling,
courage, endurance, sympathy, self-sacrifice and all the
activities of man. Again, looked at in a different light, it is
the strongest of social bonds, the basis of the family. Again,
it is the most intimate of human associations, a union
for ' mutual society, help and comfort '. These aspects
of love are not necessarily divorced from each other, but
if for the purposes of argument we separate them, they
may be described thus : the love of the animal, of the
lover, of the father, of the husband. These are the most
obvious ways in which we may think of love, and these
are the ways in which the Greeks as a nation thought
of it.

But there is another way of viewing love, a favourite
with modern poetry. Hitherto we have spoken of it as
an emotion, which, if more than animal, is still natural,
if idealized, is still earthly. But there is a conception of
love in which it becomes unearthly, supernatural, the ex-
clusive food of the soul, the ambrosia which only immortals
taste ; it is no longer grown in the soil, or ground in the
mills of earth. Once it was a bond in which man was
on a level with any animal ; now its physical origins are so
far forgotten that it becomes a symbol of the union of
Christ with His Church. Once it was vain and frustrated
without the satisfaction of desire ; now the rejected
lover feels that he reaps the fruit of his passion as fully
as his successful rival. Such is the attitude of many
modern poets. They ignore the concrete and natural

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 79

aspects of love ; their minds are filled with its spiritual
satisfactions. Browning looks to his dead wife for ' all
hope, all sustainment, all reward '-1 He conceives a lover
as mystically united to a dead girl, who hardly knew his
name and was too young to have thought of love.2 It is
enough for him to ride with a woman who does not return
his passion ; 3 with a serene contentment he calls his
successful rivals blest.4

Now whereas modern poetry is largely absorbed in this
last stage, Greek literature, except for one great writer,
shows no trace of it. The Greeks took a direct view of
love, and saw in it either a natural passion, or a social
tie, or a union for mutual comfort. If any one wishes to
satisfy himself of this, let him turn to a branch of poetry
from which love is inseparable, to the Greek drama. Let
him recall what passages he can bearing on the point,
and let him supplement these by looking up any references
to "EpQ>$ and 'A^poSirrj in the Indices in Tragicos Graecos.
He may ignore Aeschylus, whom Aristophanes makes
say that he never represented a woman in love ; 5 Sopho-
cles and Euripides furnish enough material. He will find
that these writers do not view love as Browning viewed
it. They are never anything but direct.

So it is always in Greek literature. Here are some
typical passages taken partly from the drama, partly from
elsewhere. The first is a famous love-poem of Sappho,
which I quote in bald prose, because even the best verse
translations conceal its simplicity.

' He seems to me the peer of gods, who sits facing you,
and hears close to him your sweet voice, your lovely
laughter : it has made the heart shiver in my breast ; one

1 Ring and the Book, bk. i . fin. * Evelyn Hope.

8 Last Ride Together. * One W ay of Love. ' Frogs, 1044.

8o THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

glance at you, and my voice fails, my tongue is broken,
subtle fire runs straightway through my frame, my eyes
see nothing, there is a roaring in my ears, sweat pours
down me, a tremor seizes every limb ; I am paler than
grass in autumn and seem all but dead.' 1

Translated into other language this means : ' the presence
of my lover throws my senses off their balance.' The
emotions described are those of white-hot physical passion
felt with amazing intensity ; and no one could call it
anything but earthly.

Now take a passage which to outward view is more
in the modern vein.

Love is not love alone,
But in her name lie many names concealed ;
For she is Death, imperishable Force,
Desire unmixed, wild Frenzy, Lamentation ;
In her are summed all impulses that drive
To Violence, Energy, Tranquillity.
Deep in each living breast the Goddess sinks,
And all become her prey ; the tribes that swim,
The fourfoot tribes that pace upon the earth,

1 fr. 2.

fj.ru KTJVOS iros
a>VT)p, Sans fvavrtos roi
KCU ir\arjiov a8v (atvev-

<ras
Kal yfXaiaas ipepotv, TO fj.oi yta

<as yap ctcrido) ^po^eus <rf, (fxavas

ov8(v fr* eiKft*
dXXa Kafj. fj.(v y\Sxrcra fiayf) \firrov 8*

tWTlKll Xp(S TTV

o7nrdT€<r(ri if ov8ti>

@ft<rt. 8* uKovut.

a 8e pi8pas KaK\f(Tait rp6fj,os fie
irai<rav uypft, ^Xtopor/pa 8i Troias

fflfJ.1, Tf6lHlKT)V 8* oXryw 'lTl8€VT)S

aXXa.

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 81

Harbour her ; and in birds her wing is sovereign,

In beasts, in mortal men, in gods above.

What god but wrestles with her and is thrown ?

All thoughts of man and deity are shattered
By Love, without a spear, without a sword.1

It may seem at first that this is nearer the modern con-
ception of love. But read the passage carefully and you
will see that what is in Sophocles' mind is still love in
the first stage. Only whereas Sappho is in a white-hot
passion, Sophocles is calmly reflective on it. But it is
for him merely a natural thing, a desperate desire which
makes men mad or contented or miserable or energetic
or lazy, which kills or makes alive, which is always
upsetting human calculations and plans. It is still love
in its earthly stage.

These two instances illustrate the Greek attitude to
love in general ; the next is a passage on married love.
Andromache is speaking of the life she is destined to lead
as the concubine of Neoptolemus and protesting her
loyalty to the dead Hector :

How ? Shall I thrust aside
Hector's beloved face, and open wide
My heart to this new lord ? Oh, I should stand
A traitor to the dead ! . . .

One night,

One night . . . aye men have said it ... maketh tame
A woman in a man's arms . . . O shame, shame !
What woman's lips can so forswear her dead ?
O my Hector ! best beloved,
That being mine, wast all in all to me,
My prince, my wise one, 0 my majesty
Of valiance ! No man's touch had ever come
Near me, when thou from out my father's home
Didst lead me and make me thine.2

1 Soph. fr. 678. * Eur. Troades 66 1 f. (tr. Murray).

1358 F

82 THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

The words are a little colourless, for while modern love-
poets proclaim their passion in ambitious language, the
Greeks were content to feel the thing and leave the
embroidery alone ; yet, unless we wish for a touch of
mysticism, it is difficult to see that anything essential
remains to be added to this conception of marriage. But
it is absolutely direct. Indeed, the translation makes it
less so than the Greek warrants. For the lines in italics,
literally translated, run : ' I had in you a husband
sufficient for me in wisdom and birth, and great in riches
and courage.' Andromache regards marriage, not as
a mystical, supersensual thing, not as a sacrament, but
as the purely natural affection of a woman for her first
husband, the husband of her girlhood (aKriparov Xafiav
7r/oa>roy TO irapQtvtLov egevga) Aexoy), whom she had
found ' sufficient ' for her, and prized for such sober and
solid qualities as 'birth, wisdom, courage, and wealth'.
This is marriage as a union for 'mutual society, help,
and comfort '.

Further than that the Greek in general never went.
He would never have written The last Ride Together,
Evelyn Hope, One Way of Love, the Epilogue to Fiftne at
the Fair, and the lines beginning 0 Lyric Love, with which
the first book of The Ring and the Book closes. Read
these last two poems ; they deal with the same situation
as the lines of Euripides above, for they are spoken by
a husband to a dead wife. But whereas Browning thinks
of his wife and addresses her as if she were alive, feels
their intimacy to be unbroken, and looks to her for
inspiration and comfort, Andromache has no doubt that
her severance from Hector is complete, and that of their
bond nothing but the privilege of fidelity remains. The
one union depends on, the other is independent of, space

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 83

and time. Browning is mystical ; Euripides, though
no one could call his sentiments unideal, keeps his feet
firm on the earth. He sees no more in marriage than the
obvious facts of it warrant. He sees it as Alcman saw
the seagull, with directness.

So the Greek saw everything. Here are three further
instances, passages on the loss of children, on friendship,
and on death. Subjects averse to directness of treatment ;
subjects lending themselves to much false pathos and
false sentiment ; subjects through which any writer
treads warily. But the Greek is quite frank on them, r
he calls a spade a spade, and even if his words in two
of these cases may seem naive, in the third few will
deny that they are heart-searching, whether we agree
with them or not.

The first instance is from the Supplices of Euripides.
The mothers of the Argive chiefs who have fallen under
the walls of Thebes are lamenting for their dead sons. This
is what they say : ' Ah child, I nursed you to unhappiness ;
I bore you in my womb and suffered the agony of travail.
But to-day the grave holds that burden, and I have
none to feed my old age, though I bore, alas, a son.' x
Tripofioo-Kov OVK ex®, ' I have none to feed my old age.'
It will be found that most English translations practically
expurgate this phrase. They instinctively tone it down.
And indeed it is safe to say that any writer, except
a Greek, would have omitted these words. He would
have dwelt on the misery of bereavement, on the blight
that fell on youth and promise ; but he would not
have allowed his characters to put the prospect of a
destitute old age so prominently forward in their grounds
for grief. He would have been more conventional and
1 Sup-pi. 923 f.

84 THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

more safe. Even in the ruder English poetry, where one
might expect to find such things, I cannot remember
any place where this particular disadvantage of losing
a husband or a son is mentioned ; the balladist contents
himself with saying simply

Next morning many widows came
Their husbands to bewail.

But at least four of Euripides' plays have references of
this kind to the yrjpopoa-Kos,1 and the theme is a regular
one in Greek tragedy. The Greek plunges directly for
what certainly is a serious inconvenience to a human
family — the loss of the bread-winner. He shocks our
sentimentality, for he has none of his own. He looks
straight at life.

Here is a second instance of Greek directness, taken from
a philosopher. Aristotle is talking about friendship. The
subject must have suggested many admirable common-
places, and even had Aristotle refrained from them, he
might have felt that on such a subject his motto
should be eu^/m. But these are his words : ' a friend
is a good thing ; for not only are friends intrinsically
desirable, but they are productive in a number of ways.' 2
Yet Aristotle was no cynic, as his account of friendship
in the Ethics shows. Nor is he merely joking. For we
find that Socrates, too, speaks of friends as trees worth

1 Med. 1033 ; Ale. 663 ; Phoen. 1436 ; and this passage :
perhaps Ion, 475. Xenophon, Oec. 7. 19, says that men and
women marry, firstly that the race may not fail ; ' secondly by
this pairing human beings provide themselves with yrjpoftovKoL'
Generally, throughout Greek drama, whether on this topic or
on any other, it would be difficult to find a single instance of false
sentiment. A glance at the tragedies of Seneca will show, by
contrast, what that means.

* Rhet. i362b 19.

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 85

cultivating for their fruit, and deplores the neglect of
such profitable investments. ' What other possession is
in the least comparable to a good friend ? ' (So far there
is nothing uncommon ; but the following remarks sound
strange to modern ears.) ' What horse or team of animals
is so useful as a good friend, what slave is so well-disposed
and constant, what other possession is so entirely ex-
cellent ? . . . And yet while some people will tend trees
for their fruit, most of us are lazy and careless in their
attentions to that all-productive property which we call
a friend.' 1

What cynicism ! we think. But it is not cynicism,
only a perfect frankness, which does not shrink from
drawing consequences and is not ashamed of uttering
them. It is always meeting us : in an openness of speech
about, and allusion to, sexual matters (witness quite
casual phrases and metaphors in the tragedians), which
at least had this result, that it kept Greek literature
singularly free from pruriency : in candid admissions
about courage and cowardice, a topic where moderns
are particularly reticent. ' I do not undertake to fight
with ten or with two, nor indeed willingly with one,'
says Demaratus to Xerxes. A young Athenian soldier,
explaining to a jury his feelings after the defeat at Coronea,
says : ' the archons voted to select detachments as sup-
ports, and we were all afraid — naturally, gentlemen ; it was
a terrible thing, after barely getting off safe a little before,
to be thrown into new dangers.' Aristotle avows that
only ' insane or insensible ' men do not fear earthquakes
and storms at sea ; and adds : ' it seems that the citizens
are induced to face dangers by the penalties and censures
which the laws inflict and by the honours which they
1 Xen. Mem. 2. 4. 5 f.
F3

86 THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

confer.' l If a modern man thought these things, would
he have the directness to say them ?

One more instance ; a better one than the preceding,
for it brings us near the deeper things of life. It is taken
from the Funeral Speech, which was delivered in the first
year of the Peloponnesian War. There was a public
funeral in the Cerameicus for those who had fallen during
the year, and all Athens was there to hear Pericles give
the address over their graves. He had no easy task to
perform. Obituary consolations are notoriously difficult,
and Pericles had not even the belief that these dead had
passed into an eternal life. Below him in the crowd he
could see those whose husbands, fathers, sons had fallen.
What was he to say when he came to speak of their loss ?
It was difficult to avoid ' vacant chaff well-meant for grain '.
This is what he says :

' You know that your life has been passed among
manifold vicissitudes ; and that they may be thought
fortunate who have gained most honour, whether an
honourable death like your sons, or an honourable
sorrow like yours. I know how hard it is to make you
feel this, when the good fortune of others will too often
remind you of the gladness which once lightened your
hearts. The deepest sorrow is felt at the loss of blessings
to which we have grown accustomed. Some of you are of
an age at which they may hope to have other children, and
they ought to bear their sorrow better. Not only will the
children who may be born hereafter make them forget
their own lost ones, but the city will be a gainer. To those
of you who have passed their prime, I say : " Congratulate
yourselves that you have been happy during the greater
part of your days ; remember that your life of sorrow
will not last long, and be comforted by the glory of those
who are gone. Honour is the delight of men when they
are old and useless." ' 2

1 Hdt. 7. 104. Lysias, Or. 16. 16. Aristotle, 1 1 1 5b, 27 ; 1 1 16*,
1 8. So Aeschines, In Ctes. 175. * Thuc. 2. 44.

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 87

That is cold comfort, for childlessness in the eyes of
a Greek was a far greater misfortune than it is to us.1
Yet Pericles does not spare his audience, or minimize their
loss. He dwells on it, returns to it, enforces it on their
minds. He even reminds them how often in days to come
it will return to them. Others have thought it better to
have loved and lost than never to have loved. Pericles
disagrees and he will not spare his hearers the point. And
what is the consolation he offers ? That some shall make
themselves useful to Athens by having more children ;
while the others must console themselves in a ' useless old
age ' with their neighbours' respect. There is no mincing
of words here ; no shrinking from facts. We may not
think that Pericles is right ; but at any rate, he has
looked death straight in the face. We can see that, if
we set against the words of Pericles a fine piece of senti-
ment on the same subject. It is an extract from Dryden's
Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew.

Thou youngest Virgin-Daughter of the Skies,

Made in the last promotion of the Blest ;
Whose Palms, new pluckt from Paradise,
In spreading Branches more sublimely rise,

Rich with Immortal Green above the rest :
Whether, adopted to some Neighbouring Star,
Thou roll'st above us in thy wand'ring Race,

Or, in Procession fixt and regular,
Mov'd with the Heavens Majestick pace :

Or, called to more Superior Bliss,
Thou tread'st, with Seraphims, the vast Abyss :
Whatever happy region is thy place,
Cease thy Celestial Song a little space ;
(Thou wilt have time enough for Hymns Divine,

Since Heav'ns Eternal Year is thine.)

1 Euripides puts children before ' wealth and royal halls ' :
/on, 482 — see the whole passage and Greek literature passim.

88 THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

Hear then a Mortal Muse thy praise rehearse

In no ignoble Verse,

But such as thy own voice did practise here
When thy first Fruits of poesie were given,
To make thyself a welcome Inmate there ;
While yet a young Probationer,
And Candidate of Heav'n.

Certainly this is ' no ignoble verse '. But read again the
passage from the Funeral Speech quoted above. It has
indeed none of Dryden's conscious art ; as its language,
so its sentiments are bald and almost brutal ; many people
might think that if these were all the fruits of patriotism,
and these all the rewards of the pains of child-bearing
and child-rearing, then S. Paul was right to say that the
Greeks were without hope in the world. But right or
wrong, Thucydides has at any rate felt far more deeply
than Dryden, what death is. He has not obscured its
form with a mist of convention and sentiment. He has
brought us really into its presence, and his words, if
they are put by the side of Dryden's, simply kill them.
Dryden's lines are beautiful, not without feeling, and, in
their stately and imaginative phrasing, the work of a real
poet. We might read them delightfully in an armchair
by the fireside ; but would they not seem a mockery in
a house of death ?

It is more usual to define first and illustrate afterwards ;
we have inverted the process and given instances of a
quality before we analysed it. We saw that the Greeks did
not view love as Dante, or death as Dryden, or seagulls
as Mrs. Browning ; that they admitted the material
uses of friends and children with nai've candour : and we
gave the name directness to the habit of mind in virtue

HI THE NOTE OF DIRECTENSS 89

of which they did this. We must now return and define
more exactly what directness is.

Two things it is not. It is not, as we might at first
be inclined to think, an absence of convention. If
any one maintains that the Greeks did not descend to
such a thing, it is easy to convict him by pointing to the
Greek drama, which with its chorus, its three actors,
its queer stage machinery, its long harangues, its fabulous
mythology, has far more conventions than our own.
But that is no discredit to it. All literatures work through
authorized and accepted forms. Rhythm, metre, language
itself, are conventions. But convention is not conven-
tionality, and its employment is consistent with absolute
inner truthfulness of feeling. We may wear a collar,
a dress coat, or even a fancy costume, without thereby
becoming insincere. These are the lines on which we
might answer any one who argued that Euripides and
others, using the old myths without always believing in
them, could not be called direct.

Nor yet does directness mean that the Greeks had an
unerring view into the real nature of things, and that,
like skilful surgeons, they could cut within a millimetre
of their mark. This is too much to claim for them. Such
accuracy of insight has not been given to man, and
whether we turn to their philosophers' speculations on
the universe, or to their poets' dreams about the Gods,
we shall find that in common with all humanity, they
made their blunders and had their blind eye. That is
no discredit to them either, for every age has beliefs
which its successor will disown. Milton depicts Satan
striding across the sea of burning marie, and Shakespeare
shows Prospero conversing with a winged spirit. Yet
Satan is none the less a living portrait of rebellious pride,

go THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

nor Prospero less a pattern of the charitable wisdom of old
age, because their creators placed them in a setting which
we find incredible. Similarly Aeschylus and Euripides
kept their hold on real life in spite of legend and myth.

We shall understand more easily the quality of which
we are speaking, when we remember that the Greeks
were a primitive people. They were simpler, less sophisti-
cated, more naive than we, for they stood nearer to
the morning of the world, and had inherited fewer
traditions of thought, smaller accumulations of knowledge.
There is something childlike about them. Like children
they were sometimes deceitful and often mistaken, but
romanticism and sentimentality had not yet taken hold
upon them. Like children they had an amazing power
of going straight to the point. The freshness with which
they looked at the most common things and lighted
instinctively on truths ' which we are groping all our
lives to find ', is childlike ; and very childlike is the
directness which saw in things no more than is actually
there. Only they were children with the intellects of men.

This primitiveness, this simplicity of the Greeks is in
the first instance responsible for the qualities on which
their admirers so often dwell, their lucidity, their con-
creteness, their definiteness, their ' eternal outline ',
their directness. They were too young for many of the
tastes of our own age. They themselves said that they
disliked TO aireipov, the infinite, ' that of which the
end cannot be seen : ' the mysterious as a whole was
disagreeable to them, and they were infinitely far from
the deliberate exploitation of it, by which Maeterlinck,
Verlaine, and the modern symbolists live.1 They had

1 A. Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, gives a
convenient account of modern symbolism.

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 91

no part in those familiar phenomena of modern poetry,
its rebellion against the actual, its cry for the impossible,
its reaching away from the finite, its obstinate questioning
of sense and outward things, its aspiration towards
unrealized worlds. They did not seek, like Mrs. Browning,
for a half-human soul in seabirds : nor, like Shelley,
did they flutter in the illimitable inane, expressing the
material in terms of the immaterial : 1 nor, when they
wished to describe the fading of a rose, did they write,

like Blake :

O Rose, thou art sick !
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy ;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Nor did they wanton in mere beauty, using language and
painting situations, because, though unreal, they are
picturesque or pleasant ; like Vergil, who introduces
rustics talking politics in limelight scenery, or like Ovid,
who spends his genius on characters as unreal, if as
beautiful, as the courtiers and shepherdesses of Dresden
china ; like Dryden, who thinks to annihilate death by
describing its victim as moving across heaven in the
procession of the stars ; like Heine, who talks of a pine on
a snowclad northern hill, dreaming of a palm in the burning
East ; like Mr. Housman, who tells us that if we go to
a certain bridge in Shropshire, we shall hear his soul
' sighing above the glimmering weirs '. Nor did they
wallow in luxurious emotions of sentimentality, trying
at all costs to be magnificent or heroic or pathetic or
1 F. Thompson's essay on Shelley, p. 58.

92 THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

picturesque, sacrificing truth to effect, leaving reality
to follow a phantom, which in the end disappoints them
of their quest : thus they escaped the commonest vice of
our literature, which flaws forty-nine out of fifty among
its novels, and from which few even of our greatest writers
are free. They have nothing which answers to the unreal
pathos of Dickens, the intolerable falsity of Pope, the
pose of Byron, the affectations of Bulwer Lytton.

Instead they did what Mrs. Browning did not do with
the seagull, nor Dryden with death, nor Vergil with
the Italian rustic, nor Blake with the rose, nor Byron
with himself — they kept their eye on their subject, and
wrote down what the eye saw there. They were finite
and actual : they lived in a realized world. They looked
at things naked, and found that the seagull was an
ordinary bird and love a very definite emotion. They
did not search in them for more than meets the eye, but
were content with their beauty as it is. There is quite
enough beauty, they thought, in the real thing, if you
will only open your eyes and see it. They knew too that
parents were badly off when their children died, that
friends were profitable, that children dead in battle
could never be replaced when their parents were past a
certain age. They said so frankly at once. They were not
sentimental about these things.

Here let us guard against a misconception into which
we might slip. Some modern writers are very unsenti-
mental : they plume themselves on looking straight at
life : they open one eye and see all the ugliness, meanness,
and odiousness of things, and produce literature brutal
and bitter to a degree at which subsequent generations
will wonder. Do not let us suppose that Greek directness
led to any such results. It did not mean pessimism.

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 93

The Greeks had both eyes open, and did not overlook
good and beauty because they were able to see evil. They
knew that life, like light, can be decomposed into many
colours, and is really neither dark nor bright, but many-
hued. So they never fell into sordid ' realism '. In their
saddest moments — and a tone of sadness runs through
all Greek literature — they remembered that they had
received good at the hand of God as well as evil. ' Rejoice,'
writes Archilochus, ' in what is delightful, and be not
overvexed at ill : and recognize what a balance our life
maintains.' l ' I weep not for thee,' is the epitaph of
one friend over another, 'for thou knewest many fair
things ; and again God dealt thee thy lot of ill.' 2
Light balanced against darkness ; darkness balanced
against light. That is the Greek attitude, and it is the
truest realism.

Directness of the kind of which we have been speaking
is a quality which the Greek shares with writers of every
race. Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales is as direct as Homer,
so are the Icelandic Sagas : so is all early literature : for
the poets who write it are young-eyed people in a young
world. And because affectation and sentimentality are
not the necessary accompaniments, though they are
the dangers, of culture, directness persists in every age,
and for the most part prevails over its opposites. But
always, as time advances, this primitive simplicity tends
to give place to complication, affectation, unreality. The
Euphues of Lyly, the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney mark
such a progression in our own literature. Was there
nothing analogous in Greece ? . Did not the world become
stale to its writers, so that they took their eyes off it and
followed fancy or beauty into regions of unreality ? In

1 fr. 66. * Stobaeus, Flor. 124, p. 616 (tr. Mackail).

94 THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

the age of Euripides, for instance, when at least two
centuries of poetry had been outlived, and the first bloom
had passed from the world, shall we not find that Greece
forsook directness for other attractions ?

Certainly we see signs of such a movement in the fifth
century. The extravagances of Aeschylus — it is easy
to exaggerate their number — may be due to a unique
Titanic nature. But the Phaedrus and Symposium of
Plato, at which we shall glance later, show a new spirit,
and the choruses of the Bacchae are full of romanticism.

Lines like

nav $€ (Tfi/e/3a/f)(ei/ opoy
KOI Ofjpes.

attribute, in the modern manner, animate emotions to
inanimate things.1 The writer of the Treatise on the
Sublime in his third chapter quotes instances of that
subordination of truth to effect, of reality to pose, which
is the greatest enemy to directness : and Plato has parodied
it in Agathon's speech in the Symposium. If we go to
later writers we shall find the same spirit in Alexandrian
literature ; and it is the abiding vice of that New Sophistry
which was the great work of the second century A. D.
Still, before Alexandrian times, these are rare exceptions.
Of the instances of directness given above, the most part
came from comparatively late writers, from Thucydides,
Aristotle, Xenophon, Sophocles, Euripides himself. And
if we go to still later times, it is the same ; Theocritus,

1 Bacchae, 726-7 : ' The wild beasts and all the mountain
revelled with them ' (a-wtftaKxfvt has been taken to mean ' rang
with the name of Bacchus ' : but that is not its natural meaning,
and the author of the jrtp\ tyovs took it as above, c. 15); cp.
Aesch. fr. 58 evBovaui 89 So^ia, f$aK\(v(i artyr). Both these in-
stances, it is to be noticed, occur in connexion with Bacchic
worship.

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 95

Polybius, the epigrammatists, Lucian, are as ' direct ' and
truthful as Homer or Alcman. This is enough to show
that directness was not merely the transitory bloom of
the youth of Hellenism.

Its persistence was in part due to a fortunate accident.
At the moment when romanticism and sentimentality
might have seized them, the Greeks were passing through
a severe discipline of scientific and philosophic thought.
Dialectics, logic, ethics, natural science, were created
or developed during the fifth century, and in an air
which is full of these forces, the fanciful and the insincere
find it hard to breathe. Logic would hammer them to hear
if they rang true, dialectic would toss them up and down
to see if they hung together, science would insist on know-
ing if they corresponded to facts. Thus if Euripides or his
successors tried a flight into mere fantasy, there was always
something to restrain them. They had learnt to think
and criticize, to trust their brains, to recognize that mere
imagination could not guarantee what reason would
disown, to keep the feet on earth even when the head was
in the clouds ; and this is almost as effective a safeguard
of directness, as natural simplicity of mind.1 Even when
they came to deal with philosophy, in which directness
is difficult, and the unknown and the indefinite have to
be faced, the Greeks still turned towards the concrete,
and as far as possible checked their conceptions by
references to earth : compare the moral philosophy of
Aristotle with that of T. H. Green, and the difference
is apparent. A self-perpetuating tradition had been
founded which, even in ages of decadence, and even for
writers of metaphysics, kept its clarifying power.

1 How much the world might have missed, had the modern
symbolists received a rigorous training in logic or science !

96 THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

Pages have been spent in defining directness, and the
reader may complain that though many phrases and
metaphors have been discharged at him, and though he
has been told what it is not, he still lacks a positive
definition. If he does so, we will answer him by piling
our metaphors and phrases in a heap, and saying that to
be direct is to keep the feet on the earth, to shrink from
mysticism, to be concrete and definite ; to dwell on the
' unimaginary ' qualities of things, to see things naked,
to keep the eye on them ; to avoid sentimentalism and
all forms of literary falsity : in fine, to have the outlook
V^on life of a simple, naive, childlike mind.

This is the second ingredient in that Hellenic truth-
fulness of which Goethe spoke ; by it the Greeks were

enabled

To bear all naked truths,
And to envisage circumstance, all calm : *

and because of it, we seem in their literature to watch
the immediate image of life, unrefracted by any disturbing
medium, just as to-day, off their coasts, the traveller
sometimes sails over a sunken sarcophagus, and far
below him can see the carven figures on it, clear and
undistorted through the pellucid waters.

Some people think that the world can have too much
of directness, and quarrel with precisely the quality
which we have been praising. It is just here, they argue,
that we have advanced beyond the Greeks. By a less
exact fidelity to hard fact we have immensely enriched
life and poetry, as by their strictness the Greeks im-
poverished both. Fancy playing with the picturesque and
pretending that it is true : Reverie in its dreamworld :
1 Keats, Hyperion, bk. 2.

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 97

Poetic Pantheism, with its sympathetic interpretation
of nature : none of these were known to the old Greek
world. They would have withered away in the blaze of
its directness.

True, it is a clear light in which the Greeks lived ;
but there is a quality of coldness and hardness in its tone.
We miss the richness, the variety of light and shadow,
which our own literature possesses. Greece never learnt,
like the symbolists, to indicate the vague emotions which
hover on the verge of consciousness : it ignores the infinite
mystery of things or reduces it to a minimum. Its clarity
palls on us like the transparent atmosphere and vivid
colours of Switzerland, till we long for mistier outlines
and bluer distances. And more. It is hostile, a critic
might argue, to sentiment as well as to sentimentality.
A whole range of thought and feeling is wanting in
Hellenism. There is hardly a trace in it of that poetry
of failure, in which writing of weakness and disaster,
a poet so treats his subject that we almost feel the
weakness to be a virtue and the disaster a success. Such
sentiment is present, perhaps, in Shakespeare's Richard II,
and Marlowe's Edward II : it is the life and soul of the
poetry and prose of Jacobitism ; Browning dallies with it ; l
and it inspires much modern minor poetry, notably that
of the Irish school and of Francis Thompson. There is
none of this sentiment hi the Greeks. They do not admire
and exalt failure, they do not disguise it : they look at
it far too directly to do either the one or the other. With
an infinite sense of the tragedy, then: literature goes
forward in its splendid way, passing inexorably by the
dying, leaving the wounded to lie where they fall, offering
no consolation to the mourner. Hector dies, and Homer

1 e.g. in A bt Vogler; and in his praise of the man who ' aiming
at a million misses a unit.'

1358 G

98 THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

simply says that ' his soul flew forth from his limbs and
was gone to the house of Hades, wailing her fate, leaving
her vigour and youth ' ; x and passes on to describe his
mutilation by Achilles and the hopeless tears of his wife.
Troy is .burnt, its men killed, Astyanax thrown from the
walls before his mother's eyes. Yet, as the play ends and
they pass into slavery, the Trojan women only say, ' Alas !
unhappy city : still, turn thou thy feet to the galleys of
Greece.' 2

Against these pronouncements, merciless and inevitable
as those of fate, our sentiment rebels.

el IJ.GV yap iroXe/jtov irfpl rovSt fyvyovrt
aUt $r) fieXXoifjLff dyrjp<o r' ddavdrco re

If we were unageing and immortal all our days, if there
were no such things as ill health or failure, then we might
live in this blaze of white light, which befits the deities of
Olympus and an Olympian humanity : but as it is, let
us turn to Greece when we are elated and triumphant,
but keep for our hours of depression and disappointment
the twilight world of sentiment, where irrevocable defeat
is in imagination retrieved, and the paths again lie open,
which illness, folly, sin, or want of parts have finally
closed, where failure takes the form of success, and death
itself is transmuted into something rich and strange.

Such, put briefly, is a plea which might be made against
Hellenism : it is the plea of colour versus light. The
case is easier to put than to decide : and in default of an
impartial judge we will use a method consecrated by poetic
usage to settle the dispute. We will ascertain what we
should gain by the Greek directness, and what we should

1 //. 22. 361-3. * Eur. Troad. 1331-2.

3 //. 12. 322-4. ' If we were destined to escape this war and be
for ever ageless and immortal.'

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 99

lose by it ; and, as Dionysus once put the tragedies of
Aeschylus and Euripides in opposing scales, so we will
weigh our losses against our gains.

