Part 12

But she kept the peril close. None of the neighbors, who hailed her on the street or gossiped on the vine-hung porch, ever noticed that often, as she talked, she would clasp her hands with a sudden fierce little gesture, as if she were holding tight to some strong arm, and that in her heart she was whispering, even while the swift crooked smile danced across her lips, 'O God, make me remember! make me remember! We're in Time, now: not in Eternity yet: _not in Eternity yet!_'

The Greek Genius

By John Jay Chapman

The teasing perfection of Greek Literature will perhaps excite the world long after modern literature is forgotten. Shakespeare may come to his end and lie down among the Egyptians, but Homer will endure forever. We hate to imagine such an outcome as this, because, while we love Shakespeare, we regard the Greek classics merely with an overwhelmed astonishment. But the fact is that Homer floats in the central stream of History, Shakespeare in an eddy. There is, too, a real difference between ancient and modern art, and the enduring power may be on the side of antiquity.

The classics will always be the playthings of humanity, because they are types of perfection, like crystals. They are pure intellect, like demonstrations in geometry. Within their own limitations they are examples of miracle; and the modern world has nothing to show that resembles them in the least. As no builder has built like the Greeks, so no writer has written like the Greeks. In edge, in delicacy, in proportion, in accuracy of effect, they are as marble to our sandstone. The perfection of the Greek vehicle is what attacks the mind of the modern man and gives him dreams.

What relation these dreams bear to Greek feeling it is impossible to say--probably a very remote and grotesque relation. The scholars who devote their enormous energies to a life-and-death struggle to understand the Greeks always arrive at states of mind which are peculiarly modern. The same thing may be said of the severest types of Biblical scholar. J. B. Strauss, for instance, gave his life to the study of Christ, and, as a result, has left an admirable picture of the German mind of 1850. Goethe, who was on his guard if ever a man could be, was still a little deceived in thinking that the classic spirit could be recovered. He left imitations of Greek literature which are admirable in themselves, and rank among his most characteristic works, yet which bear small resemblance to the originals. The same may be said of Milton and of Racine. The Greeks seem to have used their material, their myths and ideas, with such supernal intellect that they leave this material untouched for the next comer. Their gods persist, their mythology is yours and mine. We accept the toys,--the whole baby-house which has come down to us: we walk in and build our own dramas with their blocks.

What a man thinks of influences him, though he chance to know little about it; and the power which the ancient world has exerted over the modern has not been shown in proportion to the knowledge or scholarship of the modern thinker, but in proportion to his natural force. The Greek tradition, the Greek idea became an element in all subsequent life; and one can no more dig it out and isolate it than one can dig out or isolate a property of the blood. We do not know exactly how much we owe to the Greeks. Keats was inspired by the very idea of them. They were an obsession to Dante, who knew not the language. Their achievements have been pressing in upon the mind of Europe, and enveloping it with an atmospheric appeal, ever since the Dark Ages.

Of late years we have come to think of all subjects as mere departments of science, and we are almost ready to hand over Greece to the specialist. We assume that scholars will work out the history of art. But it is not the right of the learned and scholarly only, to be influenced by the Greeks, but also of those persons who know no Greek. Greek influence is too universal an inheritance to be entrusted to scholars, and the specialist is the very last man who can understand it. In order to obtain a diagnosis of Greek influence one would have to seek out a sort of specialist on Humanity-at-large.

I

Since we cannot find any inspired teacher to lay before us the secrets of Greek influence, the next best thing would be to go directly to the Greeks themselves, and to study their works freshly, almost innocently. But to do this is not easy. The very Greek texts themselves have been established through modern research, and the footnotes are the essence of modernity.

The rushing modern world passes like an express train; as it goes, it holds up a mirror to the classic world--a mirror ever changing and ever false. For upon the face of the mirror rests the lens of fleeting fashion. We can no more walk straight to the Greeks than we can walk straight to the moon. In America the natural road to the classics lies through the introductions of German and English scholarship. We are met, as it were, on the threshold of Greece by guides who address us confidently in two very dissimilar modern idioms, and who overwhelm us with complacent and voluble instructions. According to these men we have nothing to do but listen to them, if we would understand Greece.

Before entering upon the subject of Greece, let us cast a preliminary and disillusioning glance upon our two guides, the German and the Briton. Let us look once at each of them with an intelligent curiosity, so that we may understand what manner of men they are, and can make allowances in receiving the valuable and voluble assistance which they keep whispering into our ears throughout the tour. The guides are indispensable; but this need not prevent us from studying their temperaments. If it be true that modern scholarship acts as a lens through which the classics are to be viewed, we can never hope to get rid of all the distortions; but we may make scientific allowances, and may correct results. We may consider certain social laws of refraction--for example, spectacles, beer, sausages. We may regard the variations of the compass due to certain local customs, namely, the Anglican communion, school honor, Pears' soap. In all this we sin not, but pursue intellectual methods.

