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 archæology 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 manquée; 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 æsthetic 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 æsthetic 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 Encyclopædia 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.