Suppose we adopt directness. First, we shall lose the
' poetry of failure ' spoken of above ; and must console
ourselves by remembering that a great deal of minor
poetry will disappear under that head. Then, we shall
lose all the poetry which owes its origin to the love of
rhetoric. Rhetoric is always tempting men to close their
eyes to facts, to ' talk big ', to use, irrespective of their
truth, phrases that ring well and flatter the ear ; to
say what sounds effective or picturesque or pathetic or
magnanimous ; to see things as we should like them to
be, as public opinion approves of their being, anyhow
but as they are. Such poetry is incompatible with direct-
ness and perishes in its presence. And so we should lose
a good deal of Latin poetry. For the Romans, with their
passion for rhetoric, are continually saying things that
sound very well, but are simply untrue. Their literature
is full of false sentiment, of unreal points, of rhetorical lies.1
Here is a passage from Lucan :

Victurosque dei celant, ut vivere durent,
Felix esse mori.2

Of course, in point of fact, the gods do nothing of the sort ;
nor under ordinary circumstances is there any happiness

1 The following passage from De Quincey's essay on Rhetoric
is interesting in this connexion, though some people might disagree
with his views. ' Among the greater orators of Greece there is not
a solitary gleam of rhetoric. . . . Isocrates may have a little, being
. . . neither orator nor rhetorician in any eminent sense.' This
quality in Greek oratory De Quincey attributes ' to the intense
reality of its interest'. And if this can be said of Demosthenes
and Lysias, how much more can it be said of the poets and
thinkers of Greece I

2 Lucan, 4. 519. 'From those who are to live the gods conceal
the happiness of death, that they may continue in life.'

loo THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

in death. Only the sentiment has a sham Stoical ring, and
appeals in its rhetorical unreality to all that is rhetorical
and unreal in us or was rhetorical and unreal in Lucan's
contemporaries. Ovid is even fuller of unreality than
Lucan, though his unreality is of a different kind. The
following is a passage from an imaginary letter of Dido
to Aeneas :

Your sword before me while I write does lie,

And by it, if I write in vain, I die.

My tears flow down ; the sharp edge cuts their flood,

And drinks my sorrows, that must drink my blood.

How well thy gift does with my fate agree ;

My funeral pomp is cheaply made by thee.

To no new wounds my bosom I display,

The sword but enters where love made the way.

And she concludes by suggesting a suitable epitaph :

The cause of death and sword by which she died
Aeneas gave ; the rest herself supplied.1

Now these sentiments may show wit, cleverness and a
certain gift of tinsel pathos, but they are not real ; such
words would not have been written by a heart-broken
woman in antiquity any more than now, and Ovid is
untrue to life in making her write them. Hence, though
poetry like this may be attractive to us, if we wish to
be entertained or stimulated by literature, and require
of it merely cleverness or fancy or artistic grace, it will
not satisfy any deeper needs. It will not serve as a
serious document for the study of humanity and its
ways ; it will not sustain or inspire or comfort, for it
has not that higher sincerity which penetrates to the
heart.
All this verse we shall lose ; and with it much of Latin

1 Heroides, vii. 11. 184-90, 195-6. The translation, which is
mainly Dryden's, exactly gives the feeling of the original.

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 101

literature, condemned because it is unreal, and tries to get
past our sense of fact by appealing to our sentimentality
or to our sense of beauty, and so charming us into admira-
tion of it. The Romans took kindly to the literary
pastoral, and the literary epic, and the sham didactic
poem ; they revelled in the undigested mythology of
another race. They are imitative and second-hand,
content to dispense with direct experience of life and
translate into their own language the emotions and thought
of others ; for the most part their fingers do not touch
the pulse of life. Vergil's Pastorals and Georgics are charm-
ing ; but his shepherds are sham ones and keep no sheep,
nor are any genuine labourers at work in his fields. Only
Lucretius among Latin poets will show us the hard struggle
of man with the earth. And if we only keep Vergil in
selections, we shall have some difficulty in keeping Ovid
at all. When he is animal, he is no doubt sincere ; but in
general he spends his time in the company of mythological
marionettes, in whose reality neither he nor any one else
could possibly believe.

Finally, there will be losses nearer home, of all literature
which has not the stamp of entire sincerity. We shall
lose masses of eighteenth-century poetry with its surrender
of truth to pointed epigram or conventional diction ;
masses of modern poetry with its surrender of truth to
luxurious emotion ; much from the Idylls of the King
and from poems like Enoch Arden, in which, to quote a
famous criticism, there is more simplesse than simplicity.
Quantities of Shelley will disappear. We shall keep the
last chorus of Hellas, but some of the most exquisite
stanzas of Adonais will dissolve. We shall hear no more
of the Mighty Mother, the Dreams and Splendours, the
Twilight Fantasies. Such phantoms of Romance cannot
live in honest sunlight, and we shall prefer as our models,

102 THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

either the simply truthful words in which Antigone looks
forward to joining her dead :

a) KaTacrKa(f>r)$

aetypovpos, d
?rpoy rody e/iai/TTyy, cov dpiOftbv kv

Kapr v tTTi<nv rpeot>
Trarpi, 7rpo<r(f>i\ri$ tie (rot,
fifjrep, <f>i\T) 5e aoi, Kaa-iyvrjTov Kapa.1

or the preface to A donais, a work of Hellenic sincerity. Set
fragments from the preface and the poem side by side, and
the point will become clear.

' John Keats died at Rome of a consumption, in his
24th year, on the - of - 1821 ; and was buried in
the romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants in that
city, under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and
the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate,
which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery
is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with
violets and daisies. . . .

* The circumstances of the closing scene of poor Keats's
life were not made known to me till the Elegy was ready
for the press. I am given to understand that the wound
which his sensitive spirit had received from the criticism
of Endymion was exasperated by the bitter sense of
unrequited benefits ; the poor fellow seems to have been
hooted from the stage of life, no less by those on whom he
had wasted the promise of his genius, than those on whom
he had lavished his fortune and his care.'

Is not this at least as noble a tribute to Keats as the
cloudy splendour of the stanzas that follow it ?

1 Soph. Ant. 891-4, 897-9. Mr- Whitelaw translates :

O tomb ! O nuptial chamber ! O house deep-delved
In earth, safeguarded ever ! To thee I come
And to my kin in thee, who many a one
Are with Persephone, dead among the dead :
But a good hope I cherish, that, come there,
My father's love will greet me, yea and thine,
. My mother — and thy welcome, brother dear.

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 103

Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay,

When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies

In darkness ? where was lorn Urania

When Adonais died ? With veiled eyes,

'Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise

She sate, while one, with soft enamoured breath,

Rekindled all the fading melodies,

With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath,

He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of Death.

We shall lose all verse of this pattern, which is, truth-
fully considered, only a 'monumental mockery'. And
we could enumerate many other losses, at the nature
of which the reader can guess by referring to pages 90
to 92 above.

The losses in our list have been rising in value as we
progressed, and many people who would surrender Ovid
or Lucan may hesitate when they are called upon to
part with Adonais. But if they would really learn the
lesson of Hellenism, they may have to make sacrifices
even greater than that. The love of the unknown, the
voluntary surrender to the emotions which it arouses,
are as uncommon in Greek as they are common in
modern poetry. The Greeks did not indulge the soaring
imagination which loves to lose itself in an 0 altitudo,
or muse on the strangeness of a world in which man
walks with wonder and humility amid riddles and
mysteries, himself the greatest riddle and mystery of all.
True, there are exceptions ; Plato, whom we must keep for
special treatment ; Aeschylus somewhat, in whose plays

Giant shapes silently flitting
Pile the dim outlines of the coming doom.

In the close of the Oedipus Coloneus there is a trace of
similar feeling, and perhaps something allied to it in the
Bacchae. But, unless it be from Plato and his late descen-
dants, it would be difficult, if not impossible, really to

104 THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

parallel in Greek literature, either Pascal, le silence eternel
de ces espaces inftnis m'effraie,1 or Vaughan :

On some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity.

or Wordsworth indulging

That blessed mood

In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened : — that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on, —
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep •
In body, and become a human soul ;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.2

Such emotions are surely alien from the main drift of
Greek literature. Greek wonder was milder in quality.
' There are many strange things, and nothing is stranger
than man/ 3 says Sophocles ; yes, but when we read
further we find that man is strange because he sails the sea,
1 ploughs the earth, founds cities and rules his kind. Just
subjects for wonder, doubtless ; but put this beside the
profound amazement of Pascal, frightened by ' the

1 Pensees, 206.

1 It is noticeable that in the next lines Wordsworth half repents of
these words and relapses into a more ' direct ', a more Greek view
of the situation :

If this

Be but a vain belief, yet, oh ! how oft
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight . . .
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee
O sylvan Wye I

Lines composed above Tintern Abbey.
1 Ant. 332.

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 105

eternal silence of these infinite spaces ', and mark the
difference between ancient and, modern.1

On our judgement of the value of these feelings of wonder
will largely depend our judgement of the completeness
or incompleteness of Greek literature. Many people will
feel that the classical Greeks as a whole felt wonder too
little, and were, to adapt Carlyle's epigram, more at home
in Zion than any one has a right to be ; that the world
seemed too simple to them, simpler than it is. Since their
day the floor of heaven, which they thought solid, has been
shattered, and revealed abysses of infinite spaces behind ;
and in the world of the spirit an analogous enlargement
was made, when Christianity broke up the old limitations
of humanity and spread a belief in its infinite possibilities.

But let us turn to the compensations which Greek
directness has to offer us. If we achieve it, our first gain
will be a far keener sense of the beauty and interest of
the ordinary simple things around us. Most of us pass
through life, as people go for walks at Oxford, with
their eyes on nothing in particular, and their mind on
anything but the beauty through which they move.
Existence is a prolonged somnambulism with rare moments
of waking. Even when our eyes are open, they are fixed
sometimes on sordid details, sometimes on abstruse and
complicated topics, and miss the ordinary things which lie
at our feet. Our poets are no better : they soar away
from the common earth and lift us with them into ideal
worlds. Shakespeare keeps listening to the ' still sad
music of humanity ', Milton's vision is ' with dreadful

1 The same quality of Hellenism is indicated by the primitive
character of music — the most suggestive of arts — in Greece, and
by the lateness of the appearance of the conception of personality
— the most mysterious of conceptions ; the first faint traces of it
are found, I believe, in Aristotle.

106 THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH.

faces thronged and fiery arms ', Shelley lives ' pinnacled
dim in the intense inane '.

But while Shelley tries at the expense of twenty-one
verses to make me think of his skylark as a ' blithe spirit '
(which I know it is not), Sappho and Simonides with four
words1 make me see a real nightingale, and give me a
greater and a far saner pleasure than Shelley's ' unbodied
joy ' could give. For the Greeks walked through life with
their eyes open, and did not miss 6 /car' 7//*ap /St'oroy. I
open my volume of the lyric poets, and it is this charac-
teristic which meets me on every page. The writer's feet
are on the earth, and its sights and sounds are before
them. The visions they see are not Shelley's, but a girl
who cannot mind her loom for thinking of her lover ; 2 or
shepherds trampling down the bluebells as they follow
their flocks on the hills ; 3 or a stormy night and men
drinking beside blazing logs ; 4 or a common barndoor

1 Sapph. fr. 39 *Hpos ayyt\os , l/jifp6(p<at>os dfjStoi', ' The messenger
of spring, the lovely- voiced nightingale. Simon, fr. 73 dfjtiovfs
TroXwcwTiXoi x\u>pavxevfs flapivai, ' The warbling nightingales with
olive necks, the birds of spring.'

* Sapph. fr. 90 :

TXvKfia [WTtp, OVTOI Bvvafjiai Kpexyv TOV icrrov
Troda da/Melcra 7ral8os fipabivav 81 'A.<pp68iTav.

1 Dear mother, I cannot weave my web ; I am overcome with
longing for the boy, by the doing of delicate Aphrodite.'

* Sapph. fr. 94 :

Ouii> Tav vaKtvdov (V ovp((ri iroififves avftpes
7r6o~o~i K.o.Tao~T(if3oio~i) x^f1*11 ^* Tf irop(pvpov avdos . . .
' Like the hyacinth on the hills which shepherds tread under
foot, and the bright flower is crushed to the ground.'
4 Alcaeus, f r. 34 :

*Y« fj.fv 6 Zevs, (K fi' opavat pfyas
nfTrdyacriv 8' vbdrcw poai.

TOV %(iptovt eV! per ridtis
nvp, (V 8e Kipvais <3

vt airrap dfji<j)\ Kopcra

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 107

fowl ; l or the na'ive and very concrete occupations of a
poet ; 2 or an admirable description of an evening's genial
merrymaking over the fire :

These are the words to use, in the stormy season of winter,
Lying on couches soft, with bellies full, by the fireside,
Honeysweet wine in the glass, and nuts and beans at the

elbow ;
' Who are you ? when were you born ? and which is the

country you hail from ?
What was your age when the Persian came ' ? 3

Always it is a joy in simple things that marks the Greek ;
he had learnt that this was the secret for one who wished
in Euripides' words, Kara 0aoy VVKTCIS re $tXay evatmva
Siatfv. This is the first thing he can teach us.

Then in our general view of life ' directness ' will keep
us from humbug and false sentiment. That will be a cruel
blow at first. We delight in ' dim and feverish sensations,
dreamy and sentimental sadness, tendency to reverie,
and general patheticalness *,4 without troubling to ask

' Zeus sends rain, there is a great storm out of the sky, and the
waterfloods are frozen. Out with winter ! Pile high the fire, mix
honeyed wine generously and wrap a soft hood round your head.'

1 SimonideSjfr. 8 1 dpepfyav aXeWtop, ' O cock that criest at dawn.'

* Anacreon, fr. 17:

(v pov

XfTTTOl) fJLlKpOV OTTOKXds,

olvov 8' e£(Triov icddov,
vvv 8* dftpais tp6f(r(rav

Kco/ia£a>i/ TraTSl

1 1 broke a little off a thin cake and breakfasted : I drank
up a jug of wine : and now I am playing my dainty passionate
lyre to the dainty girl of my love.'

* Xenophanes, ap. Athenaeum, 54 :

Ilap Trvpl xpr) TOiavra \eytiv xci/Lta>i/o? ff oprj
(V K\ivrj (j.a\aKfj KaTaKttfjLtvov, f[jnr\(ov ovra,
TTivovra yXvKvv olvov, vTroTp&yovr' IpfftivQovs.
" ris TTootv ffs dv&pSiv, irocra TOI try e'orl (ptpicrrf,
irrjX'tKos r\a& 06' 6 MrJSor afpiKfro ; "

4 Ruskin, Modern Painters, iv. I3.'J 14.

io8 THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS CH,

whether these are justified by fact. We are opium-eaters,
and allow ourselves to be deluded by splendid visions or
drugged into a comfortable slumber. If a poet is musical
or picturesque, if he catches our fancy or tickles our ears,
we never ask whether what he says is true.

There are two literatures in the world which are hope-
lessly at war with this spirit, and which we must shun
unless we wish to be shaken out of it. They are very dif-
ferent in their conclusions, for they start from widely
different presuppositions, but they are very much alike in
their determination to see things as they are. One of these
is Greek literature, the other is the New Testament. They
may seem a queer pair to couple. Yet any one can take
my meaning who will note S. Paul's teaching on marriage
or that preamble to the Anglican marriage service for
which to-day we substitute some amiable hymn. Read
these and consider with what a Greek directness the
Apostle and the Church face the subject. Both to the
early Christians and to the Greeks life was too real a
thing to be surrendered to sentiment and sham. The
gay fancies of Sidney's pastorals, the facile epithalamia
of the seventeenth century, the glib threnodies of Dryden
and Pope, the sentimental melancholy of our minor
poets were not for them. They were content, in the
presence of life, if they could use and enjoy it rightly, and
in the presence of death, if they could know it for what
it was.

NOTE

Let us notice briefly one apparent, and one real,
exception to directness in Greek literature. Was Empe-
docles direct when he attributed the cosmic process to
the working of Love and Strife ; or the Pythagoreans
when they declared that things were numbers ? Is

in THE NOTE OF DIRECTNESS 109

Plato direct in the view of love which he advances in the
Phaedrus and the Symposium ?

It must be remembered with regard to Empedocles,
and indeed to all the early natural philosophers, that
when a thinker tries to reduce the world to its elements,
to find what lies below its surface, he is ipso facto unable
to deal in the tangible and concrete, in the ' actual and
unimaginary ' qualities of things. Further, as Professor
Burnet has pointed out in his Early Greek Philosophy,
science is obliged to advance through a succession of
hypotheses which sound incredible and are rarely true.1
And above all, though there is error in their views, there
is none of the falsity which we saw to be the real enemy
of directness. Perhaps that is because the eccentricities
of the Greek physicists were intellectual, those of the
modern symbolists are emotional. With regard to Plato,
the exception must be admitted — it is touched on in
Chapter VII ; certainly he is highly mystical and modern
in his treatment of love. Yet it would seem that here we
have him in an un-Greek mood, or at least in a mood
inconsistent with the genius of the Greeks. In the first
place, there is no trace of such a view of love before Plato,
there is no trace of it (I believe) even in Greek tragedy ;
in the second, though Xenophon in his Symposium
attributes the mystical view to Socrates, there is no
trace of it in Xenophon's picture of ordinary married life
in the Oeconomicus : and it is worth noticing that the
other guests at Xenophon's dinner were very far from
sharing it.2 If we find one view of love in nine-tenths
of Greek literature, and another view in one-tenth of it
(and this is a liberal over-estimate of the mysticism in
Greek), we may legitimately conclude that the first is
the general Greek view.

1 Op. cit. pp. 29, 32. 2 Xen. Sympos. 9.

CHAPTER IV
THE NOTE OF HUMANISM

Now rises a further question. The Greek tried to see
things as they are. Yes, but how are they ? He was
true to facts. Yes, but what are facts ? There are very
few certain facts ; and these are such that the knowledge
of them does not much help us to solve the problem of
conduct ; for the important thing is not the fact, but
the meaning we attach to it. Birth — as Wordsworth
viewed it, or as a physiologist views it in his physiological
moments, or as Mr. H. G. Wells views it, or as the mother
of a child views it ; death — a mere dissolution of cells
and tissues, or an end to the possibility of many sensations
of pleasure and pain, or the opening of a door into a new
world and a vast increase in those possibilities ; marriage
— a momentary connexion between two animals, or a
mystical partnership never to be dissolved ; there are the
same facts in every case, but they can be taken to mean
very different things. The important thing is not the
fact, but its interpretation. So there rises the question :
how did the Greeks interpret the world ? They had the
same facts as we have (the modern world in spite of its
scientific discoveries has no more certain clue to the
meaning of life than Aeschylus or Thucydides). In what
light did they interpret these facts ?

They did not interpret the world in the materialistic way,
seeing in a beautiful landscape only an exceptional dis-
position of strata, and in a human being only a peculiar

CH. iv THE NOTE OF HUMANISM in

collection of atoms. Nor did they interpret it in a
spiritual way, believing that the realities were unseen
things — God, a Spiritual Universe, a Future Life — and
saying that it did not yet appear what we should be.
There were no infinite possibilities in the sky above them
or in the human beings around them. While to some
the world has meant Atoms, and to others Spirit, to the
Greek it meant simply Man ; man under his natural
circumstances, and with his most obvious attributes ;
passing from childhood through manhood to old age,
the centre of his existence a home and a city, its main
events birth, marriage, death; its chief evils sickness,
poverty, exile ; its chief goods health, wealth, success, an
honourable name, warm affections and friendships. The
Greek took this being, with his instincts, impulses, and
faculties, and, with no preconceptions, no regard to the
invisible, asked himself to what they pointed ; asked
himself what obviously and on the surface man was, and
in accordance with the answer constructed his philosophy
of life. Here, then, we have the fourth note of the Greek
genius. It is the human standpoint towards life ; we may
call it Humanism, and we may sum it up in the saying
attributed to Protagoras, oivOptoiros /j.€rpov irdvTtov — Man is
the measure of all things.

It is true that in a sense the Greek was religious ; we
can see from the writings of Herodotus and Xenophon
how continually the gods were in his thoughts, and even
S. Paul called him S€i<ri8ai(jioi>€oT€pos. But his religion
was very human. It is true that he admitted possibilities
in the unseen ; but he minimized the inconveniences that
might attend their existence by making the unseen visible ;
he admitted the existence of gods, but he created them
in his own human likeness, with his own human passions,

U2 THE NOTE OF HUMANISM CH.

and only differing from man by their immortality and their
greater power. As Pindar bluntly puts it, ' one race there
is of men and one of gods, but from one mother, Earth,
draw we both our breath ; yet is the strength of us Diverse
altogether, for the race of men is nought, but the brazen
heaven abideth.' 1 This is what the Greek made of God.
He humanized him.

Everywhere he carried this passion for humanizing
things. He set to work on the old beast-gods, which
were the legacy of early barbarism, and they too were
humanized. The eagle, the raven, the snake, the wolf
were originally forms under which the god manifested
himself : in Greek hands they become his attendants
or attributes. Hera and Athene took the forms of
women, but kept from the shapes which they once wore,
the one a cow's mild glance (/Sowny), the other the keen
grey eyes of the owl (yXavK&Tris). So again inanimate
nature became not merely animate, but human. The
Greek could not think of rivers without their river-gods,
or of sun and moon apart from their divinities. Naiads
live in springs and are the authors of their clearness ;
Dryads are the tree-spirits that die when the tree is
felled. A sudden fright seizes some shepherds as they
feed their flock on the hillside ; it was Pan who peered
out at them from among the rocks. A girl was blown over
a cliff ; the North Wind had carried her away to be his
playmate. Such were the legends that the Greek invented,
and it was a human place that he made of the world.

What he did for God and Nature, that the Greek did

for his daily life. He humanized it. Some thinkers —

S. Paul, Pascal, Byron are among them — have seen in

man a twofold nature, god and beast ; and finding no

1 Nem. vi. i f. (tr. Myers).

iv THE NOTE OF HUMANISM 113

reconciliation between his two natures, have been agonized
by the conflict within this being

Half dust, half deity, alike unfit
To sink or soar. . . .l

The Greek was not conscious of such a distinction ; he
only saw a unity ' glorious in its action and itself ', in
which humanity was not distinct from divinity, nor body
from soul. S. Paul and Pascal found no escape from this
horrible dualism within except by the intervention of
God. They threw themselves on His grace. Pour faire
d'un homme un saint il faut bien que ce soil la grace ; et
qui en doute ne sait ce que c'est que saint et qu'homme.2
The Greek had not felt the difficulty and did not need the
solution. Hard work, he thought, would achieve all that
was possible to man. ' The anxious thought of youth
conjoined with toil achieves renown,' said Pindar.3 You
would have found it impossible to explain to a Greek
what this ' grace ' was ; if he were an Orphic, he
would have had a glimpse of your meaning ; but there
is no word in classical Greek which answers to it. S. Paul
and Pascal felt that the evil, infectum scelus, must always
remain while they were clothed with the flesh, and for
final deliverance looked forward to a future life. The
Greek believed that human nature could, and sometimes
did, achieve its end on earth. Of an after-life he had the
vaguest ideas, and such as he had were in no way con-
soling. Homer had spoken of asphodel meadows, where, /
bloodless and unhappy, flit the ghosts of those who were r
once so full of life ; where Achilles could say that he would
rather be a labourer on the tiniest of human farms than a
king over all the dead. And not less gloomy, if less definite .

1 Manfred, i. 2. * Pascal, Pensees, 508. * fr. 207 (Bergk).

1358

H4 THE NOTE OF HUMANISM CH.

than this, is the conception of a future life which dominates
Greek literature. Here are characteristic sentiments from
different centuries. ' When a man is dead all his glory
is gone.' He is ' dust and ashes ; what is nought turns
to nothing '. He has ' no strength nor veins that throb
with blood '. ' What of the underworld ? ' asks an epitaph
of the man over whom it is set. ' Deep darkness,' comes
the reply. Better so, thinks Macaria, the Athenian girl
who gives up her life that the suppliant children of
Heracles may live. ' I pray that there may be nothing
below the earth ; if we mortals that are to die have
sorrow even there, I know not where to turn ; for death
is thought the supreme medicine for misfortune.' x At
best there was a sickening uncertainty :

If any far-off state there be,
Dearer to life than mortality ;
The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof,
And mist is under and mist above.
And so we are sick for life and cling
On earth to this nameless and shining thing.
For other life is a fountain sealed,
And the depths below are unrevealed,
And we drift on legends ever.2

fivOois aXXcoy fapoftfcrda : ' we drift on legends ever '.
Greek literature, usually so definite, so precise in colour
and form, here alone is vague and indefinite. Except for
two great writers 3 it has no New Jerusalem, descending
visibly out of heaven, mapped and measured, named and
described ; no worshipping multitude of spirits, who were
dead and are alive. Its New Jerusalem was on earth ; its

1 The references above are to Homer, Od. 1 1. 488 f. ; Stesichorus,
fr. 52; Euripides, fr. 536; Aeschylus, fr. 226; Anth. Pal. 7. 524;
Eur. Heracl. 592 ff. My instances are mainly taken from Rohde,
Psyche, 2. 198-263. * Eur. Hipp. 191 f-. (tr. Murray).

* Pindar and Plato, with whom Chapter VII tries to deal.

iv THE NOTE OF HUMANISM 115

ideal was a human paradise. If he had health, if he escaped
poverty and exceptional sorrow, if he lived with repute
in the small city where he was born, if he was happy in
his friends and family, if he left behind him children to
perpetuate his name — then the ordinary Greek felt that
he and the world had done their duty to each other.
A philosopher would have added something more,
freedom to develop his intellect and his moral nature.1
But of a personal relation to God, of God's grace, of
a future life, neither philosopher nor ordinary man
thought. Recall three Greek definitions of happiness, and
observe how they justify this view. The first is by
Pindar : ' Two things alone there are that cherish life's
bloom to its utmost sweetness amid the fair flowers of
wealth — to have good success and to win therefor fair
fame. Seek not to be a god : if the portion of these
honours fall to thee, thou hast already all. The things
of mortals best befit mortality.' 2 The second is attributed
to Solon and approved by Herodotus : ' If a man is sound
in limb, free from disease, free from misfortune, happy
in his children, and himself goodlooking : if in addition he
ends his life well, he may rightly be termed happy.' 3 The
third is from Aristotle : ' Happiness may be defined as pros-
perity conjoined with virtue, or as independence of life, or as
the pleasantest life conjoined with safety, or as an abun-
dance of goods and slaves with the ability to preserve them
and make a practical use of them ; it would be pretty gener-
ally admitted that happiness is one or more of these things.
Such then being the definition of happiness, it follows
that its constituent parts are nobility, the possession of
many and excellent friends, wealth, a goodly and numerous

1 Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, has written the moral
philosophy of humanism. * Isthm. 4. 12. * Herod, i. 32.

n6 THE NOTE OF HUMANISM CH.

family and a happy old age ; also such physical excellence
as health, beauty, strength, stature, and athletic powers,
and finally fame, honour, good fortune, and virtue.' 1
Famous and representative definitions, these tell us what
the Greek asked of life. If Christ had given a definition
of happiness, it would have been in different terms.

It is related of Robert Hall that he ' confessed that
reading Miss Edgeworth hindered him for a week in his
clerical functions ; he was completely disturbed by her
pictures of a world of happy active people without any
visible interference of religion — a sensible and on the
whole healthy world, yet without warnings, without
exhortations, without any apparent terrors concerning
the state of souls '.2 The people who disconcerted
Robert Hall's devotions might well have been Greeks.
' The Greek humanized life. This does not mean that
he made it animal, nor must we suppose that he inter-
preted it simply in terms of sense and animal desire.
It was not so. Coarsely minded men among the Greeks
put a coarse construction on human nature, ate, drank,
and indulged themselves, and looked on such indulgence
as the best thing in life. But the better sort thought
differently. To them humanity meant the exercise of
natural gifts, the enjoyment of natural pleasures ; and
the close of the preface to Ruskin's Crown of Wild Olives
shows not unfairly what this people, having resigned the
hope of immortality and contenting themselves with
making the best they could out of earth, saw in life and
asked from it. ' They knew that life brought its contest ;
but they expected from it also the crown of all contest.
No proud one ! no jewelled circlet flaming through

1 Ar. Rhet. 1360!), 14.

* Quoted in Lewes, Life of Goethe, bk. vi. c. 2.

iv THE NOTE OF HUMANISM 117

heaven above the height of the unmerited throne ; only
some few leaves of wild olive, cool to the tired brow,
through a few years of peace. The wreath was to be of
wild olive, mark you ; — the tree that grows carelessly,
tufting the rocks with no vivid bloom, no verdure of
branch ; only with soft snow of blossom and scarcely
fulfilled fruit, mixed with grey leaf and thorn-set stem ;
no fastening of diadem for you but with such sharp
embroidery ! But this, such as it was, they might win
while yet they lived ; type of grey honour and sweet rest.
Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed trust,
and requited love, and the sight of the peace of others, and
ministry to their pain; — these and the blue sky above them,
and the sweet waters and flowers of the earth beneath.' *

These words are truer of their author than of the
nation to whom he applied them, for there is more savour
of the earth about the Greeks than Ruskin lets us feel.
Yet no one can read Greek literature without finding that
it brings him close to a people who are human in the
best sense of the word. We see this in Homer, who is
the singer not only of war, feasting, and travel, but also
of quiet domestic life. To us Hector is the terrible hero,
who wades through blood with his gleaming bronze and
nodding crest ; Homer remembered that he was a man
too, and shows him comforting his wife and playing with
his child. To us Odysseus is a prototype of the mariner
with a lie for every emergency and a wife in every port ;
Homer tells us also, how he went in disguise to greet the
father who had not seen him for twenty years, found him
in leather gaiters and gauntlets ' because of the thorns ',
digging in the vineyard and ' nursing his sorrow ', and

1 For purposes of quotation I have altered a few unimportant
words.

n8 THE NOTE OF HUMANISM CH.

was surprised out of his deceits by intense pity at the
sight. Such poetry is typical of a very human people.

Very human, too, are the ten Corinthians of whom
Herodotus tells a story — it is the only incident in their
life which we know. An oracle had warned them against
an infant who was one day to be the ruin of their state,
and they resolved on the cruel but not unnatural precau-
tion of putting it to death. Their plan failed, and the
reason for its failure tells us something about the tem-
perament of these cruel conspirators, and about that of
the historian who delighted to describe their behaviour.
' They went into Eetion's courtyard and asked for the
baby. Its mother, ignorant of their purpose and fancying
that they asked out of friendship to its father, gave the
infant into the hands of one of them. Now they had
agreed on the road that the one who first received the
child should dash it to the ground. But it happened by
a divine chance that the child smiled at the man who
took it ; and he noticing it was seized with pity and was
unable to destroy it, so he gave it to the second and he to
the third, till it thus passed through the hands of all the
ten, and no one of them would destroy it. Then they
gave the child back to its mother and went outside.
There they stopped at the gate and began to blame
and reproach each other, but particularly him who had
first received the child.' 1 The writer of this was a very
human man.

And turn to figures less fabulous than these. Xenophon
has left us some random sketches of his friends, which
show what Greeks of the best kind were like. We are
not to regard these men as poets or philosophers or in
any way exceptional. They were average Greeks of the
1 Herod. 5. 92.

iv THE NOTE OF HUMANISM 119

better sort ; and Xenophon's own career and character
is typical of theirs. He was a successful and adventurous
soldier, one of the leaders of the Ten Thousand, who
made that famous march through the mountains of
Anatolia. Later he settled in the country and spent his
days in hunting and literature. He wrote a history of his
own time, memoirs of Socrates, tractates on education,
on household management, on hunting, on commanding
cavalry, on buying and keeping horses. In the words of
a biographer ' he was a man remarkable in many ways,
notably, as his writings show, in his taste for hunting and
military pursuits ; a pious man who loved to offer
sacrifices, was versed in religious matters, and was
a faithful disciple of Socrates '. His friends were not
unlike himself.

Among them are Crito, Cebes, and the rest, of whom
he tells us that they associated with Socrates, ' not that
they might become popular speakers or successful bar-
risters, but in order to grow into good and noble men,
and learn how rightly to conduct themselves to their
households and servants, their relations and friends, their
country and fellow-countrymen.' l Is it possible to sum
up human morality more concisely or more completely
than in these words? Then there is Ischomachus, who
had realized ' that unless we know what we ought to do
and take pains to bring it about, God has decided that
we have no right to prosperity ; but if we are wise and
painstaking, He grants it to some of us, though not to
others. So to start with, I reverence Him ; and then I do
my best to act so as to be entitled, when I pray, to obtain
health and physical strength and the respect of my fellow-
Athenians and the affection of my friends and an increase
1 Mem. i. 2. 48.