The case of Germany illustrates the laws of refraction very pleasantly. The extraordinary lenses which were made there in the nineteenth century are famous now, and will remain as curiosities hereafter. During the last century, Learning won the day in Germany to an extent never before known in history. It became an unwritten law of the land that none but learned men should be allowed to play with pebbles. If a man had been through the mill of the Doctorate, however, he received a certificate as a dreamer. The passion which mankind has for using its imagination could thus be gratified only by men who _had been_ brilliant scholars. The result was a race of monsters, of whom Nietzsche is the greatest.

The early social life of these men was contracted. They learned all they knew while sitting on a bench. The classroom was their road to glory. They were aware that they could not be allowed to go out and play in the open until they had learned their lessons thoroughly; they therefore became prize boys. When the great freedom was at last conferred upon them, they roamed through Greek mythology, and all other mythologies, and erected labyrinths in which the passions of childhood may be seen gamboling with the discoveries of adult miseducation. The gravity with which the pundits treated each other extended to the rest of the world, because, in the first place, they were more learned than any one else, and in the second, many of them were men of genius. The 'finds' of modern archaeology have passed through the hands of these men, and have received from them the labels of current classification.

After all, these pundits resemble their predecessors in learning. Scholarship is always a specialized matter, and it must be learned as we learn a game. Scholarship always wears the parade of finality, and yet suffers changes like the moon. These particular scholars are merely scholars. Their errors are only the errors of scholarship, due, for the most part, to extravagance and ambition. A new idea about Hellas meant a new reputation. In default of such an idea a man's career is _manquee_; he is not an intellectual. After discounting ambition, we have left still another cause for distrusting the labors of the German professors. This distrust arises from a peep into the social surroundings of the caste. Here is a great authority on the open-air life of the Greeks: he knows all about Hellenic sport. Here is another who understands the brilliant social life of Attica: he has written the best book upon Athenian conversation and the market-place. Here is still a third: he has reconstructed Greek religion: at last we know! All these miracles of learning have been accomplished in the library--without athletics, without conversation, without religion.

When I think of Greek civilization,--of the swarming, thieving, clever, gleaming-eyed Greeks, of the Bay of Salamis, and of the Hermes of Praxiteles,--and then cast my eyes on the Greatest Authority, my guide, my Teuton master, with his barbarian babble and his ham-bone and his self-importance, I begin to wonder whether I cannot somehow get rid of the man and leave him behind. Alas, we cannot do that; we can only remember his traits.

Our British mentors, who flank the German scholars as we move gently forward toward Greek feeling, form so complete a contrast to the Teutons that we hardly believe that _both_ kinds can represent genuine scholarship. The Britons are gentlemen, afternoon callers, who eat small cakes, row on the Thames, and are all for morality. They are men of letters. They write in prose and in verse, and belong to the aesthetic fraternity. They, like the Teutons, are attached to institutions of learning, namely, to Oxford and Cambridge. They resemble the Germans, however, in but a single trait--the conviction that they understand Greece.

The thesis of the British belle-lettrists, to which they devote their energies, might be stated thus: British culture includes Greek culture. They are very modern, very English, very sentimental, these British scholars. While the German Doctors use Greek as a stalking-horse for Teutonic psychology, these English gentlemen use it as a dressmaker's model upon which they exhibit home-made English lyrics and British stock morality. The lesson which Browning sees in _Alcestis_ is the same that he gave us in _James Lee's Wife_. Browning's appeal is always the appeal to robust feeling as the salvation of the world. Gilbert Murray, on the other hand, sheds a sad, clinging, Tennysonian morality over Dionysus. Jowett is happy to announce that Plato is theologically sound, and gives him a ticket-of-leave to walk anywhere in England. Swinburne clings to that belief in sentiment which marks the Victorian era, but Swinburne finds the key to life in unrestraint instead of in restraint.

There is a whole school of limp Grecism in England, which has grown up out of Keats's Grecian Urn, and which is now buttressed with philosophy and adorned with scholarship; and no doubt it does bear some sort of relation to Greece and to Greek life. But this Anglican Grecism has the quality which all modern British art exhibits,--the very quality which the Greeks could not abide,--it is tinged with _excess_. The Briton likes strong flavors. He likes them in his tea, in his port wine, in his concert-hall songs, in his pictures of home and farm life. He likes something unmistakable, something with a smack that lets you know that the thing has arrived. In his literature he is the same. Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson lay it on thick with sentiment. Keats drips with aromatic poetry, which has a wonder and a beauty of its own--and whose striking quality is _excess_. The scented, wholesale sweetness of the modern aesthetic school in England goes home to its admirers because it is easy art. Once enjoy a bit of it and you never forget it. It is always the same, the 'old reliable,' the Oxford brand, the true, safe, British, patriotic, moral, noble school of verse; which exhibits the manners and feelings of a gentleman, and has success written in every trait of its physiognomy.

