Plain, behind oracles ... and past
All symbols, simple; perfect, heavenly-wild,
The song some loaded poets reach at last—
The kings that found a Child.
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge.—Matthew Arnold in Essays in Criticism (First Series).
An Ancient Radical
William L. Chenery
Euripides and His Age, by Gilbert Murray. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
The “conspiracy of silence” which oppressed the youth of those of us who were born in the late Victorian era never seems more hateful than when some master hand connects the present labors of liberty with the strivings of the infinite past. In some fashion the dominating spirits of a generation ago contrived to make the struggles for human freedom appear as ugly isolated episodes without precursors or ancestry. They forgot the Shelleys and the Godwins and they even denied the significance of the classic forerunners of today’s ardent prophets.
There were happy exceptions. Some of us cherish the teachings of a Virginia professor who, as far as the adolescent capacities of his students permitted, bridged the gap between Socrates’s free questionings and the contemporary yearnings for a world of uncompromising justice and beauty. What that Southern student did for his small band of followers Gilbert Murray has long been doing for the great world. His present contribution belongs to that satisfying series, The Home University Library. Incidentally, one reflects that this Home University is one of the few institutions of learning which has completely avoided the blinders so many are complacently wearing. The Euripides of Murray suggests to the author—and to the reader, one may claim—both Tolstoi and Ibsen. But, one hastens to state, Professor Murray is too learned and thoughtful a man to paint a revolutionary Euripides such as The Masses—much as one loves that exuberant Don Quixote—would delight to honor and to portray. His onset, however, catches us: