VI
There is one thing that we should never do in dealing with anything Greek. We should not take a scrap of the Greek mind and keep on examining it until we find a familiar thought in it. No bit of Greek art is to be viewed as a thing in itself. It is always a fragment, and gets its value from the whole. Every bit of carved stone picked up in Athens is a piece of architecture; so is every speech in a play, every phrase in a dialogue. You must go back and bring in the whole Theatre or the whole Academy, and put back the fragment in its place by means of ladders, before you can guess at its meaning. The inordinate significance that seems to gleam from every broken toy of Greece, results from this very quality—that the object is a part of something else. Just because the thing has no meaning by itself, it implies so much. Somehow it drags the whole life of the Greek nation before you. The favorite Greek maxim, 'Avoid excess,' does the same. It keeps telling you to remember yesterday and to-morrow; to remember the palæstra and the market-place; above all to remember that the very opposite of what you say is also true. Wherever you are, and whatever doing, you must remember the rest of the Greek world.
It is no wonder that the Greeks could not adopt the standards and contrivances of other nations, while their own standards and contrivances resulted from such refined and perpetual balancing and shaving of values. This refinement has become part of their daily life; and whether one examines a drinking cup or a dialogue or a lyric, and whether the thing be from the age of Homer or from the age of Alexander, the fragment always gives us a glimpse into the same Greek world. The foundation of this world seems to be the Myth; and as the world grew it developed in terms of Myth. The Greek mind had only one background. Athletics and Statuary, Epic and Drama, Religion and Art, Skepticism and Science expressed themselves through the same myths. In this lies the fascination of Greece for us. What a complete cosmos it is! And how different from any other civilization! Modern life, like modern language, is a monstrous amalgam, a conglomeration and mess of idioms from every age and every clime. The classic Greek hangs together like a wreath. It has been developed rapidly, during a few hundred years, and has an inner harmony like the temple. Language and temple—each was an apparition; each is, in its own way, perfect.
Consider wherein Rome differed from Greece. The life of the Romans was a patchwork, like our own. Their religion was formal, their art imported, their literature imitative, their aims were practical, their interests unimaginative. All social needs were controlled by political considerations. This sounds almost like a description of modern life; and it explains why the Romans are so close to us. Cicero, Horace, Cæsar, Antony, are moderns. But Alcibiades, Socrates, Pericles, and the rest take their stand in Greek fable. Like Pisistratus, Solon, and Lycurgus, they melt into legend and belong to the realms of the imagination.
No other people ever bore the same relation to their arts that the Greeks bore; and in this lies their charm. When the Alexandrine critics began to classify poetry and to discuss perfection, they never even mentioned the Roman poetry, although all of the greatest of it was in existence. Why is this? It is because no Roman poem is a poem at all from the Greek point of view. It is too individual, too clever, and, generally, too political. Besides, it is not in Greek. The nearest modern equivalent to the development of the whole Greek world of art is to be found in German contrapuntal music. No one except a German has ever written a true sonata or a symphony, in the true polyphonic German style. There are tours de force done by other nationalities; but the natural idiom of this music is Teutonic.
I am not condemning the Latins, or the moderns. Indeed, there is in Horace something nobler and more humane than in all Olympus. The Greeks, moreover, seem in their civic incompetence like children, when contrasted with the Romans or with the moderns. But in power of utterance, within their own crafts, the Greeks are unapproachable. Let us now speak of matters of which we know very little.
The statues on the Parthenon stand in a region where direct criticism cannot reach them, but which trigonometry may, to some extent, determine. Their beauty probably results from an artistic knowledge so refined, a sophistication so exact, that, as we gaze, we lose the process and see only results. A Greek architect could have told you just what lines of analysis must be followed in order to get these effects in grouping and in relief. It is all, no doubt, built up out of tonic and dominant—but the manual of counter-point has been lost. As the tragic poet fills the stage with the legend, so the sculptor fills the metope with the legend. Both are closely following artistic usage: each is merely telling the old story with new refinement. And whether we gaze at the actors on the stage or at the figures in the metope, whether we study a lyric or listen to a dialogue, we are in communion with the same genius, the same legend. The thing which moves and delights us is a unity.
This Genius is not hard to understand. Any one can understand it. That is the proof of its greatness. As Boccaccio said of Dante, not learning but good wits are needed to appreciate him. One cannot safely look toward the mind of the modern scholar for an understanding of the Greek mind, because the modern scholar is a specialist—a thing the Greek abhors. If a scholar to-day knows the acoustics of the Greek stage, that is thought to be a large enough province for him. He is not allowed to be an authority on the scenery. In the modern scholar's mind everything is in cubby-holes; and everybody to-day wants to become an authority. Every one, moreover, is very serious to-day; and it does not do to be too serious about Greek things, because the very genius of Greece has in it a touch of irony, which combines with our seriousness to make a heavy, indigestible paste. The Greek will always laugh at you if he can, and the only hope is to keep him at arm's length, and deal with him in the spirit of social life, of the world, of the beau monde, and of large conversation. His chief merit is to stimulate this spirit. The less we dogmatize about his works and ways, the freer will the world be of secondary, second-rate commentaries. The more we study his works and ways, the fuller will the world become of intellectual force.
The Greek classics are a great help in tearing open those strong envelopes in which the cultivation of the world is constantly getting glued up. They helped Europe to cut free from theocratic tyranny in the late Middle Ages. They held the Western world together after the fall of the Papacy. They gave us modern literature: indeed, if one considers all that comes from Greece, one can hardly imagine what the world would have been like without her. The lamps of Greek thought are still burning in marble and in letters. The complete little microcosm of that Greek society hangs forever in the great macrocosm of the moving world, and sheds rays which dissolve prejudice, making men thoughtful, rational, and gay. The greatest intellects are ever the most powerfully affected by it; but no one escapes. Nor can the world ever lose this benign influence, which must, so far as philosophy can imagine, qualify human life forever.
