What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?

by J. P. Mahaffy

I know there are people who think transcendent genius such as that of Napoleon, or, in his way, of Wagner, affords a justification, or at least an excuse, for such lawlessness. And you have heard much talk about the Superman, whose main attribute seems to me infra human, when the rights of others are concerned. To me the veritable Superman is not the slave of his own passions, who satisfies them at the expense of others, but the master of himself, who, because he is pure, feels and helps the weakness of his neighbours. Not Sir Lancelot but Sir Galahad is the ideal of chivalry. Of the one,

“His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true”;

but of the other,

“My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure!”

Perhaps, during this digression, the objection may have been rising in your minds that if Greek music was so universally believed to have a moral or immoral influence, this was because it differed wholly in quality from that which we pursue, and that therefore an inference from one to the other is very hazardous. This is supported by the fact already adduced, that the actual remains of Greek music, though legible and intelligible in the literal sense, have no power whatever to speak to our musical emotions. We must therefore turn back from practice to theory and prove to you that, in spite of these difficulties, Greek music was distinctly the source and forerunner of our own. And I may say by way of preface to this part of my discourse that the simplicity of music, far from being a cause of its lesser emotional effect, may be the very reason why the great mass of people feel it more deeply. The intricacy and difficulty of our modern music tend to estrange it from the feelings of the larger public and to confine its influence to the special class of trained musicians. The Greeks left us no practical work on music, no criticism of existing compositions, no comparison of the effects produced on audiences by this or that artist, by this or that kind of instrument. We find only obvious generalities, such as the flute being more exciting than the harp. There is indeed one passage where Plato goes deeper and inveighs against purely instrumental music as more exciting and therefore possibly more mischievous than vocal music with an accompaniment, showing that he did not lay the stress of the emotion upon the words. Those who have gone deeply into modern music will agree with him; they feel that the emotions produced by a symphony of Beethoven are more subtle, and, because more subtle, deeper and more lasting than those produced by any vocal music, unless it be eight-part music, which approaches the richness of an orchestra.

But this suggestive remark is quite an exception. The extant musical tracts are wholly theoretical, and are concerned with the scientific basis of music, not its application to practice. And the first problem to which they applied themselves, which they solved, and have handed down to us, their heirs in art, is the determination of the proper scale or scales in which music should be composed. This was no easy thing to do, and if you take the trouble to hear the music of any people who have not adopted the Greek solution, or one like it, you will at once perceive the difference. I well remember persuading, with great difficulty, a band of gipsies, in Hungary, to play for me not the music of the Hungarians, for which they are so celebrated, but some of their own Oriental stuff, which they play among themselves in private. I found it wholly unintelligible on account of the scale, which seemed to have thirteen or fourteen notes within the octave. All this the Greeks had contemplated, and in some of their early scales they used quarter-tones and intervals strange and disagreeable to us. But, after much hesitation, they fixed upon the diatonic scale, which became the basis of their music, and in due time of ours. The varieties of this scale which they used were far greater than ours. We are contented with the variation of major and minor, and repeat the same intervals in the same order with a mere difference of pitch, very slightly modified by the temperament of our tuning. The Greeks thought the position of the two semitones far more important, and considered that the quality of the scale, quite apart from pitch, was produced by the variety in the placing of these intervals. But I must repeat that our extant treatises are so absolutely scientific and not practical that it would be impossible to attempt an analysis of them in a popular lecture. The discovery of the scientific basis of concord or harmony and its difference from discord had been made very early by the Pythagoreans, and I have often thought that their famous theory that numerical relations were the key of the universe was much stimulated and fortified by finding that octaves, fifths, and fourths, which are recognised by the ear as concords, can be produced by stopping a vibrating string at the points dividing it into portions represented by 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4. They did not acknowledge our favorite major ⅓ as a concord, the proportion being more complex, viz. 4:5 or 5:6; and indeed if the major ⅓ on our instruments be tuned to its full height of two full tones, it sounds sharp and very disagreeable. In this as in most detail we can follow and understand the Greek theory. When Aristotle tells us that the middle note of the scale is that to which the melody always returns, he is evidently speaking of the unaccompanied melody, and there are scores of our melodies that move up and down round this keynote, which may in these cases well represent the central note of the scale.

It is not possible for me to delay longer on this topic. I therefore sum up the result thus: the Greeks had a music to some extent homogeneous with ours; they attributed to its varieties great and direct effects on the morals of men. Seeing that in all their other arts they were so singularly modern and reasonable, it is surely well worth the careful consideration of educators whether similar effects be not latent in our music, e.g. whether the study of Handel, Corelli, Palestrina, may not have a strengthening effect on the mind, whereas the study of Chopin, of Verdi, even of Beethoven, with all the vague Weltschmerz which they contain, the unsatisfied longings, the unreasoning discontent, the suspended harmony, may not contribute directly to the vices of modern society, vices not unknown in the fashionable cities of this Commonwealth.

We now turn to the subject of household furniture and decoration, in which you will find that there are many and the best of our ideas borrowed from the Greeks.

We have not had the good fortune to unearth a Greek town of the best epoch from under lava or from beneath the débris of an earthquake. But it is likely that even if the ruins of Antioch were cleared of the great rocks that tumbled down upon it, in the many earthquakes of the early centuries of our era, some splendid houses might be discovered. So far, however, I do not know that, except at Delos, we have been able to find clear evidences that the wall decorations and the furniture of a Greek house were the same in kind as those which a century and a half of excavation has brought up from the dead in Pompeii and Herculaneum. These towns, as well as Naples, which was well known to Cicero as an essentially Greek town, were in close proximity to Puteoli, which again was for several centuries the great port for all Alexandrian luxuries since the second Ptolemy had made friends with the Romans. Through Puteoli, then, Greek artists and Greek designs made their way to that coast, and even the worship of Isis, and the frequent use of the ibis and the crocodile in their designs, show that the Hellenistic artists had felt the influence of native Egyptian work, just as the workman of the French “Empire” felt the breath of old Egypt, when Napoleon’s Commission brought out its splendid work on that mysterious country.

Although, therefore, all the little texts scrawled upon the walls by children are in Latin, I take it the furniture and decoration of the smart houses or villas uncovered are in Greek style, and may thus give us some suggestion of the inside of a Greek house. And let me add at once, that the discoveries of such ruins and remains at Rome in the time of the Renaissance moulded all the taste of that age, and produced house decoration, in direct imitation of the antique, which has been copied down to the present day.