120 THE NOTE OF HUMANISM CH.

of wealth — with honour — and safety in war — with honour ' .*
Finally, a more personal portrait, there is the young Her-
mogenes, who is ' wasting away for love of nobleness ; look
at his serious brow, his steady glance, the temperateness
of what he says, the gentleness of his voice, the cheerful-
ness of his temper ; although he has friends among the
most august of the gods, he never despises us mortals.' 2
Whatever faults these men may have had, they were not
mere animals. Their ideals are those which we like to
attribute to the best kind of English gentleman.

Such were Xenophon's friends among themselves. The
following conversation between one of them and his wife
shows the spirit in which they approached marriage.
The husband is speaking. * " Your parents on your behalf,
and I on my own, reflected as to the best person either of
us could find to share a home and children ; and I chose
you and your parents chose me, out of the persons avail-
able. If God gives us children, we shall consult together
about the best way of bringing them up ; we shall need
them to help us and support us in old age ; and this is an
interest we have in common. But at present we share
this household. I put all I have into the common stock,
and you have done the same with your dowry. We are
not to count which of us has contributed the greater sum ;
we are to remember that whichever of us is the better
partner makes the more valuable contribution." My wife
answered : " How can I help you in this ? what does my
power come to ? Everything rests on you, and my
mother told me that my business was to live soberly
" Yes, and that is just what my father said

1 Oecon. ii. 8.

1 Sympos. 8. 3. It is an interesting picture of what a Greek
really meant by a «caX6?

iv THE NOTE OF HUMANISM 121

to me. But a sober-living man and wife look to the
preservation of their fortune, and add to it what rightly
and honourably they can." " But what," she said, " do
you see that I can do to increase it ? " " Why," I replied,
" do as well as you can what God created you to do and
what the law approves." ' 1 And then he goes on to
explain the duties of a mother and the mistress of a house-
hold as he conceives them.

These words illustrate very well the view of life to which, .
under ordinary circumstances, Greek humanism led. There
is nothing ideal, mystical, or romantic in this conception
of marriage ; it is viewed as a very human thing ; — note
the utilitarian uses of children, and the stress laid on the
duty of increasing one's income. Yet tenderness, mutual
comfort, and affection are also there ; the bond is much
more than animal. The light that never was on sea or
land does not fall on it ; yet it is warmed and brightened
by the common everyday sun.

In the same temper Ischomachus and his wife go about
the business of training and managing their servants.
' For housekeeper we chose the woman we thought would
be most temperate in food, drink, and sleep ; one who had
a good memory, and was most likely to think how she
could please us and win our esteem. In happy hours we
shared our happiness with her and in hours of distress we
invited her sympathy ; so we taught her to be loyal to us.
We took her into the counsels of our household and let
her share in its prosperity ; so we made her eager for its
advantage. We honoured goodness, and pointed out to
her that the good were better off and had more liberty
than the bad ; so we taught her to be good.' z Whether
servants can really be managed in this way is another
1 Oec. 7. ii f. * Oec. 9. n.

122 THE NOTE OF HUMANISM CH.

question. But if they can, the post of housekeeper to
Ischomachus must have been a pleasant one. Not that
there is any great idealism in this picture of a Greek
household or in the principles on which it was ruled. The
master and mistress simply assume that unspoilt human
beings are by nature kindly and honest ; that it is natural
that they should be this and not the opposite, for kindli-
ness and honesty prosper best in the world ; and that if you
treat your servants with sympathy, they will be interested
in your prosperity and do their part in contributing to it.

It is a purely human view of life, but in practice not
a bad one. Holding to it, a man knows exactly where he
stands, what he can do, and what he may look forward to.
He knows the worst that can happen to him, and has
only to make up his mind to enjoy the good and endure
the bad. In his gloomiest moments he might perhaps say
with Pascal : ' Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque belle
que soit la comedie en tout le reste ; on jette enfin de la
terre sur la tete, et en voila pour jamais.' But he would
never say, * Je blame egalement, et ceux qui prennent
parti de louer I'homme, et ceux qui le prennent de le
blamer, et ceux qui le prennent de se divertir ; et je ne
puis approuver que ceux qui cherchent en gemissant.'1
For there are none of the haunting uncertainties of
modern religion about the Greek view of life ; no dark
corners, no likelihood of skeletons in the cupboard. It is
a clear air, and in it we are not baffled by mists, which
rise and fall, but never entirely lift ; and which hold
behind them endless possibilities that can never be quite
brought to the test.

In Xenophon we see humanism at its best, and, without
looking at its dark side, we may pass to see how a humanist
1 Pens&es, 210, 421.

iv THE NOTE OF HUMANISM 123

takes life. But, in passing, let us emphasize once more the
interest to us of this human view of the world.

It is here that Hellenism parts company with Chris-
tianity, or at any rate with the prevailing Christian
theory. Hellenism dispenses with the need for a deity,
a future life, and a purely spiritual world. It is not essen-
tially inconsistent with these beliefs, and they have often
been found in union with it ; but it can do without them.
Abolish them for the Greek, and he would still live the
same life as if they were there. For him the whole creation
was not groaning and travailing in pain. He was waiting
for no glory to be revealed, with which the sufferings of
this present time were not worthy to be compared. The
glory was already present to his eyes : flesh and blood for
him did, or might, already in this terrestrial world possess
the kingdom of God. He could live with satisfaction in
the present, and forgo the necessity of a redemption to
come. But abolish the unseen world for the Christian,
and the whole meaning and value of life is altered. If
there is anything permanent in Christianity it is the certain
persuasion that the world is not an adequate theatre for
man, nor he capable of reaching the perfection of his nature
unaided. Again and again in the teaching of the Church
this conviction breaks out : it underlies the doctrines of
the Fall, of Predestination and Reprobation, of Grace ; it
prompts that sense of homelessness here to which Christian
writers give constant expression. Omnia quae hie amantur
et transeunt are the words of Augustine ; ex umbris et
imaginibus in veritatem is the epitaph of Newman ;
memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis is Pascal's
summary of our life.

There are few more important problems than this —
is humanism right ? Is it right to take a purely human

134 THE NOTE OF HUMANISM CH.

attitude towards life, to assume that man is the measure
of all things, and to believe that, even though the unseen
may be there, still we can know our duty and live our
life without reference to it. That is perhaps the biggest
question of the present day, the one most worth settling,
the one which every one has to settle for himself.

If our minds are made up and we are humanists, then
we are not likely to find better models than the Greeks.
Of unaided human nature it is not too much to say that
they made the best that can be made ; in regard to the
chief things of life, modern humanists are not likely to
come to conclusions different from or better than those
of a people whose acuteness of insight amounts almost
to inspiration ; and they can hardly find better or wiser
teachers than its great men.

But if we approach the subject as inquirers, anxious
to learn to what humanism leads and whether it will work,
still we must turn to Athens. There alone the experiment
of humanism has been tried ; the only evidence about it
we can get is the evidence from Greek society. There we
can see how it succeeds ; whether it tends to strength, to
racial survival ; whether it leads to justice, righteousness,
mercy, true happiness ; or whether the sins, whose long
catalogue closes the first chapter of S. Paul's Epistle to
the Romans, are the logical and finally inevitable issue
of life for those peoples who worship and serve the creature
more than the Creator.

Let us now form some idea of the view of life to which
humanism commits us.

If we wish to know how a humanist looks at the world,
we must first forget our own view of it, dismiss alike our
prejudices and our convictions (especially theological),

iv THE NOTE OF HUMANISM 125

and forgo that knowledge which in the course of years
humanity has achieved. We must approach the subject
with the open mind of ignorance and in the temper in
which the conventional stranger from Mars is supposed
to view the world. Imagine, then, that we arrive upon
earth, with no preconceived notions about it or its inhabi-
tants, and try to discover what man is, in order that we
may decide what he should do. We meet our first human
being ; and it becomes at once clear to us that he is
a composite being, composite of body and mind — to use the
latter term in its widest sense. Which of these elements
is most important, which is man to satisfy, the first, the
second, or both ?

First, the body would force itself on our attention,
visible, tangible, and certain ; present with us from life
to death ; with needs that must be met if we are to exist
at all ; with imperious desires clamouring for satisfaction ;
the seat of intense and gross pleasures, and yet of fine and
spiritual ones too ; gorging itself to repletion, besotted
in the harlots' houses, drinking itself drunk, hunting,
riding, fishing, tasting all the fine exultation of bodily
exercise. Surely this is the central, certain, dominant
reality. And if we think so, we shall reply that bodily
good is the good thing, and devote ourselves to securing
health, health at all costs, and money and friends in
sufficiency to satisfy the body's demands and minister to
its enjoyments.

In such a view there would be something very Greek.
The Greek looked at man, and the first thing that struck
him as he looked was the importance of the body ; he •
never forgot the lesson, even when thought and experience
had naturally carried him past it. That was natural ; for
the body is the most certain, tangible, real thing in man,

126 THE NOTE OF HUMANISM CH.

and the Greek always grasped after what was tangible
and certain. We will take some illustrations. Let the
reader ask himself what three wishes he would make, if
he were assured of being granted them. Here is a Greek
view in a proverb, quoted or alluded to five times by no
less a writer than Plato. ' First comes health, second
personal beauty, then wealth honestly come by, fourthly
to be young with one's friends.' 1 A surprising order of

1 During two successive years I asked a lecture class to put
on paper four wishes in order of preference. The answers were
so various that one or two had to be omitted and the rest grouped
under heads, but the general result was as follows :

Health 54

Spiritual or Moral Excellence . . -47
Friendship or Domestic Happiness . • 35

Intellectual Excellence . . . . .32

Contentment . . . . . .29

Artistic Pleasures . . . . 1 5

Physical Excellence . . . . -13

Success . . . . . . 13

Hard Work .10

Travel 8

Wealth 8

The individual answers were naturally more interesting than these
groups. As a whole they show instructive differences from the
Greek point of view : notably in the comparative indifference to
wealth and physical excellence, and in the appearance of items
like travel. The lists varied somewhat in the two years ; in the
first, art, travel, and hard work were prominent : the latter two
were ignored in the second year, and art almost ignored. But
otherwise the agreement was exact, wealth (as opposed to reason-
able means, which were reckoned under the head of contentment)
coming in both cases at the bottom of the list.

Perhaps in this connexion it is worth quoting Stevenson's three
wishes, in his own words.

1. Good health.

2. Two to three hundred a year.

3. O du lieber Gottl friends.

In regard to the proverb quoted in the text, it must be remem-

iv THE NOTE OF HUMANISM 127

merit, to our ideas. So again, Aristotle thinks that the
highest thing a man can aspire to is wisdom, the intel-
lectual contemplation of God ; yet no man, he thinks, can
be happy ' who is absolutely ugly '}• One of Xenophon's
young friends was of the same opinion : for he swears
' by all the gods that he would not choose the empire of
Persia instead of beauty '? There is no false idealism
about these sentiments; the Greek thought it a great
misfortune to be bad-looking or poor, and he was quite
frank in saying so ; his were concrete ambitions and
redolent of earth. Yet one would hardly call them
materialistic. It is the spiritualization of what is earthy, , /
the idealism of common things, that is typical of the
Greek.

The predominance of the body ; we see it in the abiding
passion for personal beauty and physical strength ; in
the idealization of the athlete ; in the sculpture that
developed its ideals as it watched in the gymnasia the
naked human form ; in the charm of Alcibiades ; in the
mythical story of the acquittal of Phryne ; in the legend
how Pisistratus came to Athens in the train of a country-
woman of surprising beauty, giving her out to be the
goddess Athene, and so was accepted by the Athenians as
their ruler. Xenophon mentions as qualifications for high
political office, ' good birth, and physique eminently
comely to the outward eye, and capable of supporting
hard work.' 3 (How few modern statesmen would satisfy

bered that it is part of a skolion, and any deductions from it as to
Greek ideals should be corrected by a reference to the definitions
of happiness given on p. 115. Still, Plato would not have quoted
it so often if he had felt no sympathy with the views it expresses.
1 Nic. Eth. 1099 b, 4. * Xen. Symp. 4. n.

Xen. Symp. 8. 40 vupa a£io7rpe7re'0raTOj> ftfv iSeiv, iKavbv ic
viro<p(ptii>.

128 THE NOTE OF HUMANISM CH.

the second of these conditions !) Plato, who in many
things falls away from the Greek ideal, keeps this particu-
lar element. For him physical beauty is the natural
expression of the beauty of the soul, and when he wishes
to describe the unworthy philosopher, whose champion-
ship is the supreme degradation of philosophy, he portrays
him under the likeness of an ' undersized baldheaded
tinker '. And what poet has ever drawn a picture of
youth and health like this ?

Just Cause :
Nay, bright will be your hours and fresh with busy round

of play,

You'll never bandy naughty jests like young men of to-day
About the streets, nor lord yourself in some vexatious case,
But down in Academe between the olives you will race,
Bright grasses bound about your head, in honest company
Fragrant of woodbine and of ease and budding poplar tree
And greet, where maple sighs to elm, the springtide merrily.

If to my words you give good heed
My counsel you abide
A goodly chest and clearest skin
Are yours, and shoulders wide.
Few words will lie upon your tongue
But sound you'll be in limb and lung.1

A very attractive young man ; and born, if we are to
believe Aristophanes, into a world admirably adapted to
the young. No one can read Greek literature without
feeling its delight in all the rich variety of physical exis-
tence. The Greek felt and expressed an extraordinarily

1 Aristoph. Clouds, 1002 ff. Here are three lines from the
original :

(TT«pava>(Tdp.fvos xaXa/jo) XevKejJ /«ra (ra><ppovos T)\IKIG>TOV
fj.i\(iKos ofait KOI airpayp.o(rvvi]s Kal XtvKrjs <pv\\of$o\ov<Ti)s
ev &pa xaiptw, OTTOTOV ir\aravos

How admirable a phrase is 3£<ui> airpaynoavvrjs ! I owe the transla-
tion to my former pupil, Mr. P. J. Patrick.

IV THE NOTE OF HUMANISM 129

keen pleasure in being able to eat and drink and run and
play and be young with his friends, in pleasures yXv/cIa
KaSdirava KCU 0/Xa,1 in dances, shows, processions, high
animal spirits, a direct and eminently natural sense of
humour, and, if we are to believe Aristophanes, in all
kinds of cakes and sweet confectionery. Dickens, in
English, has something of this feeling with his Christmas
feasting and coach-drives through the frosty air. But
there is far more of it in Greek literature. Look, for
instance, at the lyrists, Alcaeus, Hipponax and Archilochus
particularly. When they were not fighting they were
feasting or celebrating their fights and feasts in verse,
writing skolia which thrill the most abstemious man with
the mere pleasure of eating and drinking. What a genial
ruffianism breathes through the words of Hipponax :
' Take my coat, I will hit Bupalus in the eye ; for I am
ambidextrous and I never miss my aim.' 2 And what
a healthy thirst is here : ' We drank out of the decanter,
for it had lost its glass ; for the boy fell on it and broke it.' 3

As genial and less fragmentary is the lineal descendant
of these joyous bon vivants, Aristophanes. We will not
violate with a translation a passage which Frere left
unfinished on his deathbed, but if any one will turn to
the Peace (11. 1140 f.), he will find a picture of country life
in Attica, which rivals Christmas at Dingley Dell in jollity,
and far surpasses it in the indefinable grace of its narrative.
The corn is in the ground, a soft rain is falling, and some
farmers seize the heaven-sent opportunity for a holiday.
The maid is sent to call in the labourer off the soaking
farm. The wife is told to fetch some figs, and toast beans
and wheat together. Then there is a thrush, two finches,
a beestings pudding and four hare pies in the larder —

1 Aristoph. Peace, 592. * fr. 83. * fr. 38.

1358 I

130 THE NOTE OF HUMANISM CH.

unless the weasel has got them l ; she was making a great
noise there last night ; three pies are for the drinkers, and
one for the old father. Then a slave can fetch a dessert
of myrtle-berries from a neighbour, and on the way call
in Charinades to drink the health of the growing crops.

The same joyous spirit breathes in passages more
elevated in tone. ' Come/ says the poet in one of his plays,
' come, ye daughters who bring the rain, come to the
splendid land of Athens, and see a country rich in loveli-
ness, rich in men. Here is the majesty of inviolate shrines,
here are statues and soaring temples, here are processions,
sacred, blessed, and, through every season of the year,
flower-crowned feasts and festivals of gods. Here, as
spring advances, comes the glory of the wine-god, and the
musical delight of dancing, and the deep-toned melody
of the flute.' 2 It is an invocation to the Clouds, but other
people and other ages have felt the charm of his call, and
gone in thought with him to ' the flowering meadows deep
in roses ',3 where half the town were making holiday, men
and women, young and old together, ' leaping, mocking,
dancing, playing,' 4 with their prayer to Demeter :

Approach, O Queen of orgies pure,
And us thy faithful band ensure
From morn to eve to ply secure

Our mocking and our clowning :
To grace thy feast with many a hit
Of merry jest or serious wit,
And laugh, and earn the prize, and flit

Triumphant to the crowning.5

For the Attic festivals, like those of the Roman Church,
joined recreation with religion, and were jovial, human
holidays. Such, for instance, was the race to Phalerum

1 The Greeks had no tame cats, but kept weasels to deal with
mice. a Clouds, 300 f . ' Frogs, 449.

* Ibid. 374 f. (tr. Murray). • Ibid. 386 f.

iv THE NOTE OF HUMANISM 131

at the Oschophoria, in which, after the religious cere-
monies were over, all the youth of Athens took part,
the day ending with a universal picnic on the shores of
the bay. Such was the dancing on greased skins at the
Dionysia ; and a sport mentioned by Suidas in which
drinkers standing on inflated wine-skins, at a signal from
a trumpet, drank for a prize. Such were the ceremonies
at the Great Panathenaea, to be seen to-day in stone on
the walls of the British Museum, though the idealized
figures of the Elgin Marbles give us little idea of the gaiety
of the real scene. There were boat-races, torch-races, foot-
races, horse-races, dances of men in full armour, leaping in
and out of flying chariots, javelin-throwing from horse-
back, cock-fighting, musical and gymnastic contests, prizes
for manly beauty, recitations from Homer, a speech by
a chosen orator of the day, and, finally, the great proces-
sion to the Acropolis, in which a sacred ship was drawn
through the city, the yellow embroidered robe destined
for the statue of Athena Polias blowing out from its mast,
and the whole population of Athens, on foot, on horseback,
in chariots, following in its train.

How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to

employ
All the heart, and the soul, and the senses for ever in joy !

Yes, and the senses counted for more with the Greek
than with us : and we will allow ourselves to be brought
back to them and the body, our original theme, by con-
sidering the Greek's view of old age. When youth wore
away, he felt (and it is difficult for a humanist not to feel)
that what made life worth living was gone. In part,
perhaps, it was that old age had terrors for the Greeks
which we do not feel. They were without eyeglasses, ear-
trumpets, bathchairs, and the elaborate system of aperitifs,

132 THE NOTE OF HUMANISM CH.

which modern science has devised to assist our declining
days. Yet even with these consolations, it may be doubted
whether the Greek would have faced old age with pleasure.
At least, to judge from Greek literature, he lamented its
minor discomforts less than the loss of youth's intense
capacity for action and enjoyment. People who prize
beauty and health so highly can hardly think otherwise
when age comes and they

. . . feel her slowly chilling breath invade
The cheek grown thin, the brown hair sprent with grey ;
They feel her finger light

Laid pausefully upon life's headlong tram ; —
The foot less prompt to meet the morning dew,
The heart less bounding at emotion new,

And hope, once crush'd, less quick to spring again.1

The following passage, taken from one of Plato's
dialogues, shows how the ordinary Greek hated old age,
and why he hated it. The speaker is an elderly friend of
the philosopher. ' I and a few other people of my own
age are in the habit of frequently meeting together. On
these occasions most of us give way to lamentations, and
regret the pleasures of youth, and call up the memory of
love affairs and drinking parties and similar proceedings.
They are grievously discontented at the loss of what they
consider great privileges, and describe themselves as
living well in those days, whereas now, by their own
account, they cannot be said to live at all. Some also
complain of the manner in which their relations insult
their infirmities, and make this a ground for reproaching
old age with the many miseries it occasions them.' 2 It
is true that Plato himself did not think thus of old age,
for he makes the speaker say that the real cause of these

1 Arnold, Thyrsis. I have altered ' I ' into ' They '.
" Rep. 329.

iv THE NOTE OF HUMANISM 133

men's discontent lay not in their age but their characters.
Still to some such dismal conclusion the humanist view
of life tends to lead ; that it did so lead in Greece is shown
by the words ' most of us '. Plato's own view was the
unusual one. Greek writers in general are gloomy on the
subject of old age. They do not call it beautiful or peace-
ful or mellow ; their epithets for it are Xvypos, /?apuy,
' dismal/ ' oppressive,' and at best they allow that it
brings wisdom. Pindar and Aeschylus seem to have taken
the most favourable view of old age, and even Pindar
calls it ' detested '. It is true that Plato represents
Sophocles as welcoming its approach. But few traces of
such contentment are apparent in his plays, and no one has
ever used bitterer words of advancing years than those
with which he closes a chorus of the Oedipus at Colonus :
1 that is the final lot of man, even old age, hateful, impotent,
unsociable, friendless, wherein all evil of evil dwells.' l

Humanism is a better gospel for the young, the healthy,
and the prosperous, than for the old, the sick, or the
unfortunate, and in this context it is worth recalling
Augustine's memorable criticism on the Greeks. He is
talking of what he learnt from Plato, and after admitting
the magnitude of his debt, adds the words, nemo ibi audit
vocantem, Venite ad me qui laboratis, ' In those pages none
hear the call, Come to me all ye that labour.' 2

But with all their feeling for bodily excellence and their
dread of bodily ill, the Greeks were very far from being

I O. C. 1236. The most pessimistic passage in Greek on old age
is Aristotle's brutal account of the characteristics of old men,
Rhet. 2. 13. Even more impressive is the praise of youth in
Euripides H. F. 637 ff., where he suggests that if God thought
as a man, he would reward virtue with the gift of a second youth.

II Conf. 7. 21.

134 THE NOTE OF HUMANISM CH.

mere animals or mere athletes. Looking at human nature,
they saw another element, the intellect, a faculty minis-
tering to a strange need called a sense of truth ; often so
destructive of beliefs on which our happiness rests that we
are tempted to deny it ; often killing or corrupting the
body, and, together with the body, itself ; yet indispensable
to material success, and with worthier uses besides. To this
element in human nature the Greeks gave full weight ;
and not the philosophers only, but the ordinary man.
Common Athenians formed the audience of the Greek
drama ; and it was said of them in a later day that
they spent their time ' in nothing else but either to tell or
to hear some new thing '. It was naturally so. There
was always some new intellectual interest in fifth-century
Athens. A rhapsode was reciting Homer ; or a play by
one of the Three was being exhibited, or Anaxagoras
was unfolding those theories of the universe which were
later condemned as atheistical, or Herodotus reading
his account of travels through Egypt and Asia, or Pro-
tagoras enouncing the theory of grammar, or Gorgias
illustrating the technique of style, and many a sophist
beside, whose name has perished with his writings, dis-
cussing, or ready to discuss, any subject in heaven or
earth.

Think of the picture of Greek life afforded by the
Memorabilia of Xenophon. Between the years 440 and
400 B. c. a visitor to Athens would have seen, during the
forenoon in the market-place, at other tunes in one of the
gymnasia or of the covered walks which were found in
all Greek cities, a strongly built but ugly man, talking to
a small group of people. The subjects of the conversation
were not such as we should expect to-day to hear in similar
spots in England, in Piccadilly, for instance, or outside the

iv THE NOTE OF HUMANISM 135

Stock Exchange. These Greeks would be discussing the
meaning of religion and irreligion, discussing what are
beauty and ugliness, what are justice and courage, what
are the qualities that make men good rulers, and how to
define ' city ' or ' government '. We might be surprised
to hear such conversations held in public, and to learn
that the speakers discussed these subjects, because they
thought that knowledge of them was indispensable to
a AcaXoy *aya0oy, while ignorance of them was the mark
of a slave.

It must be remembered that now we are not speaking of
the professional philosophers, but of the ordinary Athenian.
He it was who felt himself ' possessed and maddened with
the passion for knowledge '-1 Generals, cavalry officers,
courtesans, painters, country gentlemen, aspiring or dis-
appointed politicians, came to discuss their affairs with
Socrates, and went away enlightened on subjects as
various as house-building, painting, picnicking, operations
of war, indigestion, and physical exercise.2 The Memora-
bilia, which professes to record their conversations, shows
how rational the ordinary Greek was, how much more
inclined to appeal and listen to reason than, for instance,
the ordinary Englishman. Men bring common disputes
and practical disagreements to Socrates for settlement.
Two brothers have quarrelled and he reconciles them.
A young cavalry officer discusses with him how he can
best work up his regiment to efficiency, and Socrates points
out to him that unless he is a good speaker he will never
make a good officer.3 A certain Aristarchus, who in the

1 Plato, Symp. 218 B.

1 Mem. 3. 8. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 14. Ibid, passim. Ibid. 13.
Ibid. 12.

3 Xen. Mem. 3. 3. n.

136 THE NOTE OF HUMANISM CH.

later years of the Peloponnesian War was obliged to sup-
port a number of his ruined female relatives, and was
nearly beggared by the expense, asks and receives Socrates'
advice as to what he shall do. Here is Xenophon's account
of the interviews. 5. ' Why this difficulty, Aristarchus ?
Ceramon has a number of slaves' mouths to feed, yet he
thrives on it.' A. ' Yes, they are slaves.' S. ' Are not
your lady cousins better than slaves ? ' A . ' Certainly.'
5. ' Is it not a shame that he should make out of slaves
what you fail to make out of the free-born ? ' A . ' But
his are skilled workers.' 5. ' Well, a skilled worker is one
who knows how to make something useful ? ' A. ' Yes/
5. ' And are not bread and dresses useful ? ' A. ' Very.'
5. ' Then why not make your female relatives do what
Ceramon's slaves do and support themselves ? ' l

What ! it may be said ; are you trying to persuade us
that the Greek with his sudden revulsions of feeling, with
his blind outbursts of pity and panic and cruelty, was an
eminently rational being ? Is this the lesson of the Corcyrean
massacres, or of the Mytilenaean debate ? Well, paradox
as it may seem, there are grounds for believing it true.
The Greeks had indeed the emotional temperament of
a southern nation, but they were continually fighting to
keep it in subjection to reason. There is the Memorabilia
to witness to it, there is the long line of Greek philosophers ;
and the true type of his race was seized by Plato in the
Phaedrus, where he figures the human soul as a charioteer,
struggling with an unruly horse, his animal nature, but
striving to recall and retain in his memory the vision of
truth and temperance and justice and beauty, which he
saw before birth, when he drove across heaven in the
company of the gods. Often the struggle ended in defeat ;
1 Xen. Mem. 2. 7.

iv THE NOTE OF HUMANISM 137

but the greatest Greeks did succeed in reining in the
rebellious horse, and reaching an Olympian peace, where
all traces are lost of the storms through which they have
come. We know that Sophocles, we may suspect that
Plato, were men of violent animal passions, and only
reached freedom after a long struggle with ' many mad
tyrants '. Yet few would imagine it in gazing on the
tranquil surface of their art.

Perhaps none of this comes intimately home to us.
Under the dissecting knife the living cease to live, and
when we display in conspicuous isolation qualities which
in the flesh were blended, the Greek ceases to be a human
being and appears as a compound of an aesthete, a holiday-
maker and a prig. Then, too, the details of his life are
alien and remote from ours. We give no prizes for physical
beauty, and the Greek praises of it sound strained to our
ears ; the conversations of Socrates are apt to weary us ;
Greece seems very far away. Yet there are two places
in England in which, amid the smoke and wealth and
elaboration of our life, an Athenian might for a moment
feel himself at home. They are the seats of a population
which possesses that e/cros- x°PTY^a °^ worldly goods
which Aristotle thought an indispensable preliminary to
happiness, yet on the whole has too little wealth and
too much taste for vulgar display ; a population so far
autochthonous that it is largely drawn from the owners
of the soil and takes possession of the universe with an
easy condescension ; a population mainly young, active,
well developed in body and mind, in which the sophists
would have found pupils, and Socrates such young men
as he loved to converse with, and Alcibiades humours
equal to his own, and the Olympic victors rivals of

138 THE NOTE OF HUMANISM CH. iv

their athletic grace. Surely of Oxford and Cambridge
most of the Funeral Speech of Pericles is still mutatis
mutandis true ; or at least those most often quoted words
from it, (f>i\oKa\ovfj,€v per' cureAe/ay KOI 0tAoo-o0oO/*€p
avev paXaKias. ' We are lovers of beauty without extrava-
gance and of wisdom without effeminacy.'

NOTE. — For the sake of clearness I have laid stress, in the
earlier part of this chapter, on the differences between humanism
and Christianity. But, as a logician might say, they are opposites,
not contradictories : indeed (and the later part of the chapter
should show it), humanism may fitly be regarded as complementary
to any except the most ascetic Christianity. What I mean, is
this. Judaea taught men their relation to God, and indicated
that their faculties were to be used in His service. But it says
nothing of the nature of these faculties. Hence it is impossible
to get a content of life from Judaea ; it is impossible to live after
the manner of the Jew, for the sufficient reason that, if we tried
it, we should have so little to do. A highly civilized man cannot
spend his time in worship or agriculture or trade, for he is not
born exclusively to pray or plough or make money. He has many
faculties and instincts, and the Greek, who conceived of art and
literature and political life is the best example to which he can
turn, if he wishes to employ these faculties worthily. This is the
point where humanism is complementary to Judaism;

CHAPTER V

TWO TYPES OF HUMANISM : PINDAR AND
HERODOTUS

WE should make our points clearer if we could exhibit
the Greek spirit in a typical Greek. But he is difficult to
find. The authors we class together under the heading
of Greek literature are widely different personalities, and
few of them, one might almost say, typical Greeks. Great
men of letters are not often completely typical of their
nation ; they are isolated, unique ; whereas the portrait
which would serve us best is that of an ordinary man,
a man with the instincts, ideas, prejudices of his neigh-
bours, and only differing from them in the possession of
genius. Such a man it is not easy to find among the
great names of Greek literature. We cannot turn to
Thucydides ; there is nothing popular about his grave
and sober and philosophic view of life : nor to Aristo-
phanes ; the comic mask is a distortion, and we catch
only a glimpse of the man behind : nor to Aeschylus ;
for he is Titanic and unique hi any age. Plato and
Euripides will not help us, for they are spirits in revolt
against their time. Sophocles perhaps comes nearer to
what we want, but his personality is hidden under his art.
Or the orators ; but men declaiming and posturing never
show their real countenances clearly ; Rhetoric, according
to Plato, is a species of deception ; and the character of
the mistress is unconsciously reflected in her devotees.
There are two great writers left, Pindar and Herodotus.
Let us glance briefly at them.

140 TWO TYPES OF HUMANISM : CH.

Pindar is writing for the society that existed in the
early part of the fifth century ; for the society that fought
and beat the Persians conceived the ideal of a united
Greek nation, made a few generous, unpractical efforts
to achieve it, failed and resigned the attempt. It was
a society in which aristocracies were supreme ; but
Pindar saw democracy arise in one state after another, in
some dispossess its hereditary lords, in almost all wage
against them internecine war. Of these two great move-
ments, the national and the democratic, there is hardly
a trace in him. He has no interest in politics, either at
home or abroad ; he has no interest in the masses ; if
anything, a dislike for them. He writes for the rich, the
noble, the ' upper classes ' ; and even here he is limited ;
his masterpieces were written for those who won athletic
victories. It is as if a modern poet should confine himself
to Oxford and Cambridge — indifferent to newer univer-
sities, indifferent to socialism and the working classes,
indifferent to imperialism, to India, Egypt, or the Colonies ;
and in Oxford should celebrate mainly the exploits of
' blues '. It may seem a narrow field and typical of a
narrow mind, and Pindar may appear a bad example of
the Greek manysidedness. Yet on the other hand, just
because he is not a very profound thinker, he probably
represents the way in which an ordinary Greek looked
at life, better than any of the great writers except perhaps
Herodotus ; and the peculiar Hellenic virtues stand out
the more vividly against a background of convention.

