As regards Greek architecture, its ornament is a question of sculpture, its structure is the result of intellect combined with a certain amount of design due to their artistic sense of proportion. The Greeks did great service to humanity in working out the principles of building—but, thereafter, there was no scope for originality. Apart from its sculptural ornament, nothing more monotonous could well be imagined than a series of Greek temples, all of the same type and subject to definite, rigid rules of measurement.[78]
Finally there are two matters I am bound to refer to in connection with these rough notes. First, in merely enumerating the salient features of a nation’s character, one gives no picture whatever of the life they led. The Greek men led a highly intellectual, artistic, and on the whole a very gay life. If we look around us to-day, we shall find among ourselves Greeks, intellectual men who are moral sceptics, who simply do not understand that moral motives exist, who do no act in their lives from a sense of principle, and who live a purely material life (unless perhaps some great crisis, the arrival of the angel of Death or some other overwhelming event, awakens them to a sense of higher things). We can see something like a parallel to the Greeks in the gay, immoral, artistic French aristocracy who lived in the midst of a starving peasantry before the Revolution—or in George Eliot’s fascinating renaissance story in Romola of the young Greek Tito Melema. A man may be cruel, faithless and immoral, and yet live a gay artistic and intellectual life—but it is not such a life as would have appealed to Myers or to ourselves. Secondly, a clear knowledge of the truth about the Greek character does in no way detract from the miracle of their literature or of their art. It adds to the wonder of it all. (If one may with the utmost reverence make another comparison, how can we fully appreciate the wonder and beauty of Christ’s teaching, if we forget the conditions of the time?) To find most beautiful poetry, fine literature, deep philosophic thought, amazing grace and charm in art emanating from this primitive race is purely astounding in itself. And it needs to be borne in mind that even the men who took part in Plato’s Symposium lived in a different atmosphere from our own, and had a very different conception of the physical universe and the moral law. But this should add to our admiration, our veneration, for a Plato who could rise to so great a sublimity of thought in spite of such semi-barbarous conditions and surroundings. These men also looked upon the world with younger and fresher eyes. We are two thousand three hundred years older than they are. They knew very little of the past history of the world and had only an insignificant fraction of our scientific knowledge. If any religious doubts had begun to arise in their minds, they still could not possibly have rid themselves of the belief instilled into them since childhood—and they lived among Nymphs and Fauns, and saw a god in every star and under every wave. Never had they heard or dreamt of any Love of God, or Love of Man. It is only the enthusiast who, by picturing the Greeks as a modern moral nation, detracts from our real interest in them and robs their literature of its fascination. If knowledge of the true Greek character were to destroy all our enjoyment in their art and literature, even then truth must prevail “though the heavens fall”; but the fact is far otherwise. The fuller our knowledge the more we shall enjoy the greatness and beauty of their art and poetry and the more absorbing will be our interest in their literature.
FOOTNOTES
[1] From Richard Hodgson’s Christmas Card, 1904, the Christmas before his death.
[2] To the readers of the Adelaide edition (which was issued only in Australia) I should explain why the book is now so much enlarged. The first issue was prepared hastily and without sufficient care. (The proceeds were to go to the Australian Repatriation Fund, and the book was hurriedly put together and printed to be ready for a Repatriation Day which was announced but actually was never held.) It was my first experience in publishing, and I did not realize the care and consideration required in issuing a book even of this character. Hence (1) part of my manuscript was entirely overlooked; (2) I failed to see that many quotations would be improved by adding their context; (3) I did not go properly through the great mass of Hodgson’s correspondence; and (4) I, wrongly, as I now think, excluded many quotations because I thought certain subjects were unsuitable for the book. Besides extending the scope of the collection by including those subjects I now have no longer restricted myself to the seventy-eighty period. The notes also add materially to the size of this volume.
[3] See Tennyson’s “Princess”:—
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail
That brings our friends up from the underworld