I INTRODUCTION Je sais maintenant combien je dois . . . aux Grecs à qui je dois tout, à qui je voudrais devoir davantage, car ce que nous savons de raisonnable sur l'univers et l'homme nous vient d'eux.-ANATOLE FRANCE. If we trace the life of Europe to its origin, we shall come to three sources. Rome gives us a great legal system, the vision of a highly organized and partly successful world-empire, splendid examples of great men of action, and some noble works in poetry and prose. Our spiritual and intellectual life we owe chiefly to Judaea and Greece. Besides the specific gift of Christianity, Judaea shows us a strong sense and hold of the unseen world, the stubborn persistence which in the Bible is called Faith, and that most difficult and rare of all virtues, which S. Paul defined in the thirteenth chapter of his first letter to the Church at Corinth. Greece is the author of the intellectual life of Europe and of one of its two greatest literatures; but though in the following pages I shall deal almost entirely with these, it must. not be forgotten that she represents an outlook on the world and a way of life.1 A man walking down Shaftesbury Avenue from Piccadilly to Charing Cross Road passes the Lyric Theatre. If it is the evening, a dramatic performance is probably taking place inside. It may be a tragedy, or some form of comedy. If it is a musical comedy and he enters, he will see elaborate scenery and a play which may open with a prologue and which is partly composed of dialogue between the various characters, partly of songs in various metres sung by a chorus to the accompaniment of an orchestra. As the words in italics indicate, our imaginary passerby will have seen, though he may not have suspected it, a symbol of the indelible mark which the Greeks have set on the aesthetic and intellectual life of Europe, and of the living presence of Greece in the twentieth century. An ancient Athenian might be startled at the sight of a musical comedy and its chorus, but 1 I have tried to deal with this in The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us, where the subjects treated in this chapter are more fully discussed. The chapter itself is largely abbreviated from my essay in The Legacy of Greece. he would be looking at his own child, a descendant, however distant, degenerate, and hard to recognize, of that chorus which with dance and song moved round the altar of Dionysus in the theatre of his home. The same imprint, clear or faint, is on all our literary forms, except perhaps one. Epic, lyric, elegiac, dramatic, didactic, poetry, history, biography, rhetoric and oratory, the epigram, the essay, the sermon, the novel, letter writing and literary criticism are all Greek by origin, and in nearly every case their name betrays their source. Rome raises a doubtful claim to satire, but the substance of satire is present in the Old Comedy, and the form seems to have existed in writings now lost. There are even one or two genres, such as the imaginary speech, which Greece invented and which are not, fortunately, found in modern literature. When the curtain rose on Homer, European literature did not exist long before it falls on the late Byzantines, the lines were laid on which it has moved up to our own day. This is the entire work of a single people, politically weak, numerically small, materially poor-according to the economy of nature which in things of the mind and the spirit gives a germinating power to few. The Greeks are justly admired for individual poems, plays, and pieces of writing; but it was something even greater to have explored the possibilities of literature so far that posterity, while it has developed Greek genres, has not hitherto been able to add to them. It is the same with the rest of our intellectual life. Modern civilization largely rests on the will to give a rational account of things: this will originates in Greece. All branches of modern philosophy, from metaphysics to psychology, and many of the sciences, spring from seeds that first germinated in Hellas. The students of nature (at the Renaissance) picked up the clue to her secrets exactly as it fell from the hands of the Greeks a thousand years before. The foundations of mathematics were so well laid by them, that our children learn their geometry from a book written for the schools of Alexandria more than 2,000 years ago. Modern astronomy is the natural continuation and development of the works of Hipparchus and Ptolemy; modern physics of that of Democritus and Archimedes; it was long before modern biological science outgrew the knowledge bequeathed to us by Aristotle, by Theophrastus, and by Galen.' 1 This is one part of the Greek Legacy. 1 1 Huxley, Science and Culture, p. 16. Another part are the works themselves. Literature can only be judged by reading it, and certainly it cannot be characterized in a few pages. But a man ignorant of Greek and anxious to estimate its value might form some idea by inquiring the opinion of qualified judges. He would find them unanimous : I suppose it is true that no man of eminence qualified to speak has ever spoken of Greek literature in any tone but one. The first testimony is that of the Romans. It is borne by their literature, starting in translations from Greek, adopting one after another of their genres, permeated through and through (and most of all in the greatest writers) by imitations, reminiscences, influences of Greek, confessing and glorying in the debt. 'In_learning,' says Cicero, and in every branch of literature, the Greeks are our masters.' 1 A Roman boy should begin his studies with Greek, Quintilian thought, because Latin learning is derived from Greek'.2 The same note is repeated in the literature of the Renaissance, and re-echoed by the most various voices of our own century. Beside the great Attic poets, like Aeschylus and Sophocles, I am absolutely nothing.' 