How this school of poetry invaded Greece is part of the history of British expansion in the nineteenth century. In the Victorian era the Englishman brought cricket and morning prayers into South Africa. Robert Browning established himself and his carpet-bag in comfortable lodgings on the Acropolis--which he spells with a K to show his intimate acquaintance with recent research. It must be confessed that Robert Browning's view of Greece never pleased, even in England. It was too obviously R. B. over again. It was Pippa and Bishop Blougram with a few pomegranate seeds and unexpected orthographies thrown in. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is against it, and suggests, wittily enough, that one can hardly agree with Browning that Heracles got drunk for the purpose of keeping up _other_ people's spirits.

So, also, Edward FitzGerald was never taken seriously by the English; but this was for another reason. His translations are the best transcriptions from the Greek ever done by this British school; but FitzGerald never took himself seriously. I believe that if he had only been ambitious, and had belonged to the academic classes,--like Jowett for instance,--he could have got Oxford behind him, and we should all have been obliged to regard him as a great apostle of Hellenism. But he was a poor-spirited sort of man, and never worked up his lead.

Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, began the serious profession of being a Grecian. He took it up when there was nothing in it, and he developed a little sect of his own, out of which later came Swinburne and Gilbert Murray, each of whom is the true British article. While Swinburne is by far the greater poet, Murray is by far the more important of the two from the ethnological point of view. Murray was the first man to talk boldly about God, and to introduce his name into all Greek myths, using it as a fair translation of any Greek adjective. There is a danger in this boldness. The reader's attention becomes hypnotized with wondering in what manner God is to be introduced into the next verse. The reader becomes so concerned about Mr. Murray's religious obsessions that he forgets the Greek altogether and remembers only Shakespeare's hostess in her distress over the dying Falstaff: 'Now I, to comfort him, bid him 'a should not think of God,--I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.'

Murray and Arnold are twins in ethical endeavor. I think that it was Arnold who first told the British that Greece was noted for melancholy and for longings. He told them that chastity, temperance, nudity, and a wealth of moral rhetoric marked the young man of the Periclean period. Even good old Dean Plumptre has put this young man into his prefaces. Swinburne added the hymeneal note,--the poetic nature-view,--of which the following may serve as an example:--

And the trees in their season brought forth and were kindled anew By the warmth of the mixture of marriage, the child-bearing dew.

There is hardly a page in Swinburne's Hellenizing verse that does not blossom with Hymen. The passages would be well suited for use in the public schools of to-day where sex-knowledge in its poetic aspects is beginning to be judiciously introduced.

This contribution of Swinburne's,--the hymeneal touch,--and Murray's discovery that the word God could be introduced with effect anywhere, went like wildfire over England. They are characteristic of the latest phase of Anglo-Grecism.

Gilbert Murray has, in late years, had the field to himself. He stands as the head and front of Greek culture in England. It is he, more than any one else, who is the figure-head of dramatic poetry in England to-day; and, as such, his influence must be met, and, as it were, passed through, by the American student who is studying the Greek classics.

II

The Greek genius is so different from the modern English genius that they cannot understand each other. How shall we come to see this clearly? The matter is difficult in the extreme; because we are all soaked in modern feeling, and in America we are all drenched in British influence. The desire of Britain to annex ancient Greece, the deep-felt need that the English writers and poets of the nineteenth century have shown to edge and nudge nearer to Greek feeling, is familiar to all of us. Swinburne expresses his Hellenic longings by his hymeneal strains, Matthew Arnold by sweetness and light, Gilbert Murray by sweetness and pathos--and all through the divine right of Victorian expansion. It has been a profoundly unconscious development in all these men. They have instinctively and innocently attached their little oil-can to the coattails of Euripides and of the other great Attic writers. They have not been interested in Greek for its own sake. They have been interested in the exploitations of Greece for the purpose of British consumption.

Some people will contend that none of the writers of this school are, properly speaking, professional scholars. Others will contend that professional scholarship is tolerable only because it tends to promote cultivation of a non-professional kind. For instance, Jowett was never regarded as a scholar by the darkest-dyed Oxford experts, and Jebb of Cambridge is undoubtedly regarded as an amateur in Germany, because he descends to making translations. The severest classicist is able to talk only about texts. He is too great to do anything else. And yet, properly speaking, these men are all scholars. Murray represents popular scholarship to a degree which would have shocked Matthew Arnold, just as Arnold himself would have been poison to Nauck--Nauck the author of the text of Euripides.

