Equally groundless was the notion that the issue of translations was part of a scheme to which the Queen (a Russian princess) was supposed to be accessory, for the purpose of playing into the hands of the Russians in Macedonia, by leading the Greek population to surrender their birthright as the lawful heirs of the New Testament. To understand this suspicion we must remember that the Greeks had long prided themselves on the fact that they and they alone could read the very words of the New Testament in their own tongue, and they were afraid that they would forfeit this distinction and be reduced to a level with their Slavonic neighbours, if the need for a translation were admitted.[9]
However inconsistent it may seem, this attachment to the Greek of the New Testament is only another phase of the same pride of ancestry that is seen in the straining after classical Greek.[10] The desire to pose before the world as the descendants of the nation which produced Homer and Æschylus and Pericles and Plato and Demosthenes has led them to sacrifice in some measure the real interests of the nation to the glamour of a remote and glorious past. Just as they have been ashamed of some mediæval monuments which reminded them of humiliating epochs in their history, so they have tried to get rid of words and forms which bore the stamp of foreign ascendency. But such affectation cannot alter facts, and is bad for the morale of a nation. The pride of birth, when carried to excess, may hurt the character of a people no less than of an individual, and foster a theatrical and pretentious spirit. It is easy to see that in the education of the young it cannot be favourable to vigour or spontaneity of thought if the pupil is denied the use of the words to which he has been accustomed from his earliest years. With such a discord between experience and expression, it is no wonder that the Greek people have produced so little native literature during the last two thousand years, and that they are so largely dependent at the present time on foreign authorship, especially Russian, English, and French. The loss sustained in almost all the practical departments of the national life, both sacred and secular, is alleged to be scarcely less serious. It can hardly be otherwise, indeed, if the language employed in public documents is only partially or with difficulty understood by a large proportion of the people for whom it is intended. Moreover, it cannot be good for the nation to be divided, intellectually speaking, into two more or less antagonistic camps, corresponding roughly to the educated and the uneducated.
Of recent years there have been signs of a strong reaction. Largely owing to the ability and zeal of Professor Psichari, a son-in-law of the late M. Renan, the Atticising tendency is not nearly so prevalent as it was twenty years ago, and a considerable native literature is now making its appearance not only in poetry (in which it has always been strong) but also in novels, dramas, journals, newspapers, and even in the publication of grammars. This literature is no longer confined, as it used to be, with few exceptions, to the Ionian Islands (where Salomos of Zanté and Valaoritis of Leucas sang) and Crete (where Cornaro, of Venetian extraction, produced his great epic Erotokritos, which procured for him the title of the “Homer of the People”). Even Constantinople is beginning to breathe the new spirit; and there is reason to hope that a compromise between the two extremes may yet be effected, by which the nation may realise its essential unity amid diversity, remaining true to its illustrious ancestry, without ignoring or suppressing the other elements—Roman, Byzantine, Turkish—which have contributed to its development. Its scholars are beginning to see that the idea of classical Greek ever becoming a universal language for men of culture is a vain dream, and that a nation’s speech, like its life, must undergo continual modification. Such modification, though it may appear to the pedant to be corruption, is evolution to the philosopher and man of sense. The history of the Russian and Czech languages, which have adapted themselves to literary purposes with such success during the last two hundred years, encourages the hope that the language now spoken by the common people of Greece may go through a similar process of development, borrowing from the ancient Greek what it requires in order to meet the needs of science and philosophy, while holding its ground as the essential basis of the national speech.[11]
Akin to this controversy is the question as to the proper pronunciation of Greek. So different is the pronunciation now current among the Greeks from that which is in vogue in this country that, even without any difference in vocabulary or grammar, a Western scholar trained in the Erasmian system would find the greatest difficulty in understanding or making himself
