| So shall all speech of now and of to-morrow, |
| All he hath shown me or shall show me yet, |
| Spring from an infinite and tender sorrow, |
| Burst from a burning passion of regret. |
You, reading history, would be willing to obliterate Christianity and restore Hellenism as a universal ideal. I would rather see them united in each separate life.
Before I explain what I mean by this I must beguile you by some agreement with you in your criticism of 'cardinal' Christian doctrines! You are right, I think, in objecting to the emphasis laid by the church upon a future life. But you seem to me unnecessarily disturbed by a theory. Christians, like the followers of many other faiths, do 'believe' in immortality. In fact, I suspect that only specifically intellectual people actually disbelieve in it—and, with all respect to yourself, I must add that the opinion of intellectualists on the destiny of the spirit fails to hold my attention! The authority of the spiritually gifted—including both Socrates and St. Francis—is overwhelmingly on the side of the soul being immortal. But does that make any more difference in the life of the flesh to-day than in the time of Alcibiades? Mediæval Christians certainly went mad over heaven and hell; but who now neglects Demeter's green earth for apocalyptic visions? You are depressed by a shadow cast from the printed page. Stop reading and look about at your friends! They are not too startled by the white radiance of eternity to install the latest electric lights!
As to your horror over the Christian 'adoration of suffering,' that seems to me better founded in view of the historic and continued insistence upon the cross as a symbol. I agree with you. I can scarcely express the revulsion which I feel in picture galleries before the endless succession of crucifixions and tortured saints. Until we conquer disease or discard violence there will be physical suffering in the world. But it is a thing to fight against, not to worship. For man to have painted and carved as beautiful a racked body seems to me an insult to the God who made straight limbs and fair flesh, and a strange betrayal of the Galilean who wished to heal the suffering of others as long as he lived, and only accepted it for himself as an incidental necessity at the end. He had no mediæval disregard for the flesh. The agony in Gethsemane consisted in facing the obligation to offer up a body and a life which were very precious to him. The glory consisted in the sacrifice, not in the temporary torture to which it led. Love, not suffering, is the core of Christianity. A truer symbol than the defeated body on the cross would be the same body strong and beneficent among men.
Here the Periclean sculptor would have done better for us than the mediæval painter. But only here. Neither he nor any of his contemporaries could have understood Gethsemane. Their greatness consisted in their selection, out of the prodigal abundance which lies before man, of noble possessions. They were far superior to the Puritans in that they retained art with morals, and they were equally superior to the modern Romanticists in that they picked and chose only such beauty as they believed could be amalgamated with character. Their inferiority to the Christians lay in their failure to hold their treasures in trust for humanity.
And now I come back to my argument against you. We who boast of being the 'heirs of the ages' need not be as limited as you imply. The modern man or woman can combine the Greek ideal of self-development with the Christian ideal of self-dedication. In reality, I am not arguing, but asserting. I know that this union is possible by the only evidence which is admissible—the evidence of a life. I have known for many years one person who unites in a normal experience your grandiose abstractions of Christianity and Hellenism. This person is my mother. Do not take her sex as an obstacle. She is a better example than some famous man might be, because her character is not obscured by public achievement. She has none of the limitations of a profession or career, or of some unique strain of genius. What she is creates careers or feeds genius. She is the most complete human being I have ever known, and yet her wholeness is a presage of what we all might become. It is to a life like this that you ought to go when you take stock of the philosophies of the world!
My mother's external fortune, judged by Greek standards, is good—too good, of course, for a woman. She has received from fate much that would have satisfied a Greek man: the consciousness of citizenship in a proud and prospering nation; health, long life, an active mind, and enough money to live tastefully; and, finally, satisfactory children (if I may be permitted to say this) and the approval of her fellow citizens. The Greek estimate of the importance of such approval springs, I suppose, from intense feeling for the communal life. No Greek man could be mentally less confined to the walls of a house than is my mother, and an Athenian voter could scarcely have served his polis more completely than she serves our little town. The only difference here between her and a Periclean citizen is that she is perplexed and shy rather than expectant and gratified when evidences of public approval are forced upon her.
In natural endowment, also, my mother is singularly Greek, because she possesses diverse qualities harmoniously welded into one whole. We are conscious of no contradictions in her, and yet she is both sane and imaginative, sensitive and practical, dominating and gentle.
Finally, in her conscious activities she is Greek. There is, for example, her moral insistence upon form and beauty. If you could live in her house for a day you would see Hellenism as a diurnal practice. Her taste is flawless; everything she touches turns to beauty and to a tranquillizing order and simplicity. She selects a vase or a baking dish with the æsthetic fastidiousness which beset the artists and artisans of Athens.
And, furthermore, she is Greek in her perennial enthusiasm for fresh knowledge. Her enjoyment of life seems to me intense because she is never tired of exploring the world through every kind of human achievement. She has the curiosity of the Hellenic mind. The Athenian men who were like her made it worth while for other men to be scientists and philosophers and poets.