He leaves us in no doubt as to what he thinks to be the
highest happiness, and the enthusiastic Hellenist is apt
to be shocked when he comes to Pindar's view of the
ideal life. What Pindar covets and admires is no mystic
vision of supersensual beauty, no intellectual grasp of

v PINDAR AND HERODOTUS 141

abstract truth, but an earthly, tangible, profitable good.1
To start with, a man should be young and tall and hand-
some, and have those natural gifts which attract friends,
help him to win races at Olympia, put him in a position
to enjoy the good things of life, and make him, in a word,
a success. He must have ayXaoyvios rjfir) — ' glorious-
limbed youth ' — you could not parallel the phrase outside
Greek. The picture of Jason, as he conies down from the
Centaur's cave among the forests of Pelion to claim the
kingship which was his due, gives a clear notion of Pindar's,
and indeed of the Greek, ideal of man. ' So in the fullness
of time he came, wielding two spears, a wondrous man ;
and the vesture that was on him was twofold, the garb
of the Magnetes country close fitting to his splendid limbs ;
but above he wore a leopard's skin to turn the hissing
showers ; nor were the bright locks of his hair shorn from
him, but over all his back ran rippling down. Swiftly he
went straight on, and took his stand, making trial of his
dauntless soul, in the market-place when the multitude
was full.' 2 This is the sort of man Pindar would like you
to be.

Then, if you can choose your station in life, be a king —
that is the crown and summit of human good. But in
any case be rich, and wealth joined to — or in Pindar's
expressive phrase, ' enamelled with ' — the gifts of nature 3
will make you as secure as a man can be. It will give you
chances which the ordinary man has not, it will suppress
the deeper cares, and in the end it will bring you to the
Paradise of the Just. So at least Pindar implies. A strange
key it seems with which to open heaven. And yet there

1 On his relation to Orphism see pp. 198, 200-1.
* Pyth. 4. 78. I have borrowed Mr. Myers's renderings in
nearly every case. * Ol. 2. 53 ff.

142 TWO TYPES OF HUMANISM : CH.

is some sense in Pindar's view ; for the possession of
wealth puts a man beyond the vulgar temptations of
poverty, and it is a law of life that to him that hath more
is given. Be rich, be strong, be handsome. This is the
Greek grasping after facts, after hard, concrete, physical
facts.

But supposing Nature has done her duty, and made you
an athlete and a rich man, what of the world into which
you are born ? It seems a bad world on the whole. Any
one glancing through a collection of Pindar's sayings
might think them predominantly gloomy. Everywhere
death is seen closing up the avenues of prosperity and
success which these athletic triumphs open, and Pindar
will not let the victor forget that he is putting his festal
robes on a body which is mortal, and that at the last he
will clothe himself in earth.1 Even life itself is a dark
thing. The poet is oppressed by thoughts of TTOVOS and
Xrj&rj, the hard work which is necessary to success, the
oblivion which so soon and so remorselessly devours it.
For man is ' a creature of a day, the dream of a shadow'.2
Then, too, there are the ordinary misfortunes of human
life, which Pindar thinks so many that ' heaven allots
two sorrows to man for every good thing '.3 Even his
heroes are not exempt. Some one of these brilliant victors
is in disfavour, or in exile, or has been disappointed of
some hope. Perhaps there has been death in his house,
or illness is sapping his strength, or old age has ended
his triumphs and warns him of the approach of death ;
and ' there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor
wisdom in the grave whither he goes '. Then, too, there
are all those unnumbered hindrances, accidents, and
checks to ambition, summed up in the bitter words of the

1 New. ii. 15. * Pyth. 8. 95. • Pyth. 3. 81.

v PINDAR AND HERODOTUS 143

fourth Pythian : ' now this they say is of all griefs the
sorest, that one knowing good should of necessity abide
without lot therein.' l Pindar never holds his tongue
about these things, and, if he were a modern, we should
call him a pessimist. But he is Greek, and so a page or
a line further on, and we are deep in one of those bril-
liantly coloured, ' purple ' descriptions of joy or feasting
or adventure of which he is a master, ' moving among
feasting and giving up the soul to be young, carrying
a bright harp and touching it in peace among the wise of
the citizens/ 2

Here is the Greek, determined, as far as he can see it, to
tell himself the truth. There is no shirking facts, no
pretending that evil is good and death pleasant ; there is
no attempt even to conceal the fact that such things
exist. Yet the existence of evil is no argument for pessi-
mism in Pindar's eyes. The skeleton is indeed brought
out to fill his place ; but he is only one among the guests
at the banquet of life. If the dark days are many, so are
the bright, and the wise man enjoys or endures each as it
comes.

Many people would criticize Pindar's view of life as
earthy, and find fault with a poet who seems to place man,
not a little lower than the angels, but rather a little higher
than the brutes. Yet no one could call Pindar sordid, for
he has the Greek gift, to repeat a phrase, of spiritualizing
material things. The joys of feasting, for instance, play
some considerable part in him (they were, then as now,
the sequel to athletic contests). But they are viewed
in a glory of ideal light, not as the mere filling of the
belly, but as €v<f)poo-vi>r) , ' cheerfulness,' as Upbv ev£<pas
, ' the sacred blossom of joyous living.' English
. 4. 287. • Pyth. 4. 294.

144 TWO TYPES OF HUMANISM : CH.

keeps traces of the same thought in phrases like ' good
cheer ' and ' good living ', but they have long since sunk
into synonyms for gluttony ; in Pindar the good fellow-
ship remains more than the good food, as we see in the
description of the brilliant company of poets and states-
men at the table of Hiero. ' They celebrate the son of
Kronos, when to the rich and happy hearth of Hiero they
are come ; for he wieldeth the sceptre of justice in Sicily
of many flocks, culling the choice fruits of all kinds of
excellence ; and with the flower of music is he made
splendid, even such strains as we sing blithely at the table
of a friend.' 1

No, it is not sordid, nor, if life is to be regarded from
a purely human point of view, is it wrong. At any rate
even the most aspiring idealists have at times their human
moments, and there are few who will not find it refreshing
after reading Carlyle or some other mystic prophet, till
the head grows dizzy and numb with the thought of the
mystery of life and of man wandering between two
eternities, to take up Pindar and read, set out in a flaming
glory of language, this sober, commonplace philosophy of
the earth on which we live.

Probably the more we have said about Pindar, the
more unfitted he has seemed to illustrate the view of
Hellenism which the last chapter attempted to expound.
There it was argued that the Greek united to his love
of physical excellence a love of, and respect for, the
things of the mind. And now, to illustrate this theory,
we have hit upon a poet, who has the Greek truth-
fulness and the Greek love of personal beauty and of
concrete things, but who has so far shown no sign of the
Greek love of reason. Pindar, to judge from what we

1 01. i.8f.

v PINDAR AND HERODOTUS 145

have seen of him, appears to have had a very common-
place intellect, and to have compensated for intellectual
commonplaceness, as a man by a passion for athleticism,
as a poet by a rich sense of beauty.

True, Pindar has not a first-class intellect ; he has no
speculative power at all ; and though much of his poetry
is sudden and dazzling like lightning, its flashes do not
illuminate the depths of human nature. Yet Pindar is
more philosophical than at first appears. He has an
elaborate intellectual theory of life, is clearly very pleased
with it, and loses no opportunity of preaching it. He may
not be speculative in the sense in which Plato and the
dramatists are speculative, but like all his race he felt the
need for some rational account of things. Hence a
philosophy. Its catchwords sound meaningless (so do
Election, Reprobation, Justification by Works or by
Grace ); but that is only because we have outgrown the
phraseology, and use clearer or ampler language to
express our meaning. The meaning is modern, if not
the words.

Let us take a fragment of this philosophy — Pindar's
account of evil. Our misfortunes, he thinks, are due to
three causes. First comes the nature of the universe, in
which death and old age are inevitable, and some people
are born weak or sickly ; in which accidents happen that
no one can foresee or avert. That is Moipa, Fate, which
sends evil not of our seeking and beyond our control. It
is no use our complaining or rebelling against it. Death
and old age have to be frankly accepted — as the tyrant
of Syracuse had to accept them ; avOtvel ^v xpari
fiatvav, d\\a p.oipi8Lov rjv,1 ' walking with sick body,

1 Pyth. i. 55. (The words are used of Philoctetes, to whom
Hiero is compared.)

1368

146 TWO TYPES OF HUMANISM : CH.

yet so it was fated to be.' Then there are the evils which
we bring on ourselves, by arrogance or vice or some other
sin ; and these are due to "Tfipis, the Insolence of man.
Finally there are the evils which cannot be put down to
either of these causes, which are not of God, yet for which
we can hardly blame ourselves. An upright, patriotic
citizen is banished ; his very virtue makes it impossible
for him to live peaceably with his neighbours, and keeps
him out of office and power. What is the malign influence
which works against him but QOovos, Envy ? MoTpa,
"TfSpis, $66vos, the three sources of our misfortunes ; how
could we improve on the definition, except by a change
of words ? What is the remedy for these evils ? For ill-
ness ? doctors, medicine : but there are many evils which
they never cure. For "Tfipis ? repentance and amend-
ment : but the evil done may be irreparable. For $0oj/os ?
it is difficult to find any remedy for that, except Pindar's
general remedy for them all, Xpovos, Time. A slow remedy
and one sometimes overtaken by death ; but is there any
other which is effective ? S. Paul, perhaps, might have
said vironovri, 'patient endurance' ; but that is only putting
the same idea in a profounder and more personal way.

So, after all, Pindar serves to illustrate our point ;
a commonplace intellect ; interests which might well have
crowded out intellectual things, and certainly do not
encourage them ; yet a complete philosophy ; not pro-
found, in some ways crude, but carefully thought out,
elaborately rounded off, and perhaps not so very inade-
quate or contemptible.

Now let us pass to our second example.
To have been born in a town, situated in Asia, but where
the settlers were Dorians and the prevailing influence

v PINDAR AND HERODOTUS 147

Ionian ; before the age of twenty to have rebelled against
the local tyrant, to have been exiled, to have returned, to
have been driven out again by the ' intolerable criticism '
of the citizens ; then to have travelled northward as far
as the Crimea, southward as far as Assouan, eastward as
far as Susa, westward as far as Sicily ; when forty, to
have joined a new venture for founding an all-Greek
colony in Italy ; thence to have returned to Athens, while
Pericles was at the height of his power — that was not
a narrow life, nor a poor training for an historian. It is
the life of Herodotus.

What inspired him to write his history ?

Not the motives which inspired Gardiner and Acton,
and inspire the better historians of our own day. Not the
instinct, half conscious, half mechanical, to learn what
really happened, to rinse from their baser setting scanty
grains of genuine truth, to postpone to that the picturesque,
the interesting, the profitable, the prudent. Herodotus
had, as we shall see, a peculiar veracity of his own ; but
it was not the veracity of a scientific historian. Otherwise
there would have been fewer miracles in his history :
and we should have missed that conversation (whose
genuineness his contemporaries questioned, but he him-
self with amazing mendacity affirms,) in which Darius
and two eminent Persians debate at Babylon on the merits
of democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny, in set speeches
and with sentiments entirely Greek.1 Herodotus does
not belong to the modern school.

Yet his motives were not those of historians like Livy
or like Macaulay. He did not write to glorify a great
faction or a great people or great principles or a great man :
or if he did, if the triumph of Greece over Persia was his

1 3. 80 f.

148 TWO TYPES OF HUMANISM : CH.

real inspiration, he wrote in a different spirit from the
historians whom we have just named. He is not a mere
panegyrist or an apologist : he does not speak of his own
people as Livy speaks of the Romans, or Macaulay of the
Whigs, or Carlyle of Cromwell. He does not speak of
the Persians as Livy speaks of Carthage or Macaulay
of the Tories, or Carlyle of the Cavaliers. He is not
a lawyer, briefed to elicit the virtues of one side and
the vices of the other. He quotes with evident enjoy-
ment Cyrus's definition of a Greek market-place, as ' a
place set apart for people to go and cheat each other
on oath'. Though Persia was the enemy of Greece, he
calls attention to the Persian virtues. ' Their valour,
their simplicity and hardiness, their love of truth, their
devoted loyalty to their princes, their wise customs and
laws, are spoken of with a sincerity and strength of
admiration which strongly marks his superiority to the
narrow spirit of national prejudice. . . . The personal
prowess of the Persians is declared to be not a whit inferior
to that of the Greeks, and constant apologies are made for
their defeats, which are ascribed to deficiencies in their
arms, equipment, and discipline.' It is the same with
his own people. He admires Athens beyond any state :
yet he frequently criticizes her, pointing out, for example,
the Spartans' superiority in courage. He dislikes Corinth
and Boeotia, yet he calls attention to the bravery of the
latter and to various excellences of the former. His
verdict on the Greek world, so full of jealousy and detrac-
tion, has a tranquil impartiality. ' So much I know, that
if all people were to deposit their private misdoings in
public and try to make an exchange with their neighbours,
when they had examined their neighbours' iniquities, they
would all of them be thankful to carry home again those

v PINDAR AND HERODOTUS 149

with which they came.' And he concludes with a charac-
teristic description of his own practice. t ' For myself, I am
bound to report all that is said : but I am not bound to
believe it all.' l

The little treatise of Plutarch, On the Malignity of
Herodotus, is an interesting testimony to this candour.
Plutarch took the view that the Greeks of the great age
were incapable of wrong, and rated the historian for
' needlessly describing evil actions '. ' How malignant of
Herodotus,' he thinks, ' to say that the Delphic oracle was
bribed, that a party in Athens tried to betray the city
after Marathon, that the Persians were worse armed than
the Spartans at Plataea (' if so, what remains great and
glorious to Greece in those battles '). How odious is his
habit, after relating something to the credit of a man, of
mentioning some weakness or vice ; as in the case of
Ameinocles the Magnesian, of whom he says that he
killed his son : it is better to leave such details out.' 2 An
odd criticism, but one which is based on fact. There are
many characters in Herodotus whom we like, but none of
them are heroes ; and I am inclined to think that there
is no one, except perhaps Aristides, whom we can whole-
heartedly respect. Perhaps that is not entirely the fault
of Herodotus : still it is true that his was not the style
of those text-books of our childhood from which we learnt
that the English arms never suffered a reverse except at
Fontenoy, Saratoga, and Yorktown. He is not a scientific
historian : he is not a conscientiously merciless realist :

1 Hdt. i. 153 (an agora) : quotation from Rawlinson, Herodotus,
i. 80 : see the whole passage from p. 76 for references. Hdt.
7. 152.

1 Except for the words in brackets (de malign. 874), this is
not a verbal quotation, though it represents the sentiments and
employs the instances of Plutarch : for Ameinocles see Hdt. 7. 190.

K 3

150 TWO TYPES OF HUMANISM : CH.

but with the genuine Greek instinct of directness he took
men and things as nature made them. And so as an his-
torian his place is not with Livy, Froude, Carlyle, and
their like.

Why, then, did he write his history ?

He wrote it because he kept to manhood a gift which is
original in us all. For Herodotus is exactly what a man
would be who grew up and preserved unimpaired the
na'ive curiosity with which he was born. Solon had the
same curiosity — it made him travel Ofwptrjs Iz/eica, ' to
see the world : ' and it made Herodotus travel too, and
leave in writing what he saw. @o>/*a — ' Wonder ' — he
calls the quality, and in some sense or other the
word is continually on his lips : — OS>p.d pot Alyerat

a> TO

airiov.

Fortunate Egyptian priests, who expounded to him the
ways of their country, and watched him absorb it all from
the three hundred and thirty sovereigns of Egypt down
to the bird that picks the crocodile's teeth ! He took down
every detail, small or great, with the impartial interest of
a child. You can learn from him that Egyptian cats
jump into the fire, that the Persians dislike white pigeons,
that the priestess of Athene at Pedasus has twice grown
a large beard, that the Massagetae eat their parents, that
the Danube islanders get drunk on smells : he tells us
why Scythian cattle have no horns, what is the relative
hardness of an Egyptian and a Persian skull, what is the
size of the waterworks at Samos, how Psammetichus learnt
that the first men on the earth were Phrygians, how the
walls of Babylon were built, how the trench was dug
through Athos, how the Adyrmachidae treat fleas, how
the lake-dwellers prevent their children falling into the

v PINDAR AND HERODOTUS 151

water.1 And all this springs from a history of the relations
of Greece with the East, which its writer follows through
sinuous meanders of infinite digression, using it as a frame
for the history of all the ways of all mankind of which he
knew or had been told.

And how much of something more interesting than
archaeological or ethnological fact, how much of human
nature, passes in review as we read him. For the Wonder
of Herodotus goes far beyond the curiosity of Mandeville
or Marco Polo, and is nearer the imaginative sympathy
of a great novelist. He loves to watch and depict human
nature. He loves the personal element in history. And
because he is unfettered by desire for immediate relevance,
he lets this draw him wherever it is to be found ; so that
in his pages, statesmen, grooms, doctors, nurses, peasants,
gods, thieves, jostle one another. Now a king speaks,
now a philosopher, now a cafe loafer. We see Syloson
in the great square of Memphis, strutting in his scarlet
cloak, we hear the self-complacency of the fisherman who
was asked to dinner with the tyrant of Samos,2 and the
retort of the mother of Ariston to the man who said that
a mule driver was the father of her children. Children,
too, who are generally excluded from history, delight the
broad humanity of Herodotus, and are continually to be
met in his pages.3 In general he is more interested in
human beings, their passions and emotions, than in the
' forces ' and ' movements ' of the modern historian. ' The
Phocaeans sunk a lump of iron and swore they would

1 2.66 ; I. 138 ; 8. 104 ; I. 216 ; r. 202 ; 4. 29 ; 3. 12 ; 3. 60 ;
2. 2 ; I. 179 ; 7. 23 ; 4. 168 ; 5. 16.

1 3. 42 (/ie-ya iroi(vfitvos) ; 3.139 (Syloson) ; 6. 69 (the wife of
Ariston).

» e.g. i. inf.; 2. i ; 3.48; 5. 51.92.

152 TWO TYPES OF HUMANISM : CH.

not return to their city till it floated. But as they were
setting out for Cyrnus, longing and sorrow for their home
and for the ways of the land overcame more than half of
them, and they broke their oath and sailed back to
Phocaea.' l The writer of these words was more than a
mere historian. He was a man whose width of human
sympathy, and interest in human things places him nearer
to Shakespeare than to Thucydides.

The real genius of Herodotus lies in this quick imagi-
native intellect — not in his religious or ethical views. Of
his religion it is difficult to speak, for he belongs to an age
of transition, and exhibits at once the old superstitions
and the new criticism. On the one hand, he fills his
history with miracles, goes out of his way to express
confidence in the oracles of Bakis, is shocked by any form
of impiety, and believes that God envies and overthrows
men for becoming powerful. On the other, he supposes
that the gods owe their functions, shapes, and names to
Homer and Hesiod, thinks that ' one man knows as much
of them as another ', and holds the dangerous doctrine
that custom determines men's beliefs.2 A generation
later these lines might have taken him into agnosticism.
But whatever his destination, he was not and could never
have become a religious genius ; he is not a spiritual man,
and he is entirely wanting in that sense of a personal
relation to God without which religion wanes as knowledge
grows.

Equally little is he a great moralist. When a definite

1 i. 165.

* 8. 77 (Bakis) ; i. 32 (enviousness of God: so 3. 40 ; 7. 10) ;
2. 53 (Homer and theology) ; 2. 3 ; 3. 38 (vopos). The ' envious-
ness ' of the Herodotean gods is not to be confused with the
' jealousy ' of Jehovah : it is mere unmixed envy.

v PINDAR AND HERODOTUS 153

issue is presented to him, he takes the side of the angels ;
he definitely condemns certain enormities : he often im-
plies, without openly stating, condemnation. On the
other hand, he relates horrible things in the same spirit
in which we read of murders, sometimes with a pleased
interest in their strangeness, sometimes with a not
unagreeable thrill of horror, but in either case without
any realization of the misery and degradation they imply.
Here is his account of a particularly atrocious custom,
the Scythian custom of blinding slaves. ' The Scythians
blind all their slaves because of the milk which they drink :
and what they do is this.' (Then he describes a method
of inflating the mares to make them give more milk.)
' When the milk has been obtained, they pour it into
hollow wooden vessels, station the blind slaves by them
and churn the milk. The part which sets, they drain off
and esteem most : what sinks to the bottom, they con-
sider of less value. That is why the Scythians blind
every one they capture : for they do not cultivate the
ground, but are nomads.' That is a type of many stories
in Herodotus. Herodotus has come upon some odd
customs ; he is extremely interested in a curious way the
Scythians have of treating their slaves, in a curious way
they have of making their mares give more milk. If we
could ask him whether he approved of treating slaves
thus, he would of course have answered no. But he is so
absorbed hi the way in which the Scythians get their
milk, what they do with it, and what they think of it,
that he forgets to be angry or disgusted about the slaves.
Hence a string of details quite irrelevant to the main
horror, and which indicate that Herodotus is full of intel-
lectual curiosity, but temporarily indifferent to the moral
aspects of the story. In that he is a true devotee of

154 TWO TYPES OF HUMANISM : CH.

It is almost impossible to unite the impar-
tiality of a genuine critical temperament with moral
fervour. The one will be lukewarm or the other biased.
If a man is Renan or Goethe, he will not be Carlyle or
Ruskin.1

Now let us glance at the relation of all this to the Greek
genius.

We saw in the preceding chapter that intellectual
interest is one side of humanism. Here Herodotus is
a better representative of the Greeks than Pindar, whose
mental joints work somewhat stiffly ; and for that reason
we have occupied ourselves with him. He was never
trained to criticize or speculate ; his criticism and
speculation are the spontaneous work of an untutored
brain. But he is the rough material of a Socrates or
a Plato, and with such a stock to draw from we are
not surprised at the later intellectual achievements of
Greece.

True, the ordinary man was not Herodotus. But no
one can read the history without realizing that it tells of
a people amazingly quick-witted itself and delighting in
the quick wit of others, a people, as Herodotus says, ' dis-
tinguished of old from the barbarians for its greater clever-
ness and greater freedom from silly simplicity.' 2 There
are the quaint sayings and ready retorts — ev flprjfifva,
dcrrcTa. There is the infinite fertility of expedient

1 Hdt. 4. 2. It is, perhaps, possible to argue that all the while
Herodotus is in a state of suppressed moral indignation. Every
one must judge for himself whether that is the impression he
leaves. On the difference between the moral and intellectual
temperament, see Mazzini's essays on Renan, and on Goethe and
Byron.

* i. 60.

v PINDAR AND HERODOTUS 155

and trick which furnished Herodotus with so many of his
tales. There is the gusto with which these things are
narrated. And, greatest testimony of all, there is the
sight of the Greek already seizing the position which he
was to hold for so many generations, under Seleucids,
Ptolemies, Romans, Turks, already becoming the brain
of the Nearer East. His oracles — it was an intellectual
people surely that riddled and unriddled sayings so
obscure — are consulted by Eastern potentates ; his
philosophers go travelling to their courts ; his engineers
bridge the Bosphorus for Darius ; his doctors attend that
monarch for sprained ankle ; his exiles instigate and
counsel Persia in the invasion of Greece. Their ready wit
takes the Greeks everywhere and makes them everything.
When Cambyses invaded Egypt, he both found Greeks in
the opposing army and took them with him in his own :
they had come, Herodotus says, ' in great quantities,
some to trade, and some, too, to see the country.' Perhaps
on that occasion some Persian or Egyptian courtier may
have anticipated by six centuries Juvenal's hatred of
this ubiquitous, insinuating race, and cursed in his own
language the

Ingenium velox, audacia perdita
of Greece.1

As in intellectual power, so in religious and moral
capacity, Herodotus is the general type of the Greek race.
It is doubtless unfair to generalize from a single individual,
but so much surely is borne out by history. Though the
Greeks did much for theology, yet we should not look
among them for the great religious teachers of man-
kind ; though they did much for moral philosophy, their

1 i. 30 (Solon); 4. 87 (Bosphorus bridge) ; 3. 130 (Democedes);
3. II and 139 (Greeks in Egypt) ; Juvenal 3. 73.

156 TWO TYPES OF HUMANISM : CH.

achievement in the sphere of practical morals was the virtue
of a few individuals, not the strenuous uplifting of a whole
nation. They had the sympathetic temperament, which
at the worst shows itself as quickness of mind, at the best
as high imagination. The strength of this temperament
is not the patient, stubborn edification of character. Its
victories are won in literature and thought, and in brief
moments of brilliant life. It made the Greeks quickly
responsive to noble ideas, to sublime conceptions of God
and man and the world. By moments they felt more
intensely than any men the splendour of patriotism, the
fascination of wisdom, the excellence of virtue ; though,
as such natures do, they were apt to lack persistence for
the hard toil through which visions are wrought into
realities. They had the poet's nature, which is sensitive
to the atmosphere around it, and flushes to its colours
as quickly as a cloud. So in their cities they created
a rich life, and in their art, philosophy, and literature
they were capable of high and beautiful conceptions.
And the latter were permanent, but the former passed
rapidly away.1

To suit our purposes we have dwelt on the points in
which Herodotus is complementary to Pindar and have
ignored his view of life. In spite of the differences between
the two men, it is essentially the same as Pindar's.
Herodotus was a democrat, Pindar an aristocrat : in the
latter we see the cramped embryo of a speculative intel-
lect, in the former one that is growing to manhood. But
on things in general their opinions coincide. Like Pindar,

1 I cannot help feeling that Maeandrius, ' the man who wanted
to be just and found it impossible ' (Hdt. 3. 146 f.), is a type of
many Greeks.

v PINDAR AND HERODOTUS 157

Herodotus thinks the world an evil place, and almost
justifies Goethe's statement that the lesson of Greek
literature and art was that hell existed on this earth and
in our present life.1 Here is a conversation in which the
speakers are Xerxes and Artabanus, but the sentiments
are Greek. ' Our life is short, and yet there is no man so
happy but he will have occasion often and often to wish
that he was dead rather than alive. Misfortunes befall,
illnesses harass us, and make life seem long, for all its
brevity. Life is wretched, death is the most desirable
refuge from it, and God shows his jealousy by giving us
a taste of the sweetness of existence.'

These are gloomy words ; yet round Herodotus, as
round Pindar, there hang none of the depressing miasmata
of modern pessimism ; he faces this evil world with the
common sense of a healthy man. ' Human life is as you
say, Artabanus, but let us say no more about it, nor
remember the evil days while the good are in our power.'
The big battalions of fate are against us, but that is no
reason for dropping arms from nerveless hands. ' If you
are going, as each question arises, to take into account all
possible chances, you will never do anything at all. It
is better to be always courageous and come in for half
the possible disasters, than to fear everything and never
suffer anything at all. . . . The chances here are equally
balanced. How can a man have certain knowledge ? It
is impossible for him. But those who act generally suc-
ceed, and those who take everything into consideration
and turn back, generally do not.' Brave talk and excellent
sense, these words, both in their gloom and their courage,

1 Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Schiller, 927. Perhaps I have
misrepresented Goethe by substituting literature and art for
Homer and Polygnotus.

158 TWO TYPES OF HUMANISM : CH.

are typical of the Greek view of life, at least in the years
before Chaeronea. They should warn us not to speak of
Greek ' pessimism ' without explaining what we mean by
the word.1

For the Greeks, as we said before, kept both eyes open,
and knew that life might give a qualified happiness to
any one. And here again, though the happiness which
Herodotus contemplates is less gilded than that of Pindar,
it mixes, like Pindar's, with a vein of idealism those con-
crete and earthly qualities which we saw that the Greeks
favoured. The historian has told us something about
three men whom Greek opinion considered happy, one
Athenian, two Argives. The Athenian had virtuous and
good-looking sons, he saw his grandchildren grow to
manhood, his city was prosperous, he fell in victorious
battle for her, and the city gave him a public funeral.
Because of all this Solon thought him the happiest man
he knew. The Argives are Cleobis and Biton, who drew
their mother in a carriage five miles to a festival, and
' having done this and having been seen by the gathering
(few moderns would be unsentimental enough to add
this detail), came to an excellent end. God showed in
their case that it was better to die than to live. The
Argive men surrounded them and congratulated them on
their strength ; the Argive women congratulated their
mother on her children. Then she, delighted at what they
had done and at its celebrity prayed God to give them the
gift best for man. And after that prayer, when they had
sacrificed and feasted, they lay down to rest in the temple,
and never rose again. But the Argives made statues of
them and set them up in Delphi, as the best of men.'
Herodotus adds as further ingredients in their happiness
1 Hdt. '7. 46. 47. 50.

v PINDAR AND HERODOTUS 159

that they had comfortable means and powerful physique,
and that they had been victorious in the public games.1

Keats, whose untaught genius a century ago rejected
the stilted Hellene of popular imagination, spoke in his
Ode on a Grecian Urn of a

Little town by river or sea shore

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

and some such place was the home of Cleobis and Biton.
Its citizens, as Herodotus shows them, are a homely,
genial people — a German would call them gemutlich —
too simple to be intellectualists or hedonists, too human
to be materialists, prizing highly the common virtues and
pieties, but not so idealistic as to undervalue good looks,
' comfortable means/ public funerals, and statues at
Delphi ; inclined to a dark view of the world, yet able to
enjoy it, and living in kindly simplicity the happy life of
the ' natural ' man.

With this picture of them we may leave our sketch of
the meaning of Greek humanism.

1 Hdt. i. 30. 31.

CHAPTER VI
THE NOTES OF SANITY AND MANYSIDEDNESS

HUMANISM did not disappear from the world with the
Greeks, nor is it a philosophy peculiar to them. It is the
shadow thrown by human nature, and, like a shadow,
inseparable from it. Wherever body and brain exist,
strength, beauty, and intellectual prowess have their
worshippers ; youth is enjoyed and old age dreaded.
Men eat and drink, marry and are given in marriage,
to-day, in the days of Noah, and in those of the Son of
Man. In any society and under any religion, they seek
the enjoyments and activities proper to human nature.
A few ascetics cut themselves off completely from life.
But most men have felt that common humanity is not
inconsistent with their creed, and have been content to
approach God through the circumstances of ordinary
life, and by the instruments that lay ready to their hand.
Thus humanism is no less present in our world than it was
in that of Pericles, though in Greece it was cramped by
fewer restrictions and worshipped with a more exclusive
zeal.

We are all humanists in the sense that instinctively we
enjoy human energies. But our own age is going beyond
that. It is becoming exclusively humanist, and con-
sciously adopting humanism as its creed of life. The
word, or some derivative of it, is a favourite with both
Comtism and Pragmatism ; and all agnostics, whether
they make a religion of humanity or not, are bound to

CH. vi SANITY AND MANYSIDEDNESS 161

pay it the highest respect. For, not recognizing God in
the world, nor admitting divine ordinances, they must
form their ideas of what man should be from a considera-
tion of the circumstances and possibilities of human
nature. And so conscious humanism creeps in. Popular
thinkers like Maeterlinck, Wells, and Galsworthy, start
unaffectedly from human premises, and search in the
human being himself for a revelation of what the human
being should be. They do not ask what God requires of
man ; they are ceasing to ask what Duty requires of him.
They simply inquire if he is true or false to what is best
in himself, and judge him by that standard, condemning
him for treason to his nature, praising him for loyalty to
it. They are humanists and nothing more.