But they are all scholars, and Murray, who is an Australian, and who rose into University prominence on the wings of University Extension, and through his lyric gift rather than through his learning, belongs to Oxford by race and by nature, as well as by adoption. The outsider ought not to confuse him with the whole of Oxford, and the whole of Oxford ought not to disown him after making him the head and front of its Hellenism so far as the world at large can judge. Murray, as St. Paul would say, is not the inner Oxford; but Murray is the outer Oxford which the inner Oxford cannot too eagerly sniff at or condemn; because he is no accident, but a true-bred Oxonian of the Imperial epoch.

The tendency of universities has ever been to breed cliques and secret societies, to produce embroideries and start hothouses of specialized feeling. They do well in doing this: it is all they can do. We should look upon them as great furnaces of culture, largely social in their influence, which warm and nourish the general temperament of a nation. Would that in America we had a local school of classic cultivation half as interesting as this Oxford Movement--quaint and non-intellectual as it is! It is alive and it is national. While most absurd from the point of view of universal culture, it is most satisfactory from the domestic point of view--as indeed everything in England is. If in America we ever develop any true universities, they will have faults of their own. Their defects will be of a new strain, no doubt, and will reflect our national shortcomings. These thoughts but teach us that we cannot use other people's eyes or other people's eye-glasses. We have still to grind the lenses through which we shall, in our turn, observe the classics.

III

Ancient religion is of all subjects in the world the most difficult. Every religion, even at the time it was in progress, was always completely misunderstood, and the misconceptions have increased with the ages. They multiply with every monument that is unearthed. If the Eleusinian mysteries were going at full blast to-day, so that we could attend them, as we do the play at Oberammergau, their interpretation would still present difficulties. Mommsen and Rhode would disagree. But ten thousand years from now, when nothing survives except a line out of St. John's Gospel and a tablet stating that Fischer played the part of Christ for three successive decades, many authoritative books will be written about Oberammergau, and reputations will be made over it. Anything which we approach as religion becomes a nightmare of suggestion, and hales us hither and thither with thoughts beyond the reaches of the soul.

The _Alcestis_ and the _Bacchantes_ are, in this paper, approached with the idea that they are _plays_. This seems not to have been done often enough with Greek plays. They are regarded as examples of the sublime, as forms of philosophic thought, as moral essays, as poems, even as illustrations of dramatic law, and they are unquestionably all of these things. But they were primarily plays--intended to pass the time and exhilarate the emotions. They came into being as plays, and their form and make-up can best be understood by a study of the dramatic business in them. They become poems and philosophy incidentally, and afterwards: they were born as plays. A playwright is always an entertainer, and unless his desire to hold his audience overpoweringly predominates, he will never be a success. It is probable that even with AEschylus,--who stands _hors ligne_ as the only playwright in history who was really in earnest about morality,--we should have to confess that his passion as a dramatic artist came _first_. He held his audiences by strokes of tremendous dramatic novelty. Both the stage traditions and the plays themselves bear this out. The fact is that it is not easy to keep people sitting in a theatre; and unless the idea of holding their attention predominates with the author, they will walk out, and he will not be able to deliver the rest of his story.

In the grosser forms of dramatic amusement--for example, where a bicycle acrobat is followed by a comic song--we are not compelled to find philosophic depth of idea in the sequence. But in dealing with works of great and refined dramatic genius like the _Tempest_, or the _Bacchantes_, where the emotions played upon are subtly interwoven, there will always be found certain minds which remain unsatisfied with the work of art itself, but must have it explained. Even Beethoven's Sonatas have been supplied with philosophic addenda--statements of their meaning. We know how much Shakespeare's intentions used to puzzle the Germans. Men feel that somewhere at the back of their own consciousness there is a philosophy or a religion with which the arts have some relation. In so far as these affinities are touched upon in a manner that leaves them mysteries, we have good criticism; but when people dogmatize about them, we have bad criticism. In the meantime the great artist goes his way. His own problems are enough for him.

The early critics were puzzled to classify the _Alcestis_, and no wonder, for it contains many varieties of dramatic writing. For this very reason it is a good play to take as a sample of Greek spirit and Greek workmanship. It is a little Greek cosmos, and it happens to depict a side of Greek thought which is sympathetic to modern sentiment, so that we seem to be at home in its atmosphere. The _Alcestis_ is thought to be in a class by itself. And yet, indeed, under close examination, every Greek play falls into a class by itself (there are only about forty-five of them in all), and the maker of each was probably more concerned at the time with the dramatic experiment upon which he found himself launched than he was with any formal classification which posterity might assign to his play.