3 He spoke with great animation of the advantage of classical study, Greek especially. "Where," he said, "would one look for a greater orator than Demosthenes; or finer dramatic poetry, next to Shakspeare, than that of Aeschylus or Sophocles, not to speak of Euripides.' "Herodotus he thought 'the most interesting and instructive book, next to the Bible, which had ever been written '.4 'The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death of Aristotle is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself or with reference to the effects which it has produced upon the subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in the history of the world. . . . The wrecks and fragments of these subtle and profound minds, like the ruins of a fine statue, obscurely suggest to us the grandeur and perfection of the whole. Their very language . . . in variety, in simplicity, in flexibility, and in copiousness, excels every other language of the western world.' Then, after some words on their sculpture, he adds: 'their poetry seems to maintain a very high, though not so disproportionate a rank, in the comparison' (with other literatures).5 1 Tusc. iii. 1. 2. 3 Goethe, Gespräche, iii. 443. 2 Inst. Or. i. I. 12. 5 Shelley, On the Manners of the Ancients. • Wordsworth, Tabletalk. 'The Greeks are the most remarkable people who have yet existed. . . They were the beginners of nearly everything, Christianity excepted, of which the modern world makes its boast. They were the first people who had a historical literature; as perfect of its kind (though not the highest kind), as their oratory, their sculpture, and their architecture. They were the founders of mathematics, of physics, of the inductive study of politics, of the philosophy of human nature and life. In each they made the indispensable first steps, which are the foundation of all the rest.' 1 'From quotations I had seen I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods . . but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.' 2 " 'I have gone back to Greek literature with a passion quite astonishing to myself. . . . I felt as if I had never known before what intellectual enjoyment was. Oh that wonderful people! There is not one art, not one science, about which we may not use the same expression which Lucretius has employed about the victory over superstition Primum Graius homo". I think myself very fortunate in having been able to return to these great masters while still in the full vigour of life and when my taste and judgement are mature. Most people read all the Greek that they ever read before they are five-and-twenty. . . . A young man, whatever his genius may be, is no judge of such a writer as Thucydides. I had no high opinion of him ten years ago. I have now been reading him with a mind accustomed to historical researches and to political affairs; and I am astonished at my own former blindness, and at his greatness. I could not bear Euripides at college. I now read my recantation. He has faults undoubtedly. But what a poet !' 3 These men and there is no difficulty in adding to their number -are not only qualified but unprejudiced witnesses. They have no parti pris. They cannot be accused, as schoolmasters and dons are sometimes accused, of holding shares in a great Trading Bank of Greece and Rome Unlimited, and having a personal motive for their enthusiasm. Nor can it be said that they admired Greece because they knew nothing better. All-Goethe no less than the others had English literature in their hands, knew it well and appreciated its greatness. Yet this, given in their 1 Mill, Dissertations, ii. 283 f. 2 Darwin to Ogle in 1882. • Macaulay, Life and Letters, i. 431. own words, is the impression which Greek made on them. Securus iudicat orbis terrarum; and the verdict here is plain. The Greeks created our intellectual life; they laid down the lines which European literature has followed; they wrote a body of prose and poetry which has won the homage of the world and which is of unique interest to any one who cares for literature. A climber used to Welsh hills must accustom himself to a change of atmosphere if he is successfully to judge distances in Switzerland. A modern who reads Greek literature must adjust himself to similar differences, in style as well as in mood and mental views. Certain characteristics of Greek writing are a delight to those familiar with it, a stumbling-block to those who are not. If a reader new to the classics opened Thucydides, his first impression would probably be one of jejuneness, of baldness. If, fresh from Shelley or Tennyson, he came across the epigram of Simonides on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae, Stranger, tell the Spartans that we lie here, obeying their words,' he might see little in it but a prosaic want of colour. This exceeding simplicity or economy is a stumbling-block to those who are accustomed to the expansive modern manner. Yet such a reader would have been making the acquaintance of some of the finest things in Greek literature, which is always at its greatest when most simple, and he would have been face to face with a characteristic quality of it. We may call this quality Economy and illustrate it by comparing an epitaph on a Greek boy with Ben Jonson's lines on a child actor. The former runs: His father Philip laid here to rest his twelve-year-old son, Nicoteles, his high hope.' Ben Jonson writes: Weep with me, all you that read And know, for whom a tear you shed, 'Twas a child that so did thrive In grace and feature, As heaven and nature seemed to strive Years he numbered scarce thirteen Yet three filled zodiacs had he been |