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 Æschylus,—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.