If this be true, the modern world should be swinging
round with the slow set of the tide to that attitude and
way of thought which Greece assumed so many centuries
ago. And yet it is not so. However humanistic we may
be, no one can feel that we have much Hellenism about
us. Few Hellenists are more than poor copies of those
splendid originals, mere cardboard imitations of leather.
Somewhere between us and the Greeks a great gulf is
fixed. Partly no doubt this is because the great mass of
mankind are not yet humanists in their philosophy. But
partly it is due to other reasons. The modern sense of
beauty is, as we have seen, poor and limited in comparison
with that of Greece, and this makes our whole life and
literature uglier than that of Athens. Then, we are far
more sentimental than the Greeks ; tendrils of sentimen-
tality still cling about those in whom its roots are dead,
as ivy clings to a house long after its roots have been cut
through ; a certain falsity makes itself felt in the most
merciless of our realists, a falsity quite alien to the naive

1358 L

162 THE NOTES OF SANITY CH.

and natural temper of the best Greek literature. But
there is something more than this which makes us fall
behind the Greeks. We have our humanist philosophers,
but they hold a very mutilated and imperfect form of the
creed. Their lives and their theory of human nature are
narrow in a way in which Greek life and theory were not.
There was in the Greeks a certain re Act or 77? which
we do not possess ; a certain width and completeness in
their view of human nature, for want of which our litera-
ture is limited and provincial ; a certain width and com-
pleteness in their conduct of life, for want of which our
life is poor and starved. It is this weakness of modern
humanism which the present chapter tries, very briefly,
to analyse. The subject falls under two heads, literature
and daily life ; we must ask how our men of letters differ
from Sophocles or Euripides, and how our clerks or
prosperous artisans differ from the Periclean Athenian.
We will take the first and less important question first.
In estimating the particular contributions of the
nineteenth century to the literature of the world, there
are three kinds of writing which no critic can ignore. In
the first class are essays like A Dissertation on Roast Pig,
A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis, The
Praise of Chimney-sweepers, On the Melancholy of Tailors,
all of them much or little ado about nothing. Lamb is the
greatest writer of these, but he has many descendants,
both legitimate and bastard. The second class has a wide
sweep ; it includes all literature which draws its emotions
from that uncertain borderland whose mystery and horror
trench on life : Salome and Dorian Gray, Les Aveugles and
Pelle'as et Melisande, French Symbolistic poetry, The
Celtic Twilight and most of Mr. Yeats's verse belong to it.
In the third class are Flaubert and Sudermann abroad,

vi AND MANYSIDEDNESS 163

and Arnold Bennett and Galsworthy in England ; they
are distinguished by the possession of powerful intellects
and by the impartial use they make of them ; the cold
and critical nature of their work is its strength and its
weakness. These three schools defend themselves in
different ways. But one of two principles underlies all
their work. It is justified because it is Art ; or it is
justified because it is true. Art for Art's sake is a notorious
maxim ; we may add to it another — the real ground of
the new drama's best work — Intellect for Intellect's
sake. If these two maxims are pursued deeper, their
roots unite.

Now in the best Greek literature we do not find Intellect
for Intellect's sake. Aeschylus and his successors had
high intellectual power ; but no one could say that their
central quality is a merciless analysis of fact. Nor again
do we find in Greek literature that other class of writing
to which we have alluded. Its great age at any rate
shows no works like Oscar Wilde's Salome, or the poems
of Mr. Yeats or Verlaine, or the charmingly written essays
on nothing in particular which are associated with the
names of Charles Lamb and Stevenson. The best Greek
literature is neither eccentric nor pathological nor trifling ;
its writers do not lead us, like Mr. Yeats, into the bypaths
of the human soul, to travel by dark and enchanted ways ;
nor, like Wilde, are they interested in its subtler maladies,
living in the poisonous air of its sick-rooms, or in ' a delicate
odour of decay ' ; * nor yet, like Lamb, do they spend
themselves on slight essays, where the charm lies in style
and treatment, in the elegant chewing of what is after all
only a cud of poor grass. There are no works of this kind
till we come to the morbid love poems of Alexandria (which
1 A phrase of Pater's.

164 THE NOTES OF SANITY CH.

might perhaps be set against Salome), and to the amiable
essays of Lucian on flies and amber (which have something
in common with the Plea for Gas-lamps and the Disserta-
tion on Roast Pig). The earlier literature is barren of
such children. Perhaps that should not be counted to it
as a merit ; there is sincerity and even genius in some
at least of the works cited above, and they reflect real
experiences. Still the fact remains ; such subjects are
not found in Greek literature before 326 B.C.

This is not a mere accident. It comes from the character
of the writers and their audience. Those early Greeks
were ' energiques, frais, dispos ' ; they were not ' faibles,
malades, maladifs '-1 They were not biases. They had
not yet outgrown an interest in the simple, ordinary
emotions of mankind, in what Wordsworth calls ' the
human heart by which we live '. So they were neither
aesthetes nor mystics nor symbolists. They drew from
the common sources of humanity, at the point where the
waters issue pure and fresh from the rock ; and their
subjects are ordinary, simple, human things.

Take Homer. The topics of his poetry are really very
few ; there are battles and games and councils and sea-
faring, cannibals and enchantresses and marvellous gar-
dens, life in a Greek palace and in a Greek army and on
a Greek country farm. But the underlying interests are
only the broad interests which healthy men in any age
have in common — little more indeed than a strong
physical life and the activities which arise out of it and the
intense and elemental feelings which centre round it,
eating, drinking, fighting, adventure, marriage, friendship,
faithful service ; courage, generosity, loyalty ; anger,
cunning, fear. These are the oldest things in man, and
1 Sainte-Beuve, Qu'est-ce qu'un classiquef (Causeries du Lundi).

vi AND MANYSIDEDNESS 165

they are common to all men, for they are the original
elements out of which we were made. And these things
Homer cares for and describes, and he cares for and
describes little else.

Two illustrations will bring out my point. There is
a certain similarity between the stories of Homer's
Nausicaa and Wilde's Salome. Both are girls ; both are
attracted by men of age unequal to their own. But
Nausicaa's love is the elemental human passion ; Salome's
is an obscure disease. Contrast the words of the latter
when she receives the head of John (I will not quote them) ,
with the naive confession of Nausicaa to her companions.
' Listen, my white-armed maidens, and I will say some-
what. Ere while this man seemed to me uncomely, but
now he is like the gods that keep wide heaven. Would
that such a one might be called my husband, dwelling
here, and that it might please him here to abide.' * Or,
again, observe in what a different spirit Homer and Wilde
think of friendship. The following is from Dorian Gray.
' Talking to him was like playing on an exquisite violin.
He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow. There
is something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence.
To project one's soul into some gracious form and let it
tarry there for a moment ; to hear one's own intellectual
views echoed back to one with all the added music of
passion and youth ; to convey one's temperament into
another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange
perfume : there was a real joy in that — perhaps the most
satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as
our own.' Now hear Homer : ' Achilles wept, remember-
ing his dear comrade . . . turning him to this side and that,
yearning for Patroklos' manhood and excellent valour,
1 Od. 6. 239 f.
L3

166 THE NOTES OF SANITY CH.

and all the toils he achieved with him and the woes he
bare. As he thought thereon he shed big tears, now lying
on his side, now on his back, now on his face ; and then
anon he would rise upon his feet, and roam wildly beside
the beach of the salt sea.' x Homer is simple, central,
human nature. Wilde is informed with the spirit which
Pater saw in La Joconda, with ' strange thoughts and
fantastic reveries and exquisite passions ' ; if he has
beauty, it is a beauty into which ' the soul with all its
maladies has passed '.

So much for Homer. Then take the tragedians. At
first they seem to refute my statement, for they are
occupied with problems that never occurred to the older
poet. In the murders of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra,
in the adultery of Aegisthus and the marriage of Jocasta,
Homer had only seen horrible and exciting stories. To
the tragedians these suggest the problem of evil, the conse-
quences of sin, the mystery of heredity. For Homer the
fighting at Troy was a great game. For Aeschylus and
Euripides it raised all the problems of war ; it seemed the
disorganization of society, the ruin of civilization, a cause
of misery to the conquered, of cruelty and debasement to
the conquerors. Human life had grown more complex
since Homer's day, its difficulties and possibilities had
multiplied, and literature faithfully reflects the change.
But even so literature remains central and simple in its
interests. The agonies and misfortunes of the heroes of
tragedy may be more complex than the elemental passion
of the Homeric Achilles ; but they are agonies we all
might conceivably have to suffer, misfortunes that might
possibly befall ourselves. Bizarre vices are avoided. It is
noticeable, when we remember how adulterous passions

1 //. 24. 3 f.

vi AND MANYSIDEDNESS 167

attract the modern playwright, that no extant Greek play
except the Hippolytus has them for its central interest.
There is no morbid pathology in Greek drama.

Let me illustrate my point from a play which seems
to contradict this view. The legend of the Oedipus Rex is
morbid. It is the story of Oedipus who, in ignorance,
kills his father and marries his mother, Jocasta. Surely
this cannot be called ordinary, central, broadly human ;
does it not rather rank with — or below — Salome ? At
first sight one would be tempted to say so. Yet the real
interest of the play is not in the relations into which
Oedipus is brought. It resides partly in the plot — most
wonderful of plots — and in the intricate net of circum-
stance by which Oedipus is taken in his guilt ; but mainly
in the appeal to our moral sympathies made by the story
and especially by the part which one of the sufferers plays.
Jocasta, with a woman's quick intuition, realizes the
shameful fact before her son ; with natural weakness she
tries to hush it up, and, this failing, flies from it by suicide.
But Oedipus, on whom the truth breaks later, insists on
hearing the story of his shame to its end ; and then, after
himself rehearsing the tale of his misery in calm and
bitter words, resolves, unlike his wife, to bear his fate to
its end, and goes forth a consecrated outcast into the
solitudes of the hills. The appeal of the play is not patho-
logical or even intellectual ; it is the moral appeal to the
most universal of our sympathies. We see the agony of
a human being crushed under unspeakable misfortune ;
and we see him triumph over misfortune by strength of
will. The universe falls in ruins about him and he con- \-

fronts it undismayed. L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus
faible de la nature. . . . Mais quand I'univers I'ecraseroit,
I'homme seroit encore plus noble que ce qui le tue. And so

168 THE NOTES OF SANITY CH.

many people read the play, and get to the heart of what
Sophocles meant by it, without ever quite presenting to
themselves the exact nature of Oedipus' sin. They hardly
realize that Sophocles is writing about incest. For the
fact is that the poet has used the nicest and the parricide
simply to produce a sense of superhuman disaster, of
unutterable sin ; he has not analysed and dissected them
for themselves, he has not treated them pathologically.
Put the Oedipus by the side of Salome or the Picture of
Dorian Gray, put it even by the side of Hugo von Hoff-
mannsthal's play on the same subject, Oedipus und die
Sphinx, and the difference of the two methods of treat-
ment is apparent. Sophocles would have no sooner
written Salome than Pheidias would have sculptured the
deformities of a hunchback.

This interest in the essential things of humanity is easy
to understand. It is partly due to the fact on which we
have already dwelt, that the Greeks were a younger people
than we. They stood in the morning of the world, no foot
had been before them to brush the dew from its common
grass and flowers, and they took possession of it with
a fresh delight. The bizarre, the unusual did not tempt
them. It has been said of Maeterlinck that his whole aim
is ' to show how mysterious life is ' : and of another
symbolist that he sought ' the secret of things that is just
beyond the most subtle words '. Such an aim, such
a search was foreign to the Greek ; the morbid pathology
and the charming affectations of modern literature were
equally alien from his naive and natural mind.

But there is another reason for this quality. The Greek
writers led a life very different from modern men of letters.
Our own writers, born, bred, and condemned to live in
the study, are stuffed from their early years with ' art '

vi AND MANYSIDEDNESS 169

and criticism, and they have the qualities which such
a training develops. They are artistic and critical. They
are artistic, and their work is perfect in form and taste.
Or they are critical, and it shows an intellectual apprecia-
tion of the problems of life and an uncomfortable insight
into character, though little warmth of sympathy or
delight. But in either case the universe in which they live
is narrow ; for art is really less important than life and
worthless when taken apart from it, nor does the world
consist as wholly of problems, as in a study we are apt
to believe. So it comes that the modern analyst's influence
is as narrow as his range ; the intellectuals read him, the
Stage Society acts him, and the greater part of the world
(whose life is not in these things) passes him by.

The great Greek writers were very different. Instead
of being mere men of letters they led the lives of ordinary
active men. Like Goethe or Scott or Byron or Milton, they
mixed in the affairs of the world. Sophocles and Thucy-
dides commanded fleets, Aeschylus had fought at Marathon,
Socrates had served in the army and presided in the ecclesia,
Herodotus was a great traveller, the comic poet Eupolis was
killed in a sea fight, Protagoras drew up the constitution
for the great Panhellenic colony of Pericles at Thurii, and
the most famous sophists served as ambassadors and diplo-
mats : even with writers of whom we have no such records,
we may feel sure, owing to the peculiar nature of a Greek
state, that they took some part in public life.1 Such an

1 Cp. ' It came upon me " come stella in Ciel ", when,, in the
account of the taking of Amphipolis, Thucydides, os <al ravra
^weypa^fv, comes with seven ships to the rescue. Fancy old Hallam
sticking to his gun at a Martello tower. This was the way to make
men write well ; and this was the way to make literature respect-
able. Oh, Alfred Tennyson, could you but have the luck to be
put to such employment ! ' Fitzgerald, Letters, I. 233.

170 THE NOTES OF SANITY CH.

existence bred men not only with wide but also with
ordinary interests, and with a healthy outlook on life ;
in fact it bred normal men ; nature added genius, and so
we get the literature which sane, normal men would, if
they had genius, write. We do not get Art for Art's sake,
for the writers' interests were not those of artists or littera-
teurs, but those of general humanity. We do not even get
such innocent and partial forms of it as Lamb's essays.
A Greek would have said of such things that they were very
delightful, but fit rather for invalids or aged persons, not
for robust men, brimful of life and capable of its intense
activities ; he would have sympathized with the saying of
Carlyle about Lamb, that his genius was ' a genuine but
essentially small and cockney thing '.1 Nor do we get Intel-
lect for Intellect's sake. These writers' interest in humanity
was not that of a student or thinker, but living, so that they
were kept from the cold, accurate, unfeeling analysis of
characters and situations, which is common in the ablest
dramatists of our own day. They knew, what we have
forgotten, that a generous heart as well as a clear brain was
necessary for the making of great literature. As their idea of
a dramatist was not merely an artist, who constructed good
plots, conceived tragic situations, and embodied the whole
in beautiful verse, so it was not merely a profound thinker,
who dissected character finely, studied the effect on it of
circumstance, started problems, pricked and quickened
his audiences' brains. The Greek writers were pre-
occupied with their plots, not for the artistic or intel-
lectual, but^ for the human interest ; concerned for the
actual misfortunes of the hero, not merely attracted by
their dramatic value. His triumphs and trials they did not

1 Life of Carlyle, 2. 210. In speaking of Lamb I am, here as
above, only thinking of the Essays of Elia.

vi AND MANYSIDEDNESS 171

so much see as feel. For they remembered that the figures
that moved on the stage were reflections of the struggling
humanity to which they themselves belonged, in whose
weaknesses and sufferings they saw the image of their own,
from whose errors they drew warning, from whose fortitude
strength.

Here, then, is a fifth note of Hellenism. It is an interest
in and generous sympathy with the ' general passions and
thoughts and feelings of men '. It springs from a nature
which maintains the balance of perfect health, and has
only the tastes and pleasures of the healthy. If we think
of its origin, we may call it ' sanity ' ; if we think of its
effects, we may coin some such word as ' centrality ' to
denote it. Because Greek literature has this quality, two
things can be said of it. Firstly, since all ages live by the
' human heart ', Greek literature is never antiquated. It
has never had its day, for its day is, so long as the earth
is peopled with men. Secondly, it is never morbid ; it
is a school of healthy thought and feeling ; in Plato's
words, it is 'a wind wafting health from salubrious
lands '.

Most of the features which have been spoken of above,
as absent from the prime of Greek poetry, make their
appearance later. Unfriendly critics saw Art for Art's sake
in the lyrics of Euripides, and blamed him for sacrificing
sense to sound. They found an unhealthy and morbid
interest in his plays on the adulterous passions of Phaedra
and Stheneboea. Certainly he is more critical and intel-
lectual than his two predecessors. Aeschylus is notable
for what the Germans call Stimmungsbilder ; his atmo-
sphere is electric with tremendous forces. Sophocles is
a master of dramatic situations. But Euripides is the
student of character, the poet of problem plays. That

172 THE NOTES OF SANITY CH.

description is far from exhausting his powers, but there
is something in the view which Aristophanes took of his
genius — that he taught the Athenians ' to think, see,
understand, suspect evil, question everything '.* 'To
suspect evil ' — that is one of the lessons which Shaw and
Galsworthy are teaching modern England. And it must
be remembered that Euripides is the first ' study-poet ' of
Greece. He led no armies, commanded no fleets, spoke in
no assembly. He lived in his study the life of a recluse —
his great caricaturist seized that point in him.2 In Athens
his library was famous, and tradition represented him as
' gloomy, unsmiling, averse to society '.3

A century later literature was delivered over to the
' study-poets '. Far away from Athens, under the shadow
of Egyptian civilization, a monarch of foreign descent
founded the first university of the world. He instituted
the great library and museum of Alexandria ; he built
a common hall where the savants whom he endowed could
dine, corridors where they could converse, a theatre
where they could lecture. It was a university of pro-
fessors without undergraduates, and thither the scholars
and writers of Greece flocked, to show what poetry men
of taste living in learned seclusion can produce. Inter-
minable elegies on incestuous relations ; the hymns of
Callimachus, perfect in form and empty of matter ; the
nature poetry of Theocritus, destitute, amid all its
beauty, of virility or real human interest — these were
produced in a foreign country, amid learned men, under

1 Frogs, 957.

2 Aristophanes, Acharnians, 406-9. It is with the utmost
difficulty that Dicaeopolis, who wishes to borrow some rags from
Euripides, can get him out of his study — ou o-^oX^, Euripides says :
' I have no time.' 3 Suidas.

vi AND MANYSIDEDNESS 173

the patronage of a despot, in an age when Greece itself was
sick to death. Then and only then did literature finally
divorce itself from living, and become a diversion, an
occupation, an art. The poets are no longer Aeschylus
or Pindar or Euripides, but men who (if we judged only
from their works) had neither home life nor national life
nor any of the natural activities of healthy men ; they
had merely a fine taste in literature.

The last few pages may seem to have been a tilting,
gratuitous and impertinent, at persons on whom the
public has already set the seal of its approval. So they
shall close by an extract which describes with entire
fairness the origin of one of the most perfect works, which
Art for Art's sake can claim to have inspired. It neither
praises nor blames ; it can be taken to do either, and
every one will take it according to his taste.

It was not till long after Christ's coming that Longus
wrote his fairy story of two Greek children, who lived,
in a state of impossible innocence, in the country near
Mitylene. But his pastoral has all the qualities of Alex-
andrian literature, and the words with which M. Anatole
France describes the spirit in which Longus wrote, might,
with a few changes, be transferred to Theocritus and
his friends. ' La Chloe du roman grec ne fut jamais
une vraie bergere, et son Daphnis ne fut jamais un vrai
chevrier. Le Grec subtil qui nous conta leur histoire ne
se souciait point d'etables ni de boucs. II n'avait souci
que de poesie et d'amour. Et comme il voulait montrer,
pour le plaisir des citadins, un amour sensuel et gracieux,
il mit cet amour dans les champs oil ses lecteurs n'allaient
point, car c'etaient de vieux Byzantins blanchis au fond
de leurs palais, au milieu de feroces mosa'iques ou derri£re
le comptoir sur lequel ils avaient ramasse de grandes

174 THE NOTES OF SANITY CH.

richesses. Afin d'6gayer ces vieillards mornes, le conteur
leur montra deux beaux enfants. . . .' l Think as you read
these words, how different in the circumstances of its
production was the genuine literature of Greece, and if
you care to read the pastoral of Longus, note how different
is its spirit.

Here, then, is a point in which Greek differs from modern
humanism. It took a more central view of humanity. And
so its literature has not merely the charm of beauty, or the
quaintness of a puppet show, or the queerness of a morbid
dream, or the chilly interest of an intellectual problem,
but, as in Shakespeare or Scott or Goethe, real men and
women move before us in it, and life is presented, not as
thought but as action, not as a spectacle but as a 8pdfj.a,
not as a fantasy or a problem play or a vision of beauty,
but — as life. That is one reason why Greek writers are so
far ahead of our own humanists.

All this is the concern of our men of letters, and does
not touch those who are not novelists and dramatists and
essayists. We must now attack the second part of our
inquiry, turning from our men of letters to the ordinary
citizen, from Maeterlinck and Galsworthy to John Doe
and Richard Roe. We have seen how Greek humanism
brought forth different points from our own in literature :
we must now trace an analogous difference in common life
and for the ordinary man.

The modern world recognizes and almost expects a
divorce between different interests and occupations. It
shuts the scholar into his study, the man of science in his
laboratory, the merchant in his office ; it leaves the poet
to his dreams, it reserves politics for a chosen few : it asks
1 Le Jar din d' Epicure.

vi AND MANYSIDEDNESS 175

from its soldier and its sailor little beyond proficiency in
their business and a love of sport. If any of these stray
beyond their allotted province, it stares in wonder, often
in disapproval. But to gain any idea of Greek life, we must
reverse all our conceptions of what is natural and proper,
and cease to think of each man as limited to a particular
function in the commonwealth. We must fancy Browning
and Tennyson fighting at the bombardment of Alexan-
dria, as Aeschylus fought at Salamis, and as Thucydides
commanded a fleet in Thrace. We must conceive of
Mr. Chamberlain, after initiating the Boer War, as leading
the English army in person — the fifth-century Athenians
expected that a politician who advised an expedition,
should himself carry it out. We must think of ourselves
as all trooping off from our regular employment, four times
a month or more, to discuss foreign policy and vote
budgets and bills in parliament : as all going to a national
theatre twice annually and sitting through whole days
to watch the tragedies and comedies of a contemporary
Shakespeare : we must expect to find, seated by us, at
Westminster or in the theatre, our neighbours and fellow
citizens, from the Prime Minister to our butcher or grocer ;
we must not grumble (whether we are Territorials or not)
at being suddenly asked to put on uniform and go off to
invade a foreign country. In short we must imagine
a many-sided, many-coloured life, full of every kind of
practical and intellectual interests. Then we shall get
some idea of fifth-century Athens.

The instinct of manysidedness was as deeply rooted as
any in the Greek character, and was early formulated as a
philosophical idea. The first principle the Greek struck
out to guide him through life was the saying wSlv dyav,
Nothing too much. It is a crude and negative principle :

176 THE NOTES OF SANITY CH.

no doubt the Greek hit upon it by roughly reasoning from
the fate of men in too great prosperity whose hearts were
lifted up to foolishness, men who went too far and came
to a miserable end. But the maxim carries with it as its
obverse and corollary, the precept to see life whole and on
all its sides.

Indeed the same conclusion results from the principle
we found at the bottom of the Greek view of life, from

I 'humanism. You are a man : be a man. Man is a being
with many faculties, they are there to be developed, and
if you will be a perfect man, use them all. Homo es : nihil
humani a te alienum puta. Give everything in you its
share : give a share to religion, to war, to politics, to
family life, to the intellect and to the body, to the state
and to yourself. Give a share even to qualities which might
seem dangerous.1 Man is generally a sober and reasonable
being ; be generally sober and reasonable. But man has
moments of exaltation and excitement ; devise Dionysiac
festivals to carry them off and let there be days when you
are not ashamed to be excited and exalted and drunk.
Man has bodily passions ; allow them scope, though a
j moderate scope. Do not be ascetic, do not ignore human
' nature, do not maim it ; give it play, yet such play that
while no side of it is undeveloped, no side of it tyrannizes
over, dwarfs, or interferes with the rest.

1 The Hippolytus of Euripides is full of this feeling. The Nurse
there recommends Phaedra to indulge her adulterous passion
because

A straight and perfect life is not for man

(467, tr. Murray ; see the whole speech, 433 f.)
and holds that

' Thorough ' is no word of peace :
'Tis ' Naught-too-much ' makes trouble cease,
And many a wise man bows thereto.

(261-2, tr. Murray.)
Needless to say, the sympathies of Euripides are not with the Nurse.

vi AND MANYSIDEDNESS 177

Clearly there are objections to such a way of life. It
will produce a highly civilized people, good poets, good
philosophers, good historians, bad generals, bad politi-
cians, indifferent men of business. It is not consistent
with efficiency, for efficiency demands specialization.
Further, it has a profound moral danger. We have used
the term manysidedness in a good sense. But Juvenal,
whose keen eyes had noted this quality in the Greeks, uses
it in a bad one, and saw only evil in the readiness with
which they could assume any character and turn to any
trade. He is describing the versatility of the Greek whom
he knew in Rome.

A Protean tribe, one knows not what to call,

Which shifts to every form, and shines in all :

Grammarian, painter, augur, rhetorician,

Ropedancer, conjuror, fiddler, physician,

All trades his own your hungry Greekling counts :

And bid him mount the sky — the sky he mounts !

No longer now the favourites of the stage

Boast their exclusive power to charm the age ;

The happy art with them a nation shares,

Greece is a theatre, where all are players.

For lo ! their patron smiles — they burst with mirth ;

He weeps — they droop, the saddest souls on earth ;

He calls for fire — they court the mantle's heat ;

Tis warm, he cries — and they dissolve in sweat.1

We can recognize in Juvenal's words the defect of the
quality, that want of steadiness, want of character, which
waits so often on brilliant and varied genius. The Roman
indeed knew Greece in its later days, when changed
political conditions had developed a fault which was in
the blood, just as illness will bring out in human beings
a latent constitutional taint. But Athens herself had felt
the evil of it long ago, when Alcibiades was her citizen,

1 Sat. 3. 74-8, 98-103 (tr. Gifford).

1358 M

THE NOTES OF SANITY CH.

and Plato's description of what he calls the ' democratic
man ' is a profound analysis of that corruption of many-
sidedness which was the curse of Greece.

' It is the habit of his life to make no distinction between
his pleasures, but to suffer himself to be led by the passing
pleasure which chance throws in his way, and to turn to
another when the first is satisfied — scorning none but
fostering all alike. Hence he lives from day to day to the
end, in the gratification of the casual appetite, now drink-
ing himself drunk to the sound of music, and presently
putting himself under training, sometimes idling and
neglecting everything, and then living like a student of
philosophy. Often he takes part in public affairs, and
starting up, speaks and acts according to the impulse of
the moment. Now he follows eagerly in the steps of
certain great generals, because he covets their distinctions
and anon he takes to trade, because he envies the success-
ful trader. And there is no order or constraining rule in
his life ; but he calls this life of his pleasant, and liberal,
and happy, and follows it out to the end.' * It is the very
voice of Juvenal, five centuries before his time.

We started out to bless manysidedness : it may seem
we have ended by cursing it. Certainly what we have said
of it would not raise the Greeks in the opinion of an
English man of business. Yet the quality is no slight or
common one ; nor is it without importance for our prac-
tice of life. Nothing is more remarkable than the richness
of opportunity in Athens. There it would have been
possible to find the same man, at different times, sitting
at a cobbler's bench, listening to the Bacchae, voting in
the Assembly, a worshipper in the temples, a soldier on
campaign, a juror in the courts. We cannot indeed revive
1 Republic, 561.

vi AND MANYSIDEDNESS 179

that Greek world in which poets were soldiers, and
politicians generals, and every man a member of Parlia-
ment, nor should we wish to do so. But we can try to
catch a portion of its spirit. This existence, whatever its
faults may have been, had not the grinding specialism of
the modern world. Here no one was absorbed by his trade
or livelihood ; but a man remained in the first place
a human being, and exercised the gifts, and experienced
the enjoyments, proper to human nature. The artisan
did not become a machine, or the labourer a drudge. The
soldier, the merchant, the man of letters did not slip into
narrow professionalism. The historian derived his know-
ledge of politics and war from hours spent in the assembly
and the camp. The poet and philosopher had been in
personal touch with that human nature on which they
moralized and wrote. And if at times this world had the
defects of its qualities and developed characters which
were everything by turns and nothing long, it fully com-
pensated for these failures by its successes. Greek life
always charms us by the brilliance of its many colours ;
but at its best they merge in one and become something
like ' the white radiance of eternity '.

Having reached this point in our argument let us look
back over the way we have come. Our original purpose
was to seize the essential elements in Hellenism and set
them down side by side, without asserting any necessary
connexion between them. So we passed from the Greeks'
Sense of Beauty to their Freedom, their Directness, their
Humanism, their Manysidedness, their Sanity. As our
argument advanced, it appeared that these were not
isolated qualities, but were connected with, and had
developed out of, each other. The Greek Sense of Beauty

i8o SANITY AND MANYSIDEDNESS CH. vi.

does perhaps stand apart. But the others depend, like
links of a chain, from the Greek Freedom as their out-
ward or negative, and Greek Directness as the inward or
positive, condition. Because their view of life was not
dominated by theological or political tyranny, and because
they looked at the world ' directly ', the Greeks became
Humanists. For Man met their direct gaze as the obviously
present, supremely real thing in the world. And because
the Greeks were Humanists they were Manysided. For
Man, when you look at him, clearly is a creature with
many sides, and if you wish to do him justice you must
treat him as such. And because they were Direct in their
view of him they were also Sane. For if you look straight
at Man, you see that he is at bottom not like the Cuchulain
of Mr. Yeats, or the Salome of Wilde, but — a human being.
No passion is worse than the passion for a system, and
perhaps it would have been better to leave these qualities
of the Greek genius in splendid isolation, instead of trying
to derive them from one source. But this much can be
said, I think, for the quality I have called Directness. It
is the one quality which every Greek has. Thucydides,
Aristotle, Demosthenes, show no exceptional sense of
beauty. Aristophanes, Herodotus, Homer, are not remark-
able for moral fervour. But nearly every Greek has
Directness. The most Hellenic Greeks have most of it :
but all Greek writing has something of it. And more : it
is really the secret of Greek literature. The beauty of
that literature is simply the beauty of a representation of
some event or emotion which has been felt with vivid
exactness and pictured in a full clear light. Its weight and
depth are simply the gifts of writers who have looked
straight at life and put down exactly what they saw there,
exactly as they saw it.

CHAPTER VII
SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO

WE have built a picturesque and roomy fold : it is
hexagonal in shape, and the names of its walls are Beauty,
Liberty, Directness, Humanism, Sanity, Manysidedness.
We have driven our cattle inside it, and there they remain,
to all appearance comfortably and securely penned.
None seem to have been left outside, and though a few
were rebellious, most went in without resistance or kick-
ing. That is the convenience of dealing with dumb or
dead creatures which cannot answer back ; they might
be less docile, if they had voices.

And no doubt, as we built up our notes of Hellenism,
and squared and related and adjusted them, and then
compelled the Greeks to come in, straggling strictly
forbidden, the reader may have felt that this systematic
grouping was too complete to be natural, and that Hel-
lenism had some animals which did not properly belong
to our flock. He was quite right if he thought so. For
though the central fact in Hellenism and its most precious
legacy to the world is the lucid, free, rational spirit which
takes form now as -rrapprja-ia, now as humanism, now as
directness, now as manysidedness, there is another spirit
in it too, and if we had to criticize a writer like Matthew
Arnold, who himself owed so much to Greece and said so
much that was true about her, we should say that he fell
short in his estimate of the Greek genius from supposing
that it was always coolly rational and failing to notice that
at times it was more. For if Greece showed men how to

182 SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO CH.

trust their own nature, and lead a simply human life, how
to look straight in the face of the world and read the
beauty that met them on its surface, certain Greek
writers preached a different lesson from this. In
opposition to directness they taught us to look past the
' unimaginary and actual ' qualities of things to secondary
meanings and an inner symbolism. In opposition to
liberty and humanism they taught us to mistrust our
nature, to see in it weakness, helplessness, an incurable
taint, to pass beyond humanity to communion with God,
to live less for this world than for one to come.

At this independent current of thought we must now
glance : briefly, for two reasons. Firstly, it is not the
main stream of Hellenism, but subordinate. Secondly,
we can get it from the great thinkers of Christianity in
a more impressive form, while directness, humanism, and
liberty can nowhere be found in such purity and complete-
ness as in Greece. For the sake of vividness it will be
convenient to expound this unhellenic spirit under the
name of the one great extant writer who fully represents
it on all its sides.

Perhaps to some people it may seem surprising that
this writer is £lato. Rohde long ago showed clearly that
the Platonic spirit was an alien phenomenon in Greece,1
and other writers before had said as much : but except
on grammatical and textual points, schoolboys are apt

1 In his Psyche, on which is based what I say about Orphism
and ideas of immortality, and Plato's ' otherworldliness '. To
any one who did not know Plato, this chapter would afford
a onesided idea of him, for I am trying, not to give an account
of the man, but to illustrate certain phases in him. Of course, his
extreme views — on the body, for instance — only appear in certain
dialogues ; and the Symposium, here cited for unhellenic qualities,
is in many ways the most Hellenic work in Greek literature.

vii SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO 183

to read the classics more as admirers than as critics, and
many people attain good classes in Literae Humaniores
without discovering how deep is the gulf that lies between
Plato and nearly all his peers. Still the gulf is there : and
though in a thousand ways Plato is a Greek of the Greeks,
in all that is most distinctive in his thought he is so far
a heretic that if Hellenism had been a persecuting religion,
it would have been bound to send him to the stake.
Nietzsche, who justly pointed out that he was one of the
earliest defaulters from Greek traditions, called him, in
his ugly German way, praexistent-christlich : and, to return
to my own classification, it will soon become clear that he
is frequently not direct, that he is no admirer of freedom,
and that he is not a genuine humanist. Let us take these
three notes in order, and see where he innovates on them.

We saw in an earlier chapter that of whatever the
Greek spoke, he tended to dwell on its ' unimaginary and
actual qualities ' to ' take it at its surface value ', to ' see
things naked ', to ' keep his feet on the earth ', to ' shrink
from mysticism ', to be ' concrete and definite ', to ' keep
his eye on the object ', in a word, to be ' direct '.

Now Plato is generally as direct as Homer or any of
his nation, and that too in subjects where he might
well be otherwise. • The famous description of scenery
in the Phaedrus is often quoted to illustrate the severe
and unsentimental treatment of nature, characteristic of
ancient writers : * and whatever may be thought of the
feelings which led Plato to his views on an after-life,
there is no doubt that when he takes us there, he is
definite, concrete, and unmystical in his description of the
future world to a far greater extent than, for instance, the
writer of the Apocalypse. In the pictures of Cephalus
1 Phaedr. 230.

184 SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO CH.

with which the Republic, and of the house of Callias with
which the Protagoras opens : above all, in the account of
the death of Socrates, where instead of commenting or
sentimentalizing, Plato relates the plain facts and leaves
them to move our feelings — Plato is entirely direct. And
so generally.

But there are times when he is very different, as all
readers of the Ion, the Symposium, and the Phaedrus will
remember. Take the first of these dialogues and note
Plato's theory of poetry. Poets no doubt, at the best of
times and in the most direct of hands, are mysterious
people, but it is possible to treat them with very little
mystery, as Wordsworth does in his Poet's Epitaph.

The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed ;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.

In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart ; —
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.

That is perfectly direct ; these lines attribute to the poet
powers which are indubitably his ; no one could possibly
deny that he does and is what Wordsworth says. But
many people might have grave doubts of the truth of
Plato's account of the poet as a ' light and winged and
holy thing ', in whom there is no poetry, till he has been
inspired and is out of his senses, till God ' possesses ' him
and uses him as a mouthpiece.1 Here, in their respective
treatment of the same subject, Plato is mystical, Words-
worth is direct.
A still better instance is the Phaedrus. We saw in an

1 Ion, 534.

vii SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO 185

earlier chapter that Greek literature as a whole, with one
exception, treats love with as little mysticism as the
subject allows, describing its obvious manifestations and
effects, without any attempt to discover for them unap-
parent relations or to make them symbolic of profounder
realities. The one exception was Plato. That potent and
surprising emotion to which all humanity is liable he
endeavoured to connect with mystic experiences in a
former life, when the unborn human souls drove across
heaven in the train of Zeus and other gods. There they
caught a passing glimpse of the great Ideas, of essential
beauty, essential justice, essential temperance, essential
knowledge, and then falling to the earth were imprisoned
in bodies and born as men. And so when a man meets
beauty in the world, his soul, which is languishing in its
prison-house, revives, and is fed and refreshed, and
remembers once more the vision of ideal beauty which
it saw before birth : this is love. Love, therefore, is the
intermediary between God and man, the desire of the
beautiful which is also the good, an earnest of the divine
excellence which resides in heaven, simple and unalloyed.1
How infinitely far are we come from Sappho's commo-
tion of spirit, as she sits and sees her lover : how far from
Andromache's affection for the wise and brave husband
of her girlhood : how far from the many-named goddess
of Sophocles, who spurs men now to evil, now to good.
Love left those writers on the earth, even though on a
better or a wilder earth ; but it has lifted Plato away to
heaven. We may agree with him, we may think that he has
ennobled a passion and purged it of earthliness ; but we
must not rank him, when he speaks thus, with Homer, or
the lyric poets, or Euripides, or indeed with any of his
1 Phaedr. 247-51.

186 SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO CH.

race : his place is in the new world, with Dante and
Browning and the poets of mystical and unearthly love.
Whatever he is here, he is not direct.

So, too, in the question of liberty, Plato abandons the
ideal of his race, or rather of that Ionian section of it to
which he belonged. Pericles, as we saw, intended that
in Athens a man should be able to think, say, and do
what he wished. He entrusted the greatest interests to
an unaided, unfenced humanity, in the simple faith that
it is the nature of man to do right and walk straight. His
citizens, he thought, had a spirit of awe, a thirst for fame,
and a devotion to a country, so glorious that she could
claim devotion. This was a secure guarantee for patriotism,
a sufficient basis on which to build a polity.1

There was a time when Plato must have agreed with
him, for freedom of thought was the maxim and practice of
his master, Socrates. But when he turned to politics, he
proposed to found his state on principles very different
from those of Pericles. Indeed its chief features are
borrowed from those regulations of Lycurgus which
Pericles expressly rejects.

Think for a moment of the life which we should be
leading if Plato had had his way. Born in a society where
marriage was promiscuous, we should never know father
or mother. Our early years would be spent in a state
nursery, and from youth up our character scrutinized, till
at manhood we were irrevocably fixed in one of the three
Platonic castes, labouring, military, or governing. In the
lowest and least honoured of these we might do what
we would : in the other two we should live together ' like
soldiers in a camp '. The use of gold and silver would,
1 Thuc. 2. 37. 3 ; 40. I ; 43. i.

vii SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO 187

according to Spartan precedent, be forbidden : private
possessions would be illegal : our houses would be open
to the world, our wives common property, our children
as much and as little ours as those of our neighbours.
For Plato insists on absolute communism, and as long as
we owned anything, would not trust us to be unselfish.1

Such was Plato's plan for an ideal city ; but realizing
that on earth it was impracticable and could only exist in
heaven as a pattern to which the lawgiver should longingly
aspire, he sketched in his Laws a second-best state. Here
he will allow us private property and families, though the
syssitia are continued, gold and silver banished, personal
wealth narrowly restricted, and a host of small regulations
enforced. But there is a human possession of greater
price than these purely material goods, and when he deals
with it, Plato is no friend to clemency. In his state, what-
ever may be the case with his possessions, no man's mind
is free, no man's soul is his own. Plato has decided what
is the truth in morality and religion, and has embodied it
in laws, from which no syllable shall pass. He has drawn
up certain dogmas, theological and ethical, which are
rigorously imposed on all citizens. ' The gods exist, they
care for men, they cannot be propitiated by prayers or
sacrifices.' 2 ' Virtue is always pleasant and vice always
miserable, and you must not say that a wicked man can
be happy nor a good man unhappy.' 3

These are wide and on the whole reasonable views ; but
the net, though it has large meshes, still remains a net,
and Plato is determined that no one shall escape from it.
' I should punish severely any one in the land who should
dare to say that there are bad men who live pleasant lives ;
and there are many other matters about which I should

1 Republic, 415-17. 2 Laws, 885. * Ibid. 662.

i88 SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO CH.

make my citizens speak in a manner different from the
modern Cretan and Lacedaemonian, and I may say, indeed,
from the world in general.' 1 At ten years of age the
slavery begins with teaching the child poetry selected in
order to inculcate the desired views, and certain sermons
that Plato oddly proposes to attach to his laws. Plato
knew well how easily the mind takes indelible impressions,
and saw from the readiness with which the Athenian of his
day believed the most improbable stories of mythology that
' the legislator can persuade the minds of the young of
anything : so that he has only to reflect and find out what
belief will be of the greatest public advantage, and then
use all his efforts to make the whole community utter one
and the same word in their songs and tales and discourses
all their life long.' 2 Anything that can break down the
intellectual tyranny thus established is carefully shunned.
The poets are compelled to proclaim the creed, and are
punished severely if they criticize it. Foreign travel — so
often the solvent of national traditions — is forbidden before
the age of forty, and to any one in a private capacity,
though a few selected individuals are sent abroad with
instructions to tell the youths on their return that the
institutions of other states are inferior to their own.3 At
home, a body, ominously called the Nocturnal Council,
which is carefully indoctrinated with the aims of the state,
and primed with the arguments for the established
theology, watches through its spies for any symptoms of
heresy. And if, after all, some ardent spirit, some Greek
Giordano Bruno, defies laws and traditions and poets, and
slaking his thirst for knowledge at a muddied spring
because the wells of truth are sealed, breaks into irreligion,
and declares that there is no god, Plato is ready for him.
1 Laws, 662. 2 Ibid. 663, 664. 3 950.

vii SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO 189

Some one who hears the blasphemy shall lay information,
and the man shall be committed for five years to the
House of Reformation, cut off from all intercourse except
with the Nocturnal Council ' for the improvement of his
soul's health ' : when the time has passed, if he has not
repented, the penalty is death. That is for the honest and
virtuous unbeliever : for family prayers, held in a man's
own house, and supposed to leave a loophole for heresy,
other penalties are prescribed : for the wicked atheist
immediate death and exposure beyond the borders.1

The actual ideas which Plato thus wished to propagate
are noble, but his methods the world renounced for ever
at the Reformation. Such powers are too likely to be
used against the wrong persons — indeed, as Grote has
argued, Socrates himself might well have been condemned
to death under the laws which his pupil promulgated ;
even where successful, they produce a plaster-of-Paris
virtue, at once stiff and brittle ; 2 and they soon lead the
best-intentioned men into ambiguous positions and dis-
creditable measures. Not many people will feel that
Plato had his feet on a straight road, when they find him
led to recommend to his lawgiver the use of ' noble false-
hoods ', and contemplating that on occasions he will ' tell
the young men useful lies for a good purpose '.3 But, be
that as it may, this compulsory discipline under which
mankind is to be educated, policed, and, where necessary,
hoaxed, into virtue, is infinitely removed from the liberty
of which Thucydides and Pericles dreamed. It may be

1 Laws, 907-10.

2 An interesting modern example of this is the fate of the
Paraguayan State, when the Jesuits, who had ruled it so success-
fully, were removed.

3 Republic, 414 ; Laws, 663.

SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO CH.

common sense, it may be ' the hard facts of life ' ; but it
is the shattering of the Greek ideal.

Let us pass to the third point in which Plato departs
from the canons of Hellenism as we conceived them. The
ordinary Greek was a humanist, in the sense that, looking
at man, he saw a creature at bottom and in its proper
nature essentially good, with a body and soul equally
excellent ; looking at life, he made this being the measure
of all things, turned to the earth for success or failure,
and set no store by a world to come. The two views hang
together, and Plato, who repudiated the first of them, was
in the end driven to repudiate the second.

To start with, he broke up the splendid unity of uncor-
rupted body and soul which to the earlier Greeks was
Man : he detected in its pure gold the stain of an alloy :
he saw in its superficial aspect of radiant health a malig-
nant cancer which flourished at the expense of the whole,
and if unexcised would gradually destroy it : in fact he
. adopted the Hebrew creed of original sin.

The body, which counted for so much to the ordinary
Greek, was the head of the evil.1 True that Plato at times
speaks of it in the genuine Greek spirit, goes into raptures
over the young Charmides and Lysis which modern taste
might feel mawkish, and calls a handsome face ' the
expression of Divine Beauty '.2 But elsewhere he holds
very different language, and exhausts his vocabulary in
metaphors of detestation. The body is the oyster-shell
of our imprisonment, the fetter in which we are chained,
the quack that cheats us. It wastes our time with outcries

1 In the Laws, 896, he has the idea of two world-souls, one of
which causes all evij, the other all good.
* Phaedr. 251.

vii SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO 191

for food, hampers us with diseases, betrays us to lusts,
terrors, phantoms, distracts us into the quest for money,
and thereby involves us in disputes, factions, and wars.
' Even if we are at leisure and betake ourselves to some
speculation, the body is always breaking in upon us,
causing turmoil and confusion in our inquiries, and so
amazing us that we are prevented from seeing the truth.'

From such premises Plato passes to the inevitable con-
clusion of asceticism, that it is not possible, as the earlier
Hellenism held, to take the body with its errors, fears, and
lusts, convert them to noble objects, and raise out of
weakness a temple to virtue. Instead of hopeless efforts
to control the evil, we must fly from it, ' withdrawing
from the body so far as the conditions of life allow,' dis-
honouring ' it, mortifying it, and in short ' making life
one long study for death '-1 How strange would these
ideas have sounded to Homer or Sophocles ! how strange
must the sober, earthly Aristotle have found them, who
taught that men's happiness falls in their lifetime, that
it is past for ever after death, and that wealth, good birth,
good looks, and a reasonable length of life are indispensable
to it ! 2

With the body Plato had thrown over one article in
the creed of Greece, and he soon found himself obliged
to discard another. Humanism cannot satisfy those who
have discovered a fatal flaw in human nature. If man is
tied to something radically evil which is inseparable from
him on earth, then his happiness must be placed elsewhere
than here. If the body is a chain which in this present life
continually chafes the soul, then our affections must be
fixed on a future world in which we shall be released

1 The above quotations are taken from Phaedo, 65-7 ; Phaedr.
250 ; Republic, 6n. * Nic. Ethics, i. n.

192 SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO CH.

from it. No one has put this more clearly than himself.
' If we would have pure knowledge of anything we must
be quit of the body — the soul in herself must behold things
in themselves : and then we shall attain the wisdom which
we desire and of which we say that we are lovers : not
while we live, but after death : for if, while in company
with the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one
of two things follows — either knowledge is not to be
obtained at all, or, if at all, after death. For then, and not
till then, the soul will be parted from the body and exist
in herself alone.' 1

This is indeed the gospel of otherworldliness, and it
drives Plato to further conclusions which would have
shocked his contemporaries even more. Avoid, he urged,
political life. It has killed philosophy in contemporary
Greece, so that the only philosophers left there are a few
who have been kept in private life by ill health or who
contemn and neglect the politics of the cities in which they
are born.2 Of these few remaining princes of philosophy
• he draws in another passage a picture which to our minds
is both odious and contemptible, and which must have
been even more so to a Greek. Conceive how the following
words must have outraged the public sentiment of a city,
where all citizens were members of parliament, and politics
was an indispensable part of human life. ' They (the
princes of philosophy) from youth up are unacquainted
with the road to the market-place : they have no idea even
where are the law courts or the houses of parliamen t or
any other place of public assembly. They do not see or
hear laws or decrees written or recited. They have not
the faintest notion of the enthusiasm of caucuses for office,
nor of their meetings and dinners. Of public failures and

1 Phaedo, 66. * Republic, 496.

vii SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO 193

successes they have heard as little as of the number of
pints contained in the ocean. And the philosopher is not
even conscious of all this ignorance of his. He does not
hold aloof to acquire a reputation ; it is a genuine fact
that only his body reposes and is at home in Athens ; his
mind looks on these topics as puny and valueless, and dis-
regards them, and moves everywhere, in Pindar's words,
meting the surfaces of the earth and the deeps beneath it,
scanning the stars above the sky, everywhere inquiring
into all the nature of each thing in its entirety that is,
demeaning itself to nothing that lies at its feet.' *

In itself this passage is misleading, for Plato is speaking
of contemporary Greek politics, which he held in contempt :
no doubt, when his ideal city is founded, he will allow us,
if we are philosophers, to rule her. Yet a radical aver-
sion to politics underlies all his thought, founded on the
feeling that the highest life was one of intellectual contem-
plation. He had no higher opinion of Miltiades or Pericles
than of the statesmen of his own day, and in one passage
he goes so far as to say that in a city composed ' entirely
of good men, to avoid office would be as much an object
of contention as to obtain office is at present '.2

Plato had despaired of the body, he had deserted the
earth, and now he must find some alternative place of
rest, or else relapse into helpless pessimism. Life would
be a dismal paradox for the Platonic man, if imprisoned
in a body which warped his nature, and planted in a world
for whose climate he was unfit, he was perpetually to
contemplate amid inconveniences and obstacles an ideal
good which was removed from his reach. And so Plato has
recourse to heaven. In those dialogues where he is most
deeply moved, after bringing all the forces of dialectic to
1 Theaet. 173. J Republic, 347.

1358 N

194 SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO CH.

support the cause of truth and justice, at the close he
abandons reasoning, and portrays a future world where, if
not in this, virtue and vice receive their dues. It is far
more definite than the Homeric Hades, more definite even
than the Heavenly Jerusalem of the Apocalypse, and Plato
tells us its geography. He speaks of its hot and cold
springs, its streams of fire and mud, its boiling lakes, its
four great rivers, Oceanus, Styx, Pyriphlegethon, and
Cocytus, its vast chasm, Tartarus, into which these flow,
its stream of forgetfulness, its dark blue region, like lapis
lazuli, wild and savage, its treeless, grassless wastes full
of scorching heat. Here, after death, all men come for
judgement, and thence pass to the fate which their
sentence allots. The way leads near a tunnel, which
bellows when a sinner approaches : wild, flaming men
seize him, drag him through thorns, flog him, and fling
him into Tartarus, whence he never emerges. Lesser
offenders suffer a purgatorial torment of one year, and
then are ' cast forth by the wave ' into the Acherusian
lake, where they call on the forgiveness of those whom
they have wronged, and if they can obtain it are released
from torment. But the holy are ' released from the body's
prison and go to their pure home above '. That, too,
Plato describes ; its trees, and flowers, and fruit, its
precious stones, its wonderful lights and colours, its
temples in which men hear and see and hold converse
with God himself.1 Not, as Plato admits, that this
description of the soul and its mansions is ' exactly true '.
But inasmuch as the soul is shown to be immortal, a man
of sense 'may venture to think, not improperly or un-
worthily, that something of the kind is true '.2

1 The above details are taken from Phaedo, 110-14, and
Republic, 615. Phaedo, 114; cp. Gorgias, 527.

viz SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO 195

Now we can see why Plato was called praexistent-christ-
lich — a Christian born out of due time. He anticipates in
point after point, if not the doctrines of the Catholic
Church, yet principles which underlay her development,
and important elements in her practice. His race had
held that human nature was fundamentally good, and
thought that knowledge and training would abolish wrong.
Plato argued that there is an incurably evil element in
man to which only death can put an end ; as the Church
argued that there is an incurably evil element in him,
which can only be quenched by the Grace of God. Plato's
race had held that physical beauty is among the highest
objects of desire — Plato himself thought that the body
interferes with the soul, often encrusts and embrutes it.
He spoke of mortifying it here, and being happily rid of it
hereafter ; he taught men to shun its vanities and affec-
tions, to leave even politics and public life, to devote
themselves to the contemplation of God and the saving
of their souls ; till his words might have been inscribed
in the cells of Christian hermits, to justify and sustain
them in the austere asceticism of their retirement from
the world. Plato's race had concentrated their gaze on
this earth, and had steeled themselves to face a hopeless
Sheol hereafter. Plato told his disciples to look forward to
a future life, to a judgement to come, to heaven, hell, or
purgatory, to a scheme of punishments and rewards that
followed a man's conduct in his time on earth. Plato's
race had a generous confidence in human nature, and
wished to strike the shackles off it, in the hope that it
would of itself choose good and refuse evil. Plato invented
for his countrymen a political system more rigid than
that of the Middle Ages, a system of dogma as unalter-
able, and an Inquisition almost as severe. Original sin,

196 SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO CH.

asceticism, ideas of a future life, strict authoritarianism—
in all these Plato anticipated the mediaeval Church.

And not without close analogies in Christianity is the
spirit which lies behind all these innovations — a general
and complete mistrust of man. Plato is so strict with
human nature, so anxious for its future, because he has
a feeling that, except for a few favoured natures, we
cannot be trusted to do our duty, unless temptation is
removed out of our path and we are barricaded into virtue.
' Small, my dear Cleinias,' he says in the Laws, ' small,
naturally scanty and the product of an ideal education, is
the class of men who can steadily set their faces towards
moderation when they are assailed by some need or desire.
The mass of mankind is the exact opposite of this.' l
Indeed, so far are human beings from wisdom or good-
ness, that they hate those who would help them to these
virtues. Plato likens our race to men sitting in a cavern,
bound with their backs to the light and fancying that the
shadows on the wall before them are not shadows but real
objects. But when the philosopher goes among them,
trying to release and lead them out of the cavern into the
sunlight, they are simply vexed with him, put him to
death, and return to the darkness from which they came.2

Whether he is right in his view of human nature, is one
of the great unsolved questions of the world, and not the
least interest of his writings is that they raise it so clearly.
Those who disagree with him would argue that his
pessimism can be explained on purely natural grounds, by
the history of the man and of the times in which he lived.
He had seen the fall of Athens and the judicial murder of
Socrates, his own essays in politics had been a failure,
and he was sore and embittered. What wonder, when he
1 Laws, 918. * Republic, 514-17.

vii SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO 197

looked at the Athenian democracy, which had ruined his
country and put his master to death, that he should think
men a hopeless breed ? His belief , it might be maintained,
was only the gloom of a disappointed nature, and had he
lived a century earlier, he would have thought differently.
But there are others who feel that time had brought home
to Plato a truth which the youthful thinkers of his race
had missed, and admire the insight which first suspected
a fatal flaw in human nature : they hail in him the fore-
runner of S. Paul, with his opposition of flesh and spirit of
Pascal with his endless paradox of grandeur and bassesse
meeting, unreconciled, in man. Our own age would
probably decide against him. Things are well with it. It
is making money fast ; education and recreation are cheap,
science has removed many causes of misery ; savagery
and revolution are rare ; so at present we are riding high
on a wave of humanism, and are optimistic about the
nature of man, and the rapidity of the march on Paradise.
Whether we are right is a point which every one must
settle for himself, and which time will settle for us, if we
can wait. It is enough here to notice that Plato raised the
question and gave the same answer to it as Christianity.
We have hitherto spoken of Plato, as if he was the one
great innovator in Hellenic belief, and perhaps we are
justified in that, because he is the most eminent repre-
sentative of the heretics. But in his theories of the lower
world, he is a mouthpiece, not an originator. He is the
prophet in literature of the Orphic worship, which, coming
from Thrace in the sixth century, spoke of immortality
and rebirth, of intimate union with God, of a heaven for
the initiate and mud pools for the sinner, preaching
asceticism and purity as a road to the former and, some-
what after the fashion of the Egyptian Book of the Dead,

198 SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO CH.

giving its votaries elaborate instructions for their behaviour
when they found themselves in the lower world.

Those who wish to know more of Orphism will find
admirable summaries of its beliefs in Meyer's Geschickte
des Alter turns and in the work of Rohde quoted above ; the
Nekyia of Dieterich describe its relations to Christian
eschatology, and Miss Harrison has an interesting, if
rhapsodic, account of it in her Prolegomena to Greek
Religion. Here we can do no more than briefly indicate
the wideness of its influence by a reference to literature.
Those who longed for some hopes of a future life such as
the national theology was unable to give, and were, in
the words of Euripides, ' sick of desire for an unknown
bright thing beneath the earth,' * turned with relief to its
promises ; two great writers besides Plato were deeply
touched by Orphism, and many others have allusions to
it. Pindar tells how the wicked suffer troubles on which
men cannot bear to look, in a land where ' sluggish streams
of black night belch abroad endless darkness ' ; and tells,
too, of sunny islands of deep red roses, where dead heroes
race and wrestle and dance and

Mix all odour to the gods
On one far height in one far-shining fire.2

Pythagoras was given up to Orphism heart and soul. Its
influence appears in the descent to Hades in the eleventh
Odyssey. Its doctrine inspired the Bacchae of Euripides,
and his lost play, the Cretans ; the much mocked line,

Who knows if life be death and death be life,

is clearly Orphic ; 3 and, in his Frogs, the unspiritual
Aristophanes has parodied an Orphic ' descent ' into the
lower world.
1 Hipp. 194. * frs. 130, 129. Ol. 2. 6 1 f. 3 fr. 639.

vii SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO 199

Nor is Orphism the only gospel of otherworldliness in
Greece ; the Eleusinian mysteries gave similar teaching
and attracted great numbers of worshippers. No doubt
they were on a lower moral and spiritual level. The
purity they required was ceremonial, and courtesans were
admitted to their rites. The best authorities agree that
there was no symbolism in their teaching, and that,
instead of detaching their devotees from this world, they
merely made them comfortable here and hereafter. ' The
hints and emotions won from their pictures and represen-
tations did not deprive this earthly existence of its value
for the enthusiastic hungerers after the Beyond, nor make
them strangers to the living instincts of the old unbroken
Hellenism.' l But none the less the Mysteries were a force
which worked against humanism, for they turned men's
minds from this life to a future one. And, even without

them, we have, in Orphism alone, sufficient traces of ,

otherworldliness in Greece. Are they enough to overthrow
the view that the Greek genius was humanist ?

Before answering this question we must repeat that
every rule applying to human nature is bound to have
exceptions, and that rules may yet be laid down. In this
particular case, the exceptions, when we scrutinize them,
are seen to be less serious than at first appears. Some, it
may be argued, are due to foreign influence ; the worships
of Orpheus and Dionysus were in origin Thracian cults ;
the Bacchae, the most romantic of Greek plays, was written
in Thrace, where the scenery and the wild native religion
might well influence the sympathetic temperament of
a poet. But in any case the exceptions are few, and the
instances for the rule enormously exceed those against it.
From first to last, the former run as an unbroken thread
1 Rohde, op. cit. i. 300 (ed. 1902).

200 SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO CH.

through Greek literature, the latter are intermittent and
accidental. The many are humanists and direct, the few
are not : and even these only diverge from the rule at
moments, and in general conform to it. The New Comedy,
Theocritus, Polybius, the Anthology, Lucian, show as
much humanism and directness as Homer : in the main
the same is true of Aristotle and the Alexandrians. For
one romanticist piece of poetry in Euripides there are
a thousand where he complies with national tradition.

Take two crucial instances, immortality and Orphism.
Of extant Greek writers Pindar is the one unqualified
believer in anything that can rightly be called a future
life ; though those who are acquainted with his poems
may well question whether the belief made much difference
to him. Plato is an ardent apostle : yet in places even he
laughs at the idea of rewards and punishments after
death,1 and, if Socrates voices his views in the Apology, was
at one time uncertain whether death led to immortality
or to a dreamless sleep.2 Outside these two writers, there
prevails the normal Greek view, which was either ignorant
of personal immortality or knew it only as an existence
drained alike of vital delight and of active and tormenting
pain. Absolute extinction or a shadowy life, these were
the alternatives between which the rest of Greek litera-
ture, as we have it, wavers. This is true even of the
successors of Plato. His school ignored their master's
view, Epicurus openly rejected it ; Aristotle is ambiguous
on the subject ; Stoicism either denied personal im-
mortality or held that at best the soul could survive the
body till the general conflagration ; Chrysippus restricted
this scanty possibility to the philosopher. Plato himself,
in one of his most elaborate descriptions of the lower
1 Republic,'^, 387. j a Apol. 40.

vii SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO 201

world, lets fall a phrase, which shows how strange to the
average educated Greek were the theories that he was
about to disclose. ' Have you not learned,' he says to

his friend Glaucon, ' that our soul is immortal ? ' And „

fflfli
Glaucon (who is an ordinary young Athenian) ' looked

at me and said in amazement — No, really, / have not.' l
The exceptions to humanism are few ; the rule prevails.
It is the same with Orphism (here we are on ground
which we have just traversed). Except Plato and Pytha-
goras no Greek writer really gave himself up to it. Though
it found its way into Homer it has so far failed to colour
him, that by the side of the Orphic passage comes the
famous description of Achilles, as a bloodless, unhappy
ghost. It attracted Pindar, but Pindar absorbed nothing
of its otherworldliness, its spirituality : anything more v
earthly than his general philosophy of life it would be
difficult to find. Aeschylus and Sophocles allude to it,
but themselves take the normal view. Euripides has
more of it, but who would consider that Euripides was
an Orphic at heart, or that the spirit of Greek literature
as a whole is otherworldliness, asceticism, ceremonial
purity, the desire for a personal union with God ? It is
one thing to toy with a belief, to be attracted by the
beauty and romance of it, to indulge a brief sympathy,
to set free for a moment one of the many selves bound
up in us, to rhapsodize with the prophets of a creed
which is alien from our inner temperament and ultimate
conviction : it is another thing to believe.

What we have done with humanism we might also do
with liberty, directness, and the other qualities which
we have attributed to the Greeks. We might show that
1 Republic, 608.

202 SOME EXCEPTIONS. PLATO CH. vn

all of them have their exceptions, yet that the rule pre-
dominates. But our intention from the first was to
speak of the essence of Hellenism, not of its by-products,
and if we deal with these, we shall find ourselves carried
far out of classical times, and forced to give sketchy and
inadequate accounts of growths as late as Neoplatonism.
So we will be content with having roughly indicated under
each Note, where the exceptions to it may be looked for,
and once more insist that directness, humanism, and
freedom are the prime characteristics of the genius of
Greece.

Yet while we insist on the pre-eminence of these
qualities, let us not forget that Greece shows also the first
beginnings of their opposites. Hers is the very chest of
Pandora. Authoritarianism, mysticism, otherworldliness,
romanticism, are lying ready for us at its bottom. She
gives us the alkali with the acid ; with the poison (if we
think it a poison) she gives us the antidote.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER

THE genius of the British people existed in its essence
long before its greatest achievements. The qualities
which have made us a trading, colonizing, ruling power
were evident before we had a fleet or an empire. A con-
temporary of Shakespeare might have analysed and
exhibited the character of our race in years when the
industrial revolution had not been dreamed of, and the
colonial dominions were represented by Virginia : even
in our own day a writer might write a book on the British
genius, without a mention of those great achievements,
and yet perhaps miss nothing that was vital to his purpose.
Something similar is true of the Greeks. The Greek
genius was in existence before the greatest achievements
of Hellenism, before the fifth century opened, before
Pericles or Plato was born. It was alive when the
Homeric poems were put together. The later Greeks
added nothing to it. They did but exemplify it in richer
combinations and fuller developments. If we understand
it, we shall understand them. If we understand Homer
and Hesiod, we shall understand Euripides and Aristotle —
understand at least what is most excellent and eternal in
them : just as, if we understand Drake and Cromwell
we shall understand the British achievement in the last
century.

This theory we have hitherto followed ; seeking the
general Greek genius, a spirit independent of time or
place, a property common to all ages and persons

204 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

that are genuinely Hellenic ; seeking notes or charac-
teristics which are found alike in Homer and in
Lucian, in Herodotus and in the late epigrammatists of
Byzantium. Now we must go further : we must look
beyond the essential qualities of Hellenism. We must
fix our eyes on one particular development of it, which
is so important that for the general public it has almost
thrust aside what went before and after, and arrogated to
itself the right to stand for Greece. No history of the
English genius would really be complete if it ignored the
nineteenth century : no history of the Greek genius is
complete which forgets the form it took somewhere about
500 B. c.

On the south shore of the Latmian bay and looking
across it to where the Maeander joins the sea, lies the
town of Miletus. Here, about the opening of the seventh
century, a Greek called Thales puzzled over the worlcr
around him and wondered what it really was. What lay
behind the bay and hills and olive-trees and vines and
white buildings of his home ? He thought, and decided
that everything in the last resort was water. Out of water
all things were generated. It seems a strange notion to us.
Yet Thales had grounds for it. Water, he had noticed,
is everywhere and enters into everything. It lapped,
a blue liquid, on the shores of his home ; it fell, a white
solid, in hail and snow on the hills ; it blew across them,
a transitory vapour, in wreaths of mist. It was in the
sky over his head, and on rainy days fell and gave fertility
to the soil of his fields. It appeared suddenly on the
ground as dew, it welled up in springs, it ascended on
sunny days in great shafts to the sky. It ran as blood
through his own veins and as sap through the trunks
of his olives ; he could squeeze it out of their berries,

vin THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 205

and as oil it fed the flame of his lamps. Surely this
omnipresent thing was the element from which everything
was made. Even legend sanctioned the belief, for were
not Tethys and Oceanus called the parents of all things,
and did not the gods swear by the waters of the Styx ? l

A few years later came his townsman and pupil, Anaxi-
mander, who, thinking that there were four irreducible
elements in the world, earth, air, fire, and water, felt that
it was absurd to reduce them to water, and hit on the
notion that the original source of all four was an Indefinite
Something, which was neither earth, air, fire, nor water,
but which was capable of becoming any of them ; out of
it, he thought, the world was formed.

The seventh century, with Thales for midwife, has given
birth to a strange child. Hitherto Habit has been master
of the world without a rival. Men have believed without
'doubt or question what authority prescribed. ' When
the world was created, Marduk the Sungod defeated
Tiamat, the Chaos out of whose womb all things came,
and split her in half, to form the sky above, the earth
beneath/ thought the Babylonian priests. ' When the
world was created, Shu tore the goddess Nuit from the
arms of Keb, and now she hangs above him and he is the
earth lying beneath her,' thought the Egyptian. ' Our
sacred books have recorded it, our priests declare it.'
But now Thales and Anaximander are inquiring how the
world is really composed, and instead of Tiamat and Nuit,
find only Water or some strange Indefinite Element at
work. Their own theory is not in itself much better than
that of the Assyrian hierarchs. But their attitude to the
question is new, and has in it the germs of infinite change

1 Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 49 ; Aristotle, Metaph.
A. 3.383 b.

206 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

reaching to a day when their spiritual descendant, Demo-
critus, will discover that sky and earth were formed in
void space of atoms. Nor will the new spirit rest here.
Learning their lesson in this school, other thinkers will
turn to fields more important than cosmology. Taking
the homely virtues, which old Greece had practised with-
out thinking why, they will analyse patriotism, justice,
courage, virtue, and many more, asking what these
qualities are and why men should be patriotic, just, brave,
good. They will set themselves a new task in all provinces
of life — to rise above mere instinct and habit — to rebuild
what is wise and right in them on the unshattered rock
of reason, to have an account and a ground for what they
do. So these naive speculations of Thales are among the
great events of human history. A new thing has come
into the world, such as is not to be found in the ancient
homes of civilization, neither in Jerusalem, nor in Babylon,
nor in Egypt. The reign of use and wont is over ; hence-
forth men are to base their life on reason. We are standing
beside the cradle of newborn thought.

We have watched the obscure beginnings of philosophy,
and now we must pass over nearly two centuries ; remem-
bering, however, that though we can take leaps, nature
nihil facit per saltum, and that thought, which was ger-
minating in Greece before Thales, is evident before the
second half of the fifth century, even in poetry ; evident
in Pindar and highly developed in Aeschylus. Still, the
years after 460 B.C. are the real Age of Reason. Before
460 thought was sporadic, occasional, uncertain of itself ;
after 460 it became popular, universal, systematic : and,
therefore, if we wish not to follow the history of its
development, but to see its essential spirit, we shall

viii THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 207

turn to the age of Euripides, Socrates, Thucydides. We
shall leave Herodotus with his mixture of scepticism and
credulity, with his genuine desire to make history a la-ropia,
an 'inquiry', and his frequent failures to do so, with
his perpetual portents, dreams, and divine interventions,
with his apparitions of Pan, Helena, Astrobacchus, and
others, with his theory that one dream does not, but that
two, do, constitute an omen, with the horse that gave
birth to a hare, and the olive-tree that grew a cubit in
a day ; and we shall turn to Thucydides, who says nothing
about dreams or portents, and little about the gods, and
who is so coldly scientific in his account of the plague.
Thucydides was a younger contemporary of Herodotus,
yet in reading him we are conscious of a change as of
centuries. The wave of thought, which has drenched the
Periclean Athenian, wetted the feet of his predecessor ;
but no more. Clearly it is in Athens that the real work
was done, and its most momentous consequences educed.
Ionian philosophers were the* prospectors : but Athens
made the roads and opened the country. lonians con-
ceived of Thought, Athens developed it. Thought began
outside Attica, but without Attica it would have failed
of its greatest effect. The lonians had applied it to
physics. They had worked at natural science, and had
made a beginning with metaphysics and ethics. But they
had not gone further. More — their speculations touched a
small class only : their thinkers lived in the isolation of
learning : the world went past their studies uninterested
and unmoved. When Thought came to Athens, all this
was changed. Natural science fell into the background,
and the interest passed to problems of morality and
politics. In them it developed apace ; it had found a
medium in which ferments work more rapidly. For

208 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

social life and individual conduct are the concern of
every one, while natural science is the province of a few.
In a moment all Athens was seething with this new and
revolutionary culture. And further : from the hobby
of a few Thought became the property of all, and there
sprung up, what otherwise before our own times is un-
paralleled in history, a Thinking Nation.

To produce this spiritual transformation, which in its
way is not less important than the Renaissance or the rise
of Christianity, two things were needed— the occasion
and the men. Both these were present in fifth-century
Athens. There was the occasion. Firstly the victories of
the Persian wars had brought a sense of elevation and
expansion into national life. As at the Renaissance, and in
the French Revolution, men's hearts and imaginations
were raised above the level of ordinary things. New
ambitions and activities came into life. Athens was in
a susceptible, excited mood. At the same time, increase
of trade brought wealth, and wealth brought emancipa-
tion from mean needs, and emancipation brought leisure,
and leisure left men free for thought. Finally, a demo-
cracy was established, in which every citizen took a direct
share in the government of his country. Politics became
the most important business of life. This latter fact was
the immediate cause of the coming of Thought.

English interest runs so much to practical life that it
is not easy to imagine a nation which by temperament
loved knowledge for its own sake, which did not slight
such interests as academic, and which would flock to its
public places day by day simply in the hope of seeing
or hearing some new thing. Still, let us imagine
such a state of affairs. Imagine further this nation as
totally without what we call higher education. They

viii THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 209

have some primary schools, where reading, writing,
athletics, and music are taught. But they have no
public schools and no universities. Great latent intellec-
tual powers : but nothing to develop or satisfy them.
Vast and perennial waters, but the human being has not
yet come by who can tap them. Imagine also that
a sudden political change comes about in their state,
by which henceforward birth and wealth — except for their
accidental advantages — counted as nothing. All citizens
sit in parliament ; every office from commander-in-chief
to civil service clerk is open to talent ; an aristocrat,
a grocer, an artisan may equally become premier : he has
only to persuade parliament to elect him. In such a state
the first need is the gift of speech : an eloquent, plausible,
convincing tongue. That is the one road to power. With
it a man may achieve anything. Only, where can he
learn the art of speaking, and, what is more important
than speech, the art of knowing what to say ? If we can
conceive of a nation in this plight, we shall know what
Athens was like after the Persian wars. Our imagina-
tions will be helped if we think of the recent demand for
education from our own labouring classes, who, like the
Athenians, have suddenly been called to politics, and
find themselves unequipped for the task. And perhaps
in some of the tutorial classes now being held under the
auspices of the Workers' Educational Association, we
may see, in minds capable of knowledge and from which
knowledge has been hitherto withheld, some image of
the Greek epcoy 0tAoo-o0tay, the passionate desire to know.
This was the occasion, and it immediately brought
forth the men. With their names every student of the
classics is acquainted ; of their nature he is apt to have
vague ideas. They were the central figures in fifth-

1358 O

210 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

century Greece, though to-day their faces are scarcely
distinguishable on its faded canvas. Their writings are
lost, their names largely forgotten, and our knowledge of
them is chiefly drawn from the works of their enemy and
critic, Plato. They are the sophists.

It is not easy to translate the word ' sophist ' into
modern language. At first sight ' educational quack '
seems the nearest equivalent. If a foreigner came to
London and announced that he was a teacher of virtue,
and a merchant of the goods of the soul, that he was
openly practising what Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron
practised in secret, that he was in brief an instructor of
mankind, he would be dismissed as an impostor and a poor
one. Yet according to Plato, Protagoras made professions
equivalent to these.1 And if from mere curiosity we went
to our foreigner's lecture-room and heard him saying:
' about the gods I cannot know that they exist or that
they do not exist : the obscurity of these matters and the
shortness of human life are impediments to such know-
ledge ; ' 2 we might go further and accuse him of some-
thing more than quackery.

Yet on a nearer view it becomes difficult to think
altogether unfavourably of the sophists. Undiluted im-
posture could hardly have brought educated Athens to
their feet. Nor are the charges of immorality easy to
sustain. There is nothing immoral in the profession
of Protagoras that every day a pupil associated with him
he would go home a better man, or in the promise of
Gorgias to teach the highest and best of human things.3
Prodicus was the author of the noble fable of the Choice

1 Plato, Protag. 313, 316, 317.

2 One of the few surviving sayings of Protagoras.

3 Plato, Protag. 318 ; Gorg. 451.

viii THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 211

of Heracles, and was welcomed in unintellectual Sparta
for the wholesomeness of his teaching. If Protagoras
declared his uncertainty of the existence of Gods, Gorgias
and Prodicus are represented as praying to them. If
some sophists were radicals, one at least defended Cimon
against Pericles, old ways against new. No, the sophists
were not revolutionary or radical, except in so far as all
thought carries with it an element of unrest. If we need
a modern parallel to them, we may say that they did for
Greece what the schools of literae humaniores and modern
history do for their students in Oxford ; or what agencies
as various as university extension lectures, tutorial classes,
Everyman's library, and other collections of good books,
writers like Shaw, Wells, and Chesterton, try to do for
England as a whole. And yet though there is something
in these analogies, they give little idea of what the
sophist was ; he had something of all these influences,
yet he was more than any of them. He came nearest
perhaps to a university teacher, glorified, extended, and
brought into contact with practical life.

A hungry people cried to the sophists and they fed it
with all manner of intellectual food. They wrote books
for it on grammar, music, medicine, geometry, astronomy,
tactics : they wrote on anything that could interest or
instruct. But their main subject was the conduct of
life. Go to them, and you might learn ' how to manage
your home in the best way, and to be able to speak and
act for the best in public life '.* We laugh at such an idea.
Yet it was a brilliant and plausible one. Music and
medicine were teachable, and a man who studied hard
enough might learn to sing or heal. Why not extend the
principle to life ? Surely there were rules for that, rules
1 Plato, Protag. 318.

212 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

for managing men or for disciplining oneself. Why not
ascertain them, and learn to become a good man and
a great statesman as one might learn to become a skilful
doctor or musician ?

And so the young Athenian who wished to ' learn
politics ' came to Gorgias and Protagoras : and they
taught him rhetoric — how to plead a cause and put a case,
how to arrange his arguments in the best order and style :
how to employ metaphors, figures, rhythms : how to
master the arts of narration, proof, exhortation, eulogy,
satire : how to excite or calm human passions, how to
turn them to the speaker's uses. And further than that,
because a man must know what to say as well as how
to say it, they imparted ideas, arguments, precedents,
instances, applicable to politics. This led them into
wider fields. The mere theory of politics in the first place,
the arguments for and against democracy or kingship,
the commonplaces that were useful in any political dis-
cussion— the successful statesman must know all these.
Then he must be acquainted with men, and with the con-
siderations which appeal to them, he must sweep the end-
less field of human nature with a discerning eye, and be
able to play on the vices, virtues, passions, prejudices of
his audience. And that took him into moral philosophy,
in which Protagoras had his treatises ' on the Virtues '
and ' on Ambition ' ; and moral philosophy led to meta-
physics, where Protagoras would discuss the theory of
knowledge and the nature of existence. No knowledge was
too minute or remote to be of service to one whose life was
spent in governing men. Cicero — the greatest of all advo-
cates— was only echoing the sophistic theory, when he de-
manded of his ideal orator a knowledge of dialectics, ethics,
physics, law, history, and rhetoric : he is only describing

vin THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 213

sophistic practice when he would train his orator by written
composition, extempore speaking, paraphrasing poetry
from memory, reading and criticizing literature, discussing
topics from opposite sides, study of jurisprudence, political
science, history.1 The sophist's pupils were taken through
all these subjects ; so that, by the time their education
was over, they had taken a glance at most things in
heaven and earth, and, as far as a superficial education
can make a man so, were qualified ' to manage their
homes, and to speak and act for the best in politics '. That
was the university education of an Athenian.

Let us make the acquaintance of a certain Greek, who
came under the influence of the sophists and can show
us what they did for those who could reject what was
bad in their teaching and profit by what was valuable
in it. He is the greatest pupil whom the sophists ever
had, and his work, which we possess, may give us an
idea of the atmosphere that they created in Athens.
I mean Thucydides.

No one can read Herodotus and Thucydides side by
side, and not be struck by the gulf which lies between
the two historians. Herodotus is delightful, instructive,
and, in his way, veracious : his eyes were open, he saw
things worth seeing, and he can tell what he saw. But
he teaches us more about human nature (which he under-
stood well) than about history itself. On the other hand,
in Thucydides we meet a really scientific historian, who
brings everything to the test of truth. The miscellaneous
credulity, the genial inconsequence, of Herodotus is no
more. Facts are weighed and selected : causes are sought

1 De Oratore, i. 148-59; Orator, 11-19.
03

214 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

for effects : the light of reason plays everywhere. Hero-
dotus had a generous interest in humanity : Thucydides
had also a critical intellect. Herodotus was a genius :
Thucydides was an educated man besides. Where had
he received his education ?

He had received it from the sophists ; and a certain
trick which he has shows the kind of thing they taught.
Continually there recur in his history passages like the
following. ' Simple men generally make better citizens
than the astute. For the latter desire to be thought
wiser than the laws ; they want to be always getting their
own way in public discussions ; they think that they can
nowhere have a finer opportunity of displaying their
intelligence, and their folly generally ends in the ruin
of their country : whereas the others, mistrusting their
own capacity, admit that the laws are wiser than them-
selves ; and being impartial judges, not ambitious rivals,
they hit the mark.' * Or again. ' In peace and prosperity
both states and individuals are actuated by higher
motives, because they do not fall under the dominion of
imperious necessities : but war, which takes away the
comfortable provision of daily life . . . tends to assimilate
men's characters to their conditions.' 2 Whenever a
politician speaks, thoughts like these are made to flow
from his lips, though few things could be less plausible
or appropriate than such abstract musings. They are
rather the reflections of a philosopher. They deal with
the psychology of human nature, and in particular of
human nature in politics. Thucydides is always reflecting
, on these topics. He is always analysing political actions
and situations. His history is a handbook of political
theory in disguise. The theory of empire : what is the
1 3- 37- 3 *• * 3- 82. 2.

viii THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 215

justification of it, how is it best acquired and preserved :
why it involves expansion and what dangers expansion
brings : what is the place of clemency and generosity in
it : why it is safer to leave subjects free : what leads
to rebellion ; when rebellion is justified. The theory
of the state : the question of the rights of the individual
against it : why it is better to belong to a state than to
remain selfishly isolated. The theory of politics in
general : the effect of war on a people's temperament :
the danger to political stability, of eloquent speakers,
of education, of a critical spirit : the function of in-
telligence in a state — do clever or stupid men make the
best citizens ? the place of religious motives and of con-
siderations of ' honour ' in politics : the question of justice
versus expediency in statecraft, in which, clearly after
much rumination, Thucydides comes to the decided
conclusion that the final criterion in these things is
expediency and not justice : though like Burke he would
hold that ' Magnanimity is not seldom the best policy '.
Finally the theory of human nature : the effects on men
of sudden disaster and sudden success ; the psychology of
crime (a very elaborate and acute study) ; the limits
of the effectiveness of punishment : the influence on
character of revenge, and of hope. All these and many
more topics Thucydides treats or glances at. Often his
reflections are crudely introduced, like the mannerisms of
a clever youth who has suddenly discovered psychology,
and learnt that human action masks a network of motives
and purposes ; and who is so pleased with the discovery
that he can talk of little else. But the reflections themselves
are generally profound. Read the extraordinary passage
where he describes the effects of party spirit in his own
day, tracing its dismal pedigree and hideous offspring,

216 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

and ask whether a more subtle, profound, and tragic
piece of analysis was ever penned.1

Here, then, is a pupil from the school of the sophists —
this is the sort of man they turned out — this is the atmo-
sphere they generated. These are the discussions which
we should have heard, if we had penetrated one of their
lecture-rooms and got inside four walls with Protagoras
and the young men, who were learning ' politics ' and
' virtue ' at two hundred pounds a course.2 They were
discussing methods and principles in politics, they were
probing into the interior of the human being who is the
rough material from which politics are made. ' This
Athens ; does she well to have an empire ? And having
an empire, how can she preserve it ? These human voters :
has prosperity debauched them, will war upset their
balance ? What is the secret of their nature, that we
may know it and guide them ? ' After all they are the
same subjects which Mr. Graham Wallas in one way,3
Mr. Galsworthy in another, are treating in our own day.

Thales cast a seed into the ground. Ionian and Sicilian
philosophers tended the plant which grew from it.
The sophists transplanted it to Athens, where it was
watered and planted out and grafted, till it spread into
a mighty forest. That is the Natural History of Thought
in Greece — and in the world. Now let us look in more
detail at the trees of its wood.

1 3. 82 f. The topics mentioned above have been taken from
the Mytilenaeans' speech at Sparta (3. 9 f.), Cleon's speech on the
ethics of empire (3. 37 f.), the reply of Diodotus (ibid.), the
speeches of Pericles (2. 60 f.), of Alcibiades (6. 16 f.).

8 The fee of Evenus was 5 minas (Plato, Apol. 20).

3 In Human Nature in Politics.

vin THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 217

First is the growth of Criticism, of which we need say
little more. Thucydides will stand as an example, and
what we said of him may be taken as said of it. To
analyse their neighbours' souls and their own, to weigh,
test, suspect, probe, to spare no nerve because it was
sensitive, to husband no forces because they were weak,
to expose all things mercilessly to the dissecting-knife,
and decide for ever what was diseased and sound —
Athens began to do this. In doing it she created new
forms of literature. In prose — the first history worthy
of the etymology of the name, and the great stream of
philosophic inquiry that flows down through Plato and
Aristotle past Alexandria and Rome and Byzantium deep
into the Middle Ages. In poetry something even greater —
for the critical spirit, though alien from imaginative
writing, and ultimately perhaps destructive of it, is like
many poisons, a powerful tonic in small doses. Epic
poetry, which is the telling of stories, lyric poetry, which
is an outbreak of spontaneous feeling, gave way to a
graver and more profound form. Their place was taken by
the drama. It is the predominance of the drama which
marks the poetry of the fifth century, and the essence of
the drama is that it treats of moral and intellectual
problems. These are the offshoots of the spirit of criticism
which was the first growth of the fifth century.

The second growth was akin to the first — it is the spirit
of Science. Criticism is a volatile and random thing,
which flits hither and thither without any aim beyond
its own activity — an intellectual Puck. It owes no
allegiance and admits no obligations, but fights like
a free-lance for the amusement of fighting, or, it may be,
for the best pay. You cannot count on it : the sword
which was once used in your service, criticism may turn

218 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

on its old master, or if the mood suits, on its own self.
(And the fear of this recklessness made conservatives in
Athens distrust the sophists, as in England they distrust
Mr. Shaw to-day.) But take this irresponsible spirit and
moralize it, give it an aim and an ideal, and you will
behold it casual and arbitrary no longer, but chastened
by a serious purpose and consecrated to a particular
pursuit. Puck becomes Ariel, the most faithful, laborious,
and trusted of ministers, and takes the livery of service,
and practises his arts in the household of Truth. Criticism
develops into Science.

Socrates was the means of this development in Athens.
He learnt from the sophists, and was really a sophist
himself. But he added moral genius to intellectual
power. Where the sophists were superficial, he was
thorough. They were teachers, working for money,
watching for pupils, and paid by results. The pupils
wanted their brains sharpened for practical life, and
expected quick returns from education. Science does not
flourish under such conditions, and the sophists' teaching
tended to be shallow and shoddy : they had to humour
the market and sell to demand. But Socrates took no
money and courted no pupils. He talked to those who
cared to talk to him, but he talked how and of what he
liked. He worked under conditions favourable to Science.
Not of course that we shall find in his Athens anything
like modern Science. There are no elaborate systems of
experiment and classification : no laboratories and test-
tubes : none of the machinery of knowledge. Nor are
there the achieved results of these, the masses of stored
and labelled fact, the huge granaries of daily accumulating
certainty from which nations can be fed. Such things
begin with Aristotle, and even then are only a beginning.

VHI THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 219

But Socrates had something more important if less
imposing than these — the spirit of Science.

Consider for a moment the man and his ways. He
had the laboriousness, the patience of a man of science.
' I must tell you a tale of Socrates, while he was on the
expedition ' (says Alcibiades in the Symposium). ' One
morning he was thinking about something which he
could not resolve ; he would not give it up, but continued
thinking from early dawn to noon — there he stood fixed
in thought ; and at noon attention was drawn to him,
and the rumour ran through the wondering crowd that
Socrates had been standing and thinking about something
ever since the break of day. At last in the evening after
supper, some lonians out of curiosity brought out their
mats and slept in the open air that they might watch
him and see whether he would stand all night. There he
stood till the following morning ; and with the return
of light, he offered up a prayer to the sun and went his
way.' *•

This was in the trenches round Potidaea. Now listen
to him in a friend's house at Athens. He is discussing
justice. ' What/ he asks, ' is it ? ' ' Giving back to your
neighbour what is his own,' replies some one. ' And
would you give a sword back to a madman if it were his
own, and he likely to do murder with it ? ' ' No.' ' Then
we must look for some other definition.' ' Justice is to
do harm to one's enemies and good to one's friends.'
' But if our enemy is a good man, is it just to injure him ?
surely not ? You will have to give up that definition too.'
And so on ; definition after definition is raised and found
wanting, and we end — probably in a fog. This happens

1 Plato, Sympos. 220. The next passage is from the first book
of the Republic.

220 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

in every dialogue. The discussions of Socrates lead to
little in the way of conclusion ; they are sceptical ; they
never reach more than a provisional truth ; they are
always ready to throw away results, to sacrifice a position
that might seem to have been gained. Socrates is content
to advance by slow degrees. He holds it more worthy to
seek than to find, better never to reach his goal than
to arrive at a wrong one.

This was his spirit through life, nor did it desert him
in the hour of death. In the last conversation between
Socrates and his friends, as they waited for the gaoler to
bring the cup of hemlock, their talk turned on immortality.
In that hour human weakness might well have claimed
its due, and the teacher and his disciples, whose com-
panionship was so soon to be broken, have spent their last
moments in the indulgence of a tranquillizing hope. Some
of the company were willing to do this ; not so Socrates.
These are his words. ' At this moment I am sensible
that I have not the temper of a philosopher ; like the
vulgar, I am only a partisan. Now the partisan when he
is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of
the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers
of his own assertions. And the difference between him
and me at the present moment is merely this — that
whereas he seeks to convince his hearers that what he says
is true, I am rather trying to convince myself ; to con-
vince my hearers is a secondary matter with me. And
do but see how much I gain by the argument. For if
what I say is true, then I do well to be persuaded of the
truth ' (he had been maintaining the immortality of the
soul) ; ' but if there be nothing after death, still, during
the short time that remains, I will not distress my friends
with lamentations, and my ignorance will not last, but

viii THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 221

will die with me, and therefore no harm will be done.
This is the state of mind, Simmias and Cebes, in which
I approach the argument. And I would ask you to be
thinking of the truth and not of Socrates ; agree with me
if I seem to be speaking the truth ; or if not, withstand
me with might and main, that I may not deceive you as
well as myself in my enthusiasm, and, like the bee, leave
my sting in you before I die. And now let us proceed.' 1

Bishop Burnet writes of Sir Harry Vane that he
belonged to the ' sect called " Seekers ", as being satisfied
with no form of opinion yet extant, but waiting for further
discoveries '.2 Socrates belonged to that sect too. It
makes him irritating to read ; most of us prefer decisive
pronouncements, and find the vagueness of the Greek
philosopher irritating. For the method of Socrates runs
counter to human instinct, which calls for definite results,
which clings to its inherited ideas and does not care to
sacrifice them for such problematical gains. Yet this
scepticism, this willingness to consider and reconsider
till absolute certainty is reached, is the preliminary to
real knowledge. For it means complete indifference to
everything except truth.

Because Socrates was the first to understand and
practise it, he marks an epoch in the world. If science
had her cathedrals and stained glass lights, we might
fancy an artist commemorating her lineage in a design
analogous to a Jesse window. In the lowest panel, where
religion enthrones the Jewish farmer, from whose loins
sprang the tree of Christianity, Science might fairly place
the Athenian, who is the spiritual father of her greatest
sons. Nor, if mottoes and texts were needed, would it

1 Plato, Phaedo, 91.

1 Burnet's History of his Own Times.

222 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

be easy to surpass sayings, which, if not his, were inspired
by him. ' I am one of those who are very willing to be
refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very
willing to refute any one else who says what is not true,
and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute : for I hold
that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is
greater of being cured of a very great evil than of curing
another.' l And again. ' I pray God to grant that my
words may endure, in so far as they have been spoken
rightly ; if unintentionally I have said anything wrong,
I pray that he will impose on me the just punishment of
him who errs ; and the just punishment is that he should
be set right.' 2 If Socrates was not a man of science
himself, he knew the spirit by which science lives.

This, then, is the second growth in fifth-century Athens.

The third growth is more difficult to describe. It would
be misleading to call it a growth of morality. Perhaps
we might say that it was a quickening of interest in morals.
There was in Athens a movement very similar to one which
we have seen in our own day. In modern Europe the
attacks made by criticism upon the long unquestioned
traditions of religion and conduct have filled the air
with talk of these things. Ethics have passed out of the
study of the philosopher, religion is professed beyond the
pale of the churches. Novelists and playwrights turn
preachers ; men of science provide new creeds daily ;
journalists make copy out of them ; publishers issue them
in inexpensive manuals. Something analogous to this
came about in the fifth century B.C. Men became pro-
foundly interested in morality, as under the circumstances
of the time they were bound to become. For everything
was criticized at Athens, and morality itself did not
1 Plato, Gorgias, 458. 2 Id. Critias, 106.

viii THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 223

escape criticism. As Shaw or Wells attack our marriage
laws, so the sophists picked holes in the old-fashioned
ideals of the MapaQdavofid^ai, and pressed them to find
grounds for their virtues. Thus the problems of conduct
were forced into men's minds.

This did not necessarily mean that men grew better.
Thinking about morality is often a substitute for prac-
tising it, and seems by some law of our nature to effect,
as Aristotle might have said, a purgation of virtue.
Still there is a presumption that if men talk much about
righteousness, they will practise it a little, and certainly
some men in Athens tried to act what they preached, and
to persuade their countrymen to do the same. Foremost
in this was Socrates. Xenophon, in his bald way, tells
how Socrates ' used always to talk about what related
to man, and consider the meaning of piety, impiety,
honour, dishonour, justice, injustice, moderation, madness,
courage, cowardice ; asking what do city and politician,
government and governor connote, and reflecting on
those topics, knowledge of which makes a man deserve
the name of icaXoy Kayados, ignorance of which, the name
of slave.' *• Plato, more picturesquely, makes his master
himself proclaim his mission. ' While I have life and
strength, I shall never cease from the practice and teaching
of philosophy, exhorting any one whom I meet and saying
to him after my manner : You, my friend — a citizen of
the great and mighty and wise city of Athens — are you
not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money
and honour and reputation, and caring so little about
wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the
soul, which you never heed or regard at all ? And I shall
repeat the same words to every one I meet, young and
1 Mem. i. i. 16.

224 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

old, citizen and alien, but especially to the citizens,
inasmuch as they are my brethren. For I know that this
is the command of God ; and I believe that no greater
good has ever happened in the state than my service to
the God. For I do nothing but go about persuading you
all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your
persons or your properties, but first and chiefly to care
about the greatest improvement of the soul. I am that
gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day
long and in all places am always fastening upon you,
arousing and persuading and reproaching you.' l

The mission is that of a Hebrew prophet : Socrates will
convince his people of sin. But there is something in
his methods we do not find in Isaiah. Socrates did not
fill Athens with denunciations of evil, nor thunder against
a guilty people, nor strive nor cry, nor pace the streets
of his home with the terse warning that in forty days
Athens should be overthrown. Threats and terror were
not in his method. Instead he quietly recommended to
his hearers an old Greek proverb : ' Know thyself.' To
know oneself, one's powers and limitations, to know how
far that self is really satisfied by money or fame or power,
to know the things which belong to its peace — that was
his repeated advice. Argument, common sense, looking
facts in the face — with this (he thought) the world could
be healed. So day by day ' from the early morning ' 2 he
was to be found in the public walks or gymnasia, or market-
place, ' asking and answering questions ', in the simple
faith that finally unreason is weaker than reason, prejudice
than truth.

Here we have the wedding of thought with morality,
of wisdom with virtue, which is so characteristic of Greece
1 Plato, Apol. 30. * Xen. Mem. i. i. 10.

viii THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 225

and yet of all its phenomena is perhaps the strangest to
us. The English have a reasonable love of goodness, but
it is not the love of which Euripides wrote :

TO, %o<f)ia iraptSpovs Tre/j-treiv '.Epooray,
aperay £vvepyov$,

Strong loves of all godlike endeavour
Whom wisdom hath throned on her throne.1

What a magnificent phrase, yet how alien from our ways
of feeling ! Note the three elements indissolubly inter-
woven — wisdom, virtue, love — virtue springing out of
wisdom and by its beauty exciting passionate desire.
Our virtue is not of this kind. It springs variously from
conscientiousness, from reverence, from a Puritan instinct
to mortify the flesh. But it is not ' seated by the side of
wisdom ' ; or where it is so, as in men like J. S. Mill,
there goes with it a certain uncomeliness, which is far
from exciting the passionate love of which Euripides
wrote. It is but ' a caput mortuum of piety with little
of its loveliness though with most of its essentials '?
It moves us to <f>i\ia, but not to e/x»y. Only perhaps in
the age when English thought had shaken itself loose
from Rome and was rebuilding its theology, rejoicing in
the strength of newfound truth, do we find that reason
was lovable because it led to virtue, and that virtue was
right because it was reasonable, and beautiful both for
its reasonableness and for itself. ' The end, then, of
learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by
regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge
to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may

1 Med. 844 (tr. Murray). The words would make a good motto
for a university.

* Stevenson, of Herbert Spencer, in The Influence of Books
(Art of Writing).

1358 P

226 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

the nearest, by possessing our souls of true virtue.' And
again :

How charming is divine philosophy !

Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose,

But musical as is Apollo's lute,

And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets.1

The true Greek spirit is in these extracts. But it has gone
out both from our education and our philosophy : and until
it returns, neither of them will reach the heights where
it is their place to walk.

Here for a moment let us pause, and glance at a specimen
of this fifth-century development, at a ' modern ' man.
Our example is not Socrates, who is unique almost to
eccentricity. It is the writer of the Greek words which
we have just quoted.

Consider the nominal beliefs of the society into which
he was born, the beliefs which he inherited as his birth-
right. Consider his Bible, the theology of legend. It
taught huii that there were many gods, male and female,
and that only one of these had no illegitimate children ;
she had an altar on which human beings were sacrificed. .
Zeus seduced the wives and daughters of men, his consort .>
consoled herself by tormenting these women and their
children ; Aphrodite punished excessive chastity, Artemis
requited her by persecuting her favourites. The human
heroes of this Bible were hardly more stainless, though
they bore such names as Agamemnon, Helen, Menelaus,
Odysseus, and had been glorified by the poets of his land.
Helen, after running away from her husband with a
stranger, had allowed thousands of men to kill each other
for her through the wasting misery of a ten years' war.
Agamemnon, to prosper his expedition for the recovery of
1 Milton, Letter on Education, and Comus.

vin THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 227

this woman, his brother's wanton wife, had cheated his own
daughter into leaving home by declaring that he wished to
marry her to Achilles, and then had sacrificed her to a god-
dess ; he had stolen from his best ally a slave girl whom he
coveted as a concubine, and by offending him had almost
ruined his army ; finally he had outraged his wife's feelings
by bringing a second concubine home in his chariot.1 Yet
Homer had seen no weakness in these gods and men, but
worshipped the one and praised the other in all good faith,
honouring Zeus as ' highest of rulers ' and Agamemnon as
' king of men '. Euripides found it difficult to follow him.

He found it equally difficult, with his acute, critical
mind, to follow other stories which his predecessors had
accepted. When Orestes killed his mother, Aeschylus
believed that the place filled with women, snakes bound
in their hair, who hunted the murderer, mewing at the
smell of blood ; and that these were seen by the by-
standers. Before the critical gaze of Euripides such a
story fell to pieces. True, that in the iphigeneia Orestes
supposes himself hunted by such creatures. But they are
not brought on the stage, and nobody else sees or speaks
of them. A rustic describes how he beheld Orestes combat-
ing something which he (Orestes) called Furies. But the
rustic himself saw no such things, saw only Orestes doing
execution on some cows, and calling the world to witness
that he was slaying his enemies.2 No doubt, like Ajax on
a former occasion, he was for the moment out of his senses.

But knowing that men who murdered their mothers

1 Cp. Eur. El. 101 1-50, where Clytemnestra makes these points
against Agamemnon and so excuses her own conduct.

* I. T. 285 f. The madness of Orestes is a purely natural
thing in the three plays of Euripides in which it comes, Electro,,
Orestes, I. T. It is noticeable that in the Choephoroe the by-
standers do not see the Furies, 1. 1061.

228 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

were not visited by women with serpents in their hair,
Euripides knew, too, that matricide has its punishment.
He shows us what it is in his Orestes. When the play opens
Orestes is lying on a bed, pale and thin, with foam on his
lips and long hair in disorder, his sister watching him.
He will not eat : he will not wash : he huddles closely in the
blankets, and groans. At times he sees dog-faced things
in the air menacing him, starts up, fancies he will shoot
them, and goes through the motions of drawing a bow.
The watchers hold him down in bed till the fit passes.
Then he comes to himself and lies there — in a mood more
trying to his nurse than the madness — helplessly crying.
cfji<f>pa>i> SaKpvei. Conceive the horror of it. This has
been going on for five days.1 So a child of the Age of
Reason read the punishment of matricide . It was a nervous
mental derangement. It was, in a worse form, the punish-
ment of Lady Macbeth.

Take another instance. Legend told how Helen left her
Greek husband to become the wife of Paris, and how the
Greeks followed her to Troy, and took it, and how she
became again the wife of Menelaus. An awkward story,
if we care to criticize, and ask closely what sort of woman
she could have been to act thus. Homer himself felt the
difficulty, and his Helen admits her sin. She is KvvSyjns,
shameless as a dog. But in general for Homer she is
simply the 8ia yvvaiK&v, the wonderful woman, with
white arms and flowing dress, whose beauty makes even
the Trojans think that she is worth a ten years' war.
Euripides is more searching in his analysis of the nature
of this wife who left home and daughter for a stranger.
To him she is essentially the vain, selfish, luxurious woman,
and he spares no pains to bring this out.
1 Or. 34 f., 255 f.

viii THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 229

The handsome face of Paris fascinated her, and his rich
Eastern dress ; even more trivial vanities won her heart —
the gold collar round Paris's neck, his wide Eastern trousers.
Her fancy was bewitched. And then Argos was a poor
Greek town. Troy offered her the fabled treasures and
luxurious delights of the East.

Once free from Sparta, and there rolled
The Tyrian glory, like broad streams of gold,
To steep thine arms and splash the towers ! How small,
How cold that day was Menelaus' hall !

So she left her home. Arrived in Troy she showed herself
the complete coquette, taunting Paris whenever the
Greeks won a victory, and so teasing his love into life.
She liked the elaborate courtesy, the prostrations and
salutations of the East, which were so offensive and
ridiculous to the Greek spirit. And when the end came
and Troy was taken and Paris killed, she dressed herself
splendidly — for vanity never failed — and went out to
meet the Greeks. Returning to Argos, middle-aged
now, she was the same : tori tf i^ irdXai y 1/1/17. Her
interest is in dress, in mirrors and fans : she has brought
a Phrygian eunuch from Troy to wait on her, and her
attendants are connoisseurs in perfumes and looking-
glasses. Even when the decency of mourning requires
her to cut her hair, she will not spoil her good looks, but
pares off only the very tips of it. Such was Helen, seen
by the Age of Reason.1

1 Troades, 969-1032 (the translation quoted above is Professor
Murray's); Orestes, 128, 1112, 1430; Cyclops, 182-5, are the
passages from which the above details are taken. It is noticeable
that Helen inherits her vanity from Clytemnestra (Electra, 1071),
and bequeathes it to her daughter Hermione (Andromache, 147 f.).
Euripides regards Appoavvr) as an hereditary trait of the family,
Orestes, 349.

230 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

It is the same with the war of which Helen was the
cause. To Homer war was splendid. His heroes had
found in it their vocation, and its evil was outweighed by
the magnificence of their valour and the number of men
whom they were able to slay. Euripides thought other-
wise, as the story of one of his plays will show.

A town has been taken : the men in it have been killed,
and the women who are waiting to be shipped off into
slavery tell their feelings and discuss their future. The
characters who speak are carefully chosen for their unlike-
ness, so that we may see the scene through different eyes
and in different lights. There are the common women,
whose grief is a half-animal pain at the loss of creature
comforts and the breaking up of their happy homes. There
is the wife of the king of the city. She is an old woman,
and her warm affections have burnt out, and her deeper
human sympathies dried up, partly through old age,
partly through the very pomp and state of royalty, till
what she feels most is the bitterness of the loss of a
kingdom, and the destruction of a dynasty. There is
her daughter-in-law, whose happy married life has
been broken through her husband's death, and is to be
succeeded by existence as the slave concubine of his
murderer's son. There is a prophetess who looks at the
disaster with a wider view, as befits the servant of heaven.
There is one of the victorious army, who is sorry for the
conquered, but after all is only doing what his betters
order, and who feels the self-complacency of a victor and
is looking forward to seeing his home again. Such is the
design of the Troades. Throughout, the scene is laid on
the sea-shore, where the captive women are huddled in
a corner near the tent assigned to them. In the distance
we see the victors drawing lots for the prisoners, carrying

viii THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 231

the spoil on board and preparing for departure. As the
play opens with the wailing of the captives, so it closes
with the sounding of the trumpet to call them to the
Greek ships : the town sinks into the flames, and Troy is
lost in dust and smoke.

There is not a gleam of light throughout : the play is
hopeless to the end. The captives have lost husbands
and children, they are about to be dragged into slavery
and divided as the lot falls, their old life is at an end and
there is no hope for them in the new. There are two notes
of exultation in the play, only two, and these are charac-
teristic. First is the joy of Cassandra that she is carrying
with her to Greece destruction for her captor, Agamemnon.
Second is the joy of Menelaus that at last he can punish
his treacherous wife. For, even to the victors, victory
brings no happiness. By the mouth of Cassandra Euri-
pides expressly states that of the two the conquerors are
less enviable than the conquered. A moment's revenge
is the reward of Menelaus for ten years' fighting : and
those who through these ten years had forfeited their home
life, are returning to find, some, death, some, treachery, and
all, change, awaiting them in Greece. Euripides had
asked himself what war is, when you look at it as it is :
and this is his answer.1

Voir clair dans ce qui est : so Stendhal defined the
author's duty, and Euripides might have taken the words
for his motto, for thoilgh there are many tendencies
in his work, in essence it is an attempt to see things as
they are.

To see Apollo as he was, the god who ordered Orestes
to murder his mother, because she had murdered his

1 Professor Murray (translation of the Troades) points out that
this is the significance of the play.

232 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

father Agamemnon : who seduced a young girl and
poisoned her whole life.1

To see the murder of Clytemnestra as it was : an act
which did no good to Agamemnon and which he would
have been the first to dissuade : a brutal survival of the
lex talionis into days when law had taken the place of that
primitive device.2

To see the madness of Orestes as it was : no visible
haunting with snakes and scourges and pursuing Furies :
but a horrible thing none the less, a natural disease, the
outcome of conscience, wasting the body and troubling
the brain : accompanied with morbid suspicions which
come and go with the fits of madness : fed by and feeding
the intense self-centred egoism which is an invariable
feature of such states.

To see the great figures of Greek mythology as they are :
Menelaus, not, as Homer shows him, a great conqueror
and king, but a selfish, prudent, and cowardly man : 3
Helen, not simply divinely beautiful, as Homer shows
her, but a vain, selfish, and false woman.

To see the Trojan war and its results, as they are : the
horrid murderous sack of a great town — it holds in some
of the plays of Euripides almost the place which the
family curse has in the Aeschylean drama — of which the
consequences cling to all who had part in it, and, taking
various forms, haunt their houses, bringing misery even
to the third and fourth generations.

But note that Euripides is a moralist as well as a critic.
In this point also he is linked to Socrates and separated
from Homer. Homer has a moral standard, but his

1 In the Electro, and the Ion.

2 See VerralTs essay on the Orestes in Four Plays of Euripides.
* In the Andromache and Orestes.

viii THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 233

judgement is long-suffering and his censures are light. He
is so delighted with the fullness and beauty of life that he
often forgets to condemn. Not so Euripides. He brings
the offenders mercilessly to his bar, and looks past tradi-
tional reputation to the naked self within : Menelaus,
Odysseus, Jason, Orestes, Helen, Hermione, Apollo,
Aphrodite, Hera, Artemis : we see their souls ' marked
with the whip, and full of the prints and scars of perjuries
and crimes, and crooked with falsehood and imposture '.
Euripides does not ask whether these heroes and deities
were rich or famous ; but only whether they conformed
to the highest standards of goodness, which he and Athens
knew. Were they just, courageous, merciful, truth-
loving ? If not, all the solemn plausibilities of legend
should not save them. Into the pillory they
should go.

Here is an instance, akin to those already quoted, which
brings out clearly the ethical bent of the new drama. It is
Euripides' treatment of one of those stories so common in
Greek myth. Most of the famous families of legend owed
their origin to a god. Apollo or Zeus conceived a passion
for one of the fair daughters of men : in that early age the
' gods partook the weaknesses of mortals, and mortals
the enjoyments of the gods ' ; and nothing came of the
ephemeral connexion except that a hero was born into
the world. Greek mythology is full of such tales : and the
ninth Pythian of Pindar shows with what gracious beauty
a poet — I had almost written a thinker — could invest one
of these venial irregularities not half a century before
Euripides held the stage.

But Euripides himself saw these matters otherwise,
and, to our notions, more nearly as they are. A young
Athenian girl was once picking the yellow flowers which

234 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

grew on the Long Rocks north of the Acropolis. There
Apollo found her, seized and dragged her, crying, into
a cave, — as a middle-aged woman, she could still remember
the whiteness of the wrists that grasped her, and the
blaze of golden light about him on that day.1 She bore
a child, and, to hide it from her mother, took it by night
to the cave : there she laid it, hoping that somehow
Apollo would help her. But he, having taken his pleasure,
left her alone to bear the pain of childbirth, and the
torture of concealment. Let us hear the story and the
sequel, as she told it to an old servant, years later.

Creusa. Do you know the cliffs of Cecrops, which we
call the Long Rocks — a cave in them which faces North ?
There I fought a fearful battle ; I was forced into a miser-
able union with Apollo.

Servant. How did you conceal your intercourse with
the god ?

C. I bore a child ; (the servant starts) ; endure to hear
this from me.

5. Who attended you ? and where ? or were you alone
in your pains ?

C. Alone ; in the cave which saw my union.

5. Where is the boy ? You shall be childless no more.

C. Dead : exposed to savage beasts.

5. Dead ? And did not Apollo, base god, help you ?

C. He did not help : and my boy has his upbringing
in the house of Death.

5. Who exposed him ? Surely not you ?

C. I exposed him. One dark night I swaddled him in
a robe.

5. Had you no accomplice in the deed ?

C. None but unhappiness and secrecy.

5. How did you harden yourself to leave the child in
the cave ?

C. How, indeed ! many and bitter were my farewells.

5. Oh, bold, hard heart ; and the god's heart harder
than your own.

1 Ion, 887-91.

viii THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 235

C. Yes : and if you had seen the child stretching out
its hands to me.1

No more was heard of the child, and Creusa, its mother,
married the King of Athens. In the play she is the
stately, middle-aged Queen of Athens : but we are not
allowed to forget that early adventure on the cliffs of her
home. Euripides loves to trace the bad effect of suffering
on female character, and Creusa is his childless woman.
No baby has been born to her since the one who was lost ;
and external prosperity cannot fill this void in her life.
The young temple servant at Delphi admires and envies
her home and lineage. ' So far my happiness goes ; no
further ' ; is her bitter reply.2 l-naQov &XQS dfiiov, she says
of herself, ' My sorrow is too deep for life.' And when at
the end of the play, after jealousies, blasphemies, devilry,
and attempted murder, Apollo, who set this train of
misery in motion and has been skulking in the back-
ground to shield his reputation from the discredit of
exposure, at last puts up another deity to restore the lost
child (now a grown man), we see that the god's reparation
is incomplete, and that Creusa's happiness comes too late
to compensate for a wasted and tragic youth. That is
how Euripides saw a light-hearted divine amour, which
Pindar would have invested with the splendour of poetry.
To him it was the brutal rape of a helpless girl. It had
the consequences which such actions have. It added
a quotum to the sum of human misery on earth.3

1 Ion, 936-7, 939, 940, 946-61. I have shortened the opening
of the dialogue. * 1. 264.

* The preceding is, of course, not even an attempt at a complete
account of Euripides, who had other qualities than a critical
intellect. As with Pindar and Herodotus in the fifth, and Plato
in the seventh chapter, I have merely dwelt on those sides of him
which illustrate my particular point.

236 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

Here we may take leave of the Age of Reason. For
though we have hardly crossed its threshold, we have seen
enough to judge of its significance. In it the Greek genius
enters decisively on a new course. Its youth is closed,
henceforth it faces the strenuous duties and painful virtues
of men. It studies how to live and how to know: Stoics,
Epicureans, Cynics, arise to be the spiritual doctors of
erring humanity. They chasten it and fortify it and show
it a new way of life and save its soul. Meanwhile others
take the wages of science, and give up their lives to the
accumulation of knowledge. In Athens Aristotle and his
followers made huge collections of facts, from a complete
list of all the plays acted in Athens, with the names of
their authors, actors, and managers, down to the famous
analysis of 158 constitutions, of which one, the constitu-
tion of Athens, has survived to our own day. Alexandria
has its Museum and Library and Botanical Gardens.
Pergamum, Antioch, Tarsus have their schools of learned
men. In literary history Heraclides, in literary criticism
Zenodotus and Aristarchus, in grammar Dionysius of
Thrace, in music Aristoxenus, in social history Dicaearchus,
in astronomy Hipparchus, in geometry Archimedes and
Euclid, in mechanics Heron, in physical geography and
cartography Eratosthenes, made huge collections of data,
used the methods of critical inquiry, and laid the founda-
tions of sciences. And these are but a few names. On
agriculture alone, Varro, the Roman, knew of fifty Greek
treatises. Equally thorough and wide is the work done
in philosophy. Through different paths, Stoics, and
Epicureans, Cynics, the followers of Plato and those of
Aristotle sought for virtue and happiness, and opened
up the fields of physics, metaphysics, logic, psychology,
ethics.

viii THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 237

And so when Christianity comes, she finds the world in
a sense prepared for her. There are old bottles which will
hold her new wine and not break. There is a metaphysic
and a moral philosophy, and a vocabulary ready for her.
S. Paul will find the opposition of ' flesh ' and ' spirit '
close to his hand : S. John will have the logos, in which he
can express the Person of Christ : S. Thomas will have
the system of Aristotle in which to propound the mysteries
of the gospel. Apologists will use the Greek method of
allegory for Old Testament difficulties : they will borrow
arguments against Greek gods from Greek philosophers,
and cite Plato and Euemerus as witnesses against Zeus.
The Hell and Heaven and Purgatory of Christianity will
borrow punishments and rewards from the pictures which
Orphism has drawn of a life to come. Thus with Socrates
and Euripides, we are on the watershed whence the
streams of European life descend. An infinite prospect
opens before us.

Tanta patet rerum series atque omne futurum
Nititur in lucem.

That is the significance of the fifth century. It fixed the
lines on which henceforward men were to work. It
brought to reasonable perfection the tools which they
were to use. Without it the services of Greece to the
world would have been incomplete. Intersect Hellenism
about the close of the sixth century, and the line drawn
would give us some of the greatest poetry in Greece.
But below it would fall the movement which gave
a civilization to the Roman Empire, and the spirit of
knowledge to us. Without the fifth century and its
consequences Greek influence would have hardly touched
the world.

238 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

If this is so, why is not the late Greek more attractive
than his ancestors ? Why does not our interest progres-
sively increase as we pass from Socrates to Aristotle and
from Aristotle to Theophrastus, and thence into ages
whose sentiment grows ever liker to our own, and whose
thought becomes ever more adapted to modern needs?
Have we here another instance of scholastic pedantry,
which fixes on certain periods as classical, and confines
itself to these with such exclusiveness that half the pupils
which it trains do not realize that Hellenism lived on
after the battle of Chaeronea, and barely know the names
of the later thinkers ? Or did a degenerative change really
come over Greece ? And was Nietzsche right to argue
that Socrates and Euripides were the first of her deca-
dents ? Such questions are not easy to settle. Yet most
of us have tacitly answered them in our thoughts. Greece
interests us after the fall of Athens, but we do not grow
enthusiastic over it. How many people, if fate offered
them the life of a classical Greek, would accept it at the
price of living in the fourth or following centuries B.C. ?
The Athenians themselves were conscious of decadence.
In a passage where, though the words are put on the lips
of Pericles, the thoughts are clearly the thoughts of
Xenophon, the latter deplores the decay of Athens.
' How can we convert men to a passion for the virtue and
renown and happiness of old ? The city has degenerated.
The men of old, men say, were far superior to our contem-
poraries.' x Two generations later Aeschines speaks in
the same tone to the assembled Athenians. ' If some one
asked you whether you think the city more glorious to-day
than it was in the times of your ancestors, you would all
agree that it was not. Were men better then than now ?
1 Xen. Mem. 3. 5. 7 f.

vni THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 239

Yes, they were superior : we are far inferior.' x Allowing
for human love of self-detraction, there is still some truth
left in these statements. A slackness, a softness has come
upon the Athenians. If Demosthenes was right, we see
it in their unwillingness to find men and money to make
war on Philip. The very language of the fourth century
bears a curious and indirect witness to it. Note the
adjectives which occur in the speeches of the orators, and
consider to what they point. If Demosthenes wishes to
praise a man, he calls him ^erptoy, (f>i\dvOp<oTro$, irpaos,
'moderate, humane, gentle'. These were the qualities
which the age applauded ; these were the virtues of its
choice. Qualities excellent in themselves, but in their
continual recurrence the symptoms of a certain effeminacy
and quietism very foreign to early Athens. Her virtues
were more active. Thucydides does not call his country-
men ' moderate ' : bold (doKvoi), enterprising (roX^rjpot),
innovating (vfcoTepotroioi), confident (ev f \7ri8fs), are the
adjectives he uses of them. Natural force (0yo-ea>y 8vva.fj.is)
and rapidity of judgement are the qualities he praises in
Themistocles, and in Pericles independence and honesty.
It may seem unfair to blame a nation for humanitarian
virtues which we should all be glad to possess. Yet even
so there is something wrong with the fourth century. The
greatest charm of its predecessor is too volatile for
language. It is the fullness and beauty of Athenian life.
After 400 B. c. that is gone. It fades out of Athens, leaving
her ostensibly unchanged, just as the expression which
gave all the charm to a face fades out of it without any
definite alteration in the features. Henceforward she is
a lively municipal town, with a powerful intellectual life,
arid political interests which excite much noise, but are
1 Aesch. In Ctes. 178.

240 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

infantile in comparison with those of Rome. Perhaps it
was the same at bottom before. Perhaps the Periclean
age was an inflated air bubble. Perhaps Thucydides has
imposed on us, and made us hold our breath over debates
more trifling and enterprises less important than those of
our provincial Town Councils. But at any rate he did
impose on us. Now we are undeceived.

And if this is true of the fourth, it is still truer of suc-
ceeding centuries. The Greek takes up a new role and
enters on his missionary campaign for the conversion of
the earth. He is in the spiritual, what the mercenaries
of Xenophon and Clearchus were in the military world.
He follows in the train of each conquering race, to educate
and influence it, to amuse and instruct its leisure. We
meet him in every capital small and great, from Parthia
and Babylon to Alexandria and Rome, ready to sell the
secrets of virtue and art and knowledge to all who can hire
him ; he acts the Bacchae at the court of Orodes, corrects
the verses of Cornelius Gallus, translates Homer for the
children of Livius Salinator, is the tame poet of Marius
and the chosen companion of Scipio Africanus and of Nero.
He comes in many guises : he is the financial adviser of
Roman emperors, the philosopher and confessor of Roman
aristocrats, the social parasite and ' hungry Greekling '
of disappointed Roman clients. He is the doctor, the
music-master, the rhetorician, the actor, the painter, the
rope-dancer, the palmist, the masseur, of the ruling race.
But one thing he is never again — a free citizen in an
independent state.

This progressive political decay took the colour out of
later Greek life, and is the first cause of its unattractive-
ness. But by its side goes a subtle spiritual degeneracy.
We foresee it as we read Euripides. He propounds his

VIH THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 241

terrific problems and finds no solution to them. Ortho-
doxy, tradition, custom fall in ruins round him. A merci-
less critic, he fails to construct. Men cannot go on doing
this for ever. Two things, says La Rochefoucauld, man can
never look between the eyes for long, the sun and death.
We may add a third to them — the universe as Euripides
saw it. If the world really is as he shows it to us in the
Hecuba, the Troades, the Ion, the Electra, the Hippolytus,
then we had better shut our eyes or take to spectacles
which colour things more agreeably.

So felt the fourth century. It suffered from the common
sequelae of a critical agnosticism. Not from especial
wickedness (scepticism and crime do not necessarily go
hand in hand, nor is a godless world always an immoral
one), but from torpor. Men have tired of hunting after
truth which they never find, of engaging in a pursuit
which calls for so much effort and brings so much pain,
and yet has such small results to offer. They have
grown afraid of the task which they have undertaken ;
when they think upon these things they are too painful
for them, and they turn aside into easier paths. The
higher literature takes to studying character instead of
portraying action, or pursues artistic effects with much
talk of art for art's sake ; and a corresponding change
comes over the attitude of educated men to life. A genera-
tion grows up which takes few risks and makes little pro-
gress, which is content with ' a modest competence ' in
matters of intellect even more than in income. Vigour
is replaced by virtuosity ; and life by refined criticism on
it. The ideas of such a society are generally cultured, the
ideals of it are always bourgeois — and neither of these
adjectives indicates a higher level of humanity. It is for
this kind of society that comedy is written, if we mean

1358 Q

242 THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER CH.

by comedy, not the coarse vivacity of Aristophanes, but
the delicate wit of Menander or Molidre or Congreve or
the modern French school.

That is why the New Comedy is so typical of the
fourth century, of which it is the most important literary
product. Menander is the new Euripides. He has learnt
from his great predecessor an idealization of female
character, an interest in common life, and an exquisite
style. But he has dropped the profound earnestness of his
master. Tragedy has declined into comedy, the passionate
search for truth into the genial criticism of common sense.
Heroes and heroines give place to courtesans and buffoons
and cooks and slaves ; and the sufferings of tragedy, the
dying Hippolytus and the blinded eyes of Oedipus, are
replaced by the tears of disappointed lovers and the aching
stomachs of hungry parasites. Menander's ideal is a
comfortable and unheroic life — the bourgeois ideal of wild
oats in youth, and respectability with a dowried wife in
middle age.

No doubt there were loftier and more energetic minds
in Athens than Menander's : but even these undergo a
degenerative change. Action begins to be divorced from
thought, and there appears a class of thinkers who are
willing to be mere spectators of life ; the best of them
persuaded of the wisdom of views, which they make but
a feeble attempt to enforce on the world, the worst of
them contented to weigh and appraise a thousand theories
without believing in, still less practising, one. It is
impossible not to feel in reading Aristotle, that though
his political speculations were started to meet a real need,
yet he is satisfied with having created his ideal constitu-
tion, and almost indifferent to its becoming a reality on
earth. He lives to know rather than to make his knowledge

viii THE FIFTH CENTURY AND AFTER 243

effective. Even Plato, who is cut to the soul by the needs
of his age, resigns himself to the view that his ideal state
must remain in the clouds. He sees too clearly a vanity
in human effort even when most successful, and is im-
patient and disgusted at the slow travelling and at the
rough and muddy roads. So he leaves the earth and gives
himself up to wandering in the clear and unimpeding aether
of the intellect,

aepo/Saroo*' KOU irtpi$pov£>v rov rjXiov,

as Aristophanes, a generation earlier, said scornfully of
his kind, and builds his airy palaces where no one can
hinder or defile or destroy.

The following century brought a revival, and philosophy
once more became practical : nor has history many inci-
dents more striking than the Stoic and Cynic attempt to
save mankind through virtue. Perhaps we actually owe
more to these ages than to earlier Greece. But the new
world was never quite like the old. Greece had for ever
lost two things — freedom and the glory of her early
literature.

EPILOGUE

IN spite of classical education, in spite of newspaper
tributes to the greatness of Athens, the general public
have never quite come to regard Greek literature as a
living force. Most people — and among them many who
have been through the public schools — class it vaguely
with the civilizations of Egypt or Assyria as something
which has an archaeological interest, but is not suitable
for general education. And of those who realize that it
is more than this, how many think of it as genuinely
alive ? How many would turn to its writers expecting to
meet a criticism of life as true and poignant as that of our
own literature, or to see, as they read, the world changed
and illuminated for them by Greek tragedy as by Shake-
speare ? How many regard the ideals of Homer or
Aeschylus as at least as effective as those of Milton or
Dryden, or think of Thucydides and Euripides as more
truly ' modern ' than Dickens or Thackeray ?

' Ancient ' and ' modern ' ; ' dead ' and ' living ' — the
familiar antitheses of educational controversy have made
us their dupes, and we swallow the adjectives whole,
confusing ancient with antiquated and cotemporary
with modern. If a language is spoken or a religion
venerated in our own day, we hastily conclude that it
is ' modern ' in every sense of the word : if it is ' ancient '

246 EPILOGUE

or ' dead ', we suppose it to be mere litter on the rubbish
heap of the past. Yet old thoughts are not necessa-
rily senile, nor are cotemporary thoughts necessarily of
value. We should be landed in strange conclusions if it
were so : Bantu would be a ' modern ' language, and the
rites of Bush tribes a ' modern ' religion ; Hellenism
would be obsolete, because it lies sixteen centuries behind
us, and Christianity superseded, because it was born in
the empire of Augustus.1

No ; Greek thought is still as living as our own. Greek
freedom could have taught us lessons of toleration up to,
and even in the nineteenth century. Greek sanity is a
reducing medicine, suitable to purge some of the humours
of modern literature. Greek directness will train us to
clarify our thoughts and verify our emotions. Greek
humanism is the clearest and simplest form of that religion
of the earth, against which S. Paul and so many preachers
since him have declaimed : in Plato we hear their voice
already raised, and have a forecast of the coming of
Christianity.2 To how many of the phenomena mentioned

1 In these paragraphs I am only speaking of what I believe to
be the views of the public at large ; and I am not urging the cause
of compulsory Greek ; that is a very different question, and one
which I wish carefully to avoid.

* One of the reasons why Greek has such high educational value
is that it continually poses fundamental problems, forces them on
our attention, and so is an introduction to literature and thought.
Thus Greek directness raises the great literary problems which
centre round the value of romanticism : and Greek humanism
suggests the contrast between the Christian and the humanistic
view of life (see pp. 123-4).

The remarks on the ' modernity ' of Greece that follow are
intended to emphasize the points where its thought touches
ours, and deliberately take no account of the differences be-
tween us.

EPILOGUE 247

in the last chapter could we find modern parallels, for how
many of the personages could we substitute modern names !
Qualify Shelley's passionate idealism and love of beauty
with the merciless insight of Ibsen and his fondness for
the details of ordinary life — you have Euripides. France
has created a Menander in the younger Dumas. The
sophists are come to life again in a dozen popular teachers.
M. Bourget has studied the disastrous influence of one
of these ' seducers of youth ' in Le Disciple, where the
philosopher and his depraved pupil might almost pass for
Socrates and one of those young men whom he was
accused of corrupting. Nor are many writings more
genuinely ' sophistic ' than those of Mr. H. G. Wells, with
their unshrinking audacity of thought, their wide range of
subject, their appeal to the general public, their smatter-
ing of scientific knowledge, their pretensions to the scien-
tific spirit. And Plato ? Readers of M. Brunetiere's Sur
les chemins de la croyance, and of the novels of M. Rene
Bazin, will feel that if modern France lacks a Plato, it
exhibits many of those circumstances which produced
his shuddering reaction from materialism into spiritual
vision, from the disintegrating forces of individualist
anarchy into a revolutionary conservatism. Perhaps if
Newman had lived a generation later, we might have
seen something like Plato again on earth.

But, turning from dangerous parallels, let us sum up the
reasons of our approximation to Greece. First is Greek
humanism. Greece, as we have said so often, stands for
humanity, simple and unashamed, with all the variety of
its nature free to play. The Greek set himself to answer
the question how, with no revelation from God to guide
him, with no overbearing necessity to cramp or intimidate
him, man should live. It has been a tendency with our

248 EPILOGUE

own age either to deny that heaven has revealed to us
in any way how we ought to behave, or to find such a
revelation in human nature itself. In either case we are
thrown back on ourselves and obliged to seek our guide
there. That is why the influence of Greece has grown so
much. The Greeks are the only people who have con-
ceived the problem similarly ; their answer is the only
one which has yet been made. So we are turning back
to Greece and beginning to understand what the Greeks
meant; we are beginning to canvass their views and in
some cases to accept them. In Germany, Professor von
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, in England Professor Murray,
have entered into the Greek mind to a degree impossible
to previous generations.

Secondly — and it is this, as we have said before, which
ties us so closely to the fifth century — the only thinking
civilization in the world before our own is that of Greece.
Greece tried to base life on reason. But on the collapse
of Graeco-Roman culture, mankind took refuge in a series
of despotisms, political and intellectual, which lasted to
and through the Middle Ages ; -the Roman Catholic
Church evolved a system which saved them from thinking
on theology and morals ; the theory of divine right, if it
did not destroy political thought, imprisoned it within
fixed limits. At the Reformation the world formally
declared itself free, though without quite understanding
what it meant by the declaration ; through subsequent
centuries it has moved towards a gradual realization of
the consequences of freedom, and now, in an almost com-
plete emancipation, has admitted reason as its one stan-
dard, and is shaping its theory of life to meet her demands.
In short we are resuming the task which from different
standpoints the Sophists, Socrates, Euripides, and Plato,

EPILOGUE 249

so long ago essayed. Hence we have an inner sympathy
with them which was hardly possible before our own day ;
and one of them at least, Euripides, has remained a puzzle
and a stumbling-block to critics, till an age came which
could understand him, because it was his spiritual co-
temporary.

These are the two chief causes which have brought
Greece nearer to us than to our predecessors. They are
accidental causes : we happen at the present time in some
ways to have taken the same attitude to life as the Greeks
of a certain age, and so they seem to us living and modern.
But there is another reason, far more important, which
gives Hellas life, and will keep it alive even in ages which
are far away from its mind. We must not forget this,
nor rest the permanence of Hellenism on a temporary
relation between its thought and ours. Greek literature
has a stronger fountain of life in the immortality which
all thought and utterance earn when it is truly and rightly
devised ; it has the immortality of what, in the widest
sense of the word, is art. There are some sentences of
Plutarch which describe this quality far better than any
words of mine can do, and they may fitly close this account
of the Greek genius ; Plutarch wrote them in his own age
about the Periclean buildings on the Acropolis, but they
will bear a wider application. ' For this cause therefore
those works are more wonderful ; because they were
perfectly made in so short a time and have continued so
long a season. For every one of those which were finished
up at that time seemed then to be very ancient touching
the beauty thereof : and yet for the grace and continuance
of the same, it looketh at this day as if it were but newly
done and finished, there is such a certain kind of flourishing
freshness in it, which letteth that the injury of time cannot

250 EPILOGUE

impair the sight thereof. As if every of those foresaid
works had some living spirit in it, to make it seem young
and fresh : and a soul that lived ever, which kept them
in their good continuing state.' l That is a just descrip-
tion of Greek Literature.

1 Vit. Periclis. 13 (tr. North).

OXFORD: HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

SEP 22

DF Livingstone, (Sir) Richard

77 Winn

L58 The Greek genius and its

meaning to us.

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