THE VALUE OF GREECE
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We
ourselves happen to live in the midst or possibly in the close of one such period.
More change has probably taken place in daily life, in ideas, and in the
general aspect of the earth during the last century than during any four other
centuries since the Christian era: and this fact has tended to make us look on
rapid progress as a normal condition of the human race, which it never has
been. And another such period of bloom, a bloom comparatively short in time and
narrow in area, but amazingly swift and intense, occurred in the lower parts of
the Balkan peninsula from about the sixth to
the fourth centuries before Christ.
Now
it is this kind of bloom which fills the world with hope and therefore makes it
young. Take a man who has just made a discovery or an invention, a man happily
in love, a man who is starting some great and successful social movement, a man
who is writing a book or painting a picture which he knows to be good; take men
who have been fighting in some great cause which before they fought seemed to
be hopeless and now is triumphant; think of England when the Armada was just
defeated, France at the first dawn of the Revolution, America after Yorktown:
such men and nations will be above themselves. Their powers will be stronger
and keener; there will be exhilaration in the air, a sense of walking in new
paths, of dawning hopes and untried possibilities, a confidence that all things
can be won if only we try hard enough. In that sense the world will be young.
In that sense I think it was young in the time of Themistocles and Aeschylus.
And it is that youth which is half the secret of the Greek spirit.
And
here I may meet an objection that has perhaps been lurking in the minds of many readers. ‘All
this,’ they may say, ‘professes to be a simple analysis of known facts, but in
reality is sheer idealization. These Greeks whom you call so “noble” have been
long since exposed. Anthropology has turned its searchlights upon them. It is
not only their ploughs, their weapons, their musical instruments, and their
painted idols that resemble those of the savages; it is everything else about
them. Many of them were sunk in the most degrading superstitions: many
practised unnatural vices: in times of great fear some were apt to think that
the best “medicine” was a human sacrifice. After that, it is hardly worth
mentioning that their social structure was largely based on slavery; that they
lived in petty little towns, like so many wasps’ nests, each at war with its
next-door neighbour, and half of them at war with themselves!’
If
our anti-Greek went further he would probably cease to speak the truth. We will
stop him while we can still agree with him. These charges are on the whole
true, and, if we are to understand what Greece
That
is just the magic and the wonder of it. The spiritual effort implied is so
tremendous. We have read stories of savage chiefs converted by Christian or
Buddhist missionaries, who within a year or so have turned from drunken
corroborees and bloody witch-smellings to a life that is not only godly but
even philanthropic and statesmanlike. We have seen the Japanese lately go
through some centuries of normal growth in the space of a generation. But in
all such examples men have only been following the teaching of a superior
civilization, and after all, they have not ended by producing works of
extraordinary and original genius. It seems quite clear that the Greeks owed
exceedingly little to foreign influence. Even in their decay they were a race,
as Professor Bury observes, accustomed ‘to take little and to give much’. They
built up their civilization for themselves. We must listen with due attention
to the critics who have pointed out all the remnants of savagery and
superstition that they find in Greece Greece
From
all this two or three results follow. For one thing, being built up so swiftly,
by such keen effort, and from so low a starting-point, Greek civilization was,
amid all its glory, curiously unstable and full of flaws. Such flaws made it,
of course,
much worse for those who lived in it, but they hardly make it less interesting
or instructive to those who study it. Rather the contrary. Again, the near
neighbourhood of the savage gives to the Greek mind certain qualities which we
of the safer and solider civilizations would give a great deal to possess. It
springs swift and straight. It is never jaded. Its wonder and interest about
the world are fresh. And lastly there is one curious and very important quality
which, unless I am mistaken, belongs to Greek civilization more than to any
other. To an extraordinary degree it starts clean from nature, with almost no
entanglements of elaborate creeds and customs and traditions.
I
am not, of course, forgetting the prehistoric Minoan civilization, nor yet the
peculiar forms—mostly simple enough—into which the traditional Greek religion
fell. It is possible that I may be a little misled by my own habit of living
much among Greek things and so forgetting through long familiarity how odd some
of them once seemed. But when all allowances are made, I think that this clean
start from nature is, on the whole, a true claim. If a thoughtful European or
American wants to study Chinese or Indian things, he has not only to learn
certain data of history and mythology, he has to work his mind into a
particular attitude; to put on, as it were, spectacles of a particular sort. If
he wants to study mediaeval things, if he takes even so universal a poet as
Dante, it is something the same. Curious views about the Pope and the emperor,
a crabbed scholastic philosophy, a strange and to the modern mind rather
horrible theology, floating upon the flames of Hell: all these have somehow to
be taken into his imagination before he can understand his Dante. With Greek
things this is very much less so. The historical and imaginative background of
the various great poets and philosophers is, no doubt, highly important. A
great part of the work of modern scholarship is now devoted to getting it clearer. But
on the whole, putting aside for the moment the possible inadequacies of
translation, Greek philosophy speaks straight to any human being who is willing
to think simply, Greek art and poetry to any one who can use his imagination
and enjoy beauty. He has not to put on the fetters or the blinkers of any new
system in order to understand them; he has only to get rid of his own—a much
more profitable and less troublesome task.
This
particular conclusion will scarcely, I think, be disputed, but the point
presents difficulties and must be dwelt upon.
In
the first place, it does not mean that Greek art is what we call ‘naturalist’
or ‘realist’. It is markedly the reverse. Art to the Greek is always a form
of Sophia, or Wisdom, a Technê with rules that
have to be learnt. Its air of utter simplicity is deceptive. The pillar that
looks merely straight is really a thing of subtle curves. The funeral
bas-relief that seems to represent in the simplest possible manner a woman
saying good-bye to her child is arranged, plane behind plane, with the most
delicate skill and sometimes with deliberate falsification of perspective.
There is always some convention, some idealization, some touch of the light
that never was on sea or land. Yet all the time, I think, Greek art remains in
a remarkable degree close to nature. The artist’s eye is always on the object,
and, though he represents it in his own style, that style is always normal and
temperate, free from affectation, free from exaggeration or morbidity and, in
the earlier periods, free from conventionality. It is art without doubt; but it
is natural and normal art, such as grew spontaneously when mankind first tried
in freedom to express beauty. For example, the language of Greek poetry is
markedly different from that of prose, and there are even clear differences of
language between different styles of poetry. And further, the poetry is very
seldom about the present. It is about the past, and that an ideal past. What we have to notice
there is that this kind of rule, which has been usual in all great ages of
poetry, is apparently not an artificial or arbitrary thing but a tendency that
grew up naturally with the first great expressions of poetical feeling.
Furthermore,
this closeness to nature, this absence of a unifying or hide-bound system of
thought, acting together with other causes, has led to the extraordinary
variety and many-sidedness which is one of the most puzzling charms of Ancient
Greece as contrasted, say, with Israel or Assyria or early Rome. Geographically
it is a small country with a highly indented coast-line and an interior cut
into a great number of almost isolated valleys. Politically it was a confused
unity made up of numerous independent states, one walled city of a few thousand
inhabitants being quite enough to form a state. And the citizens of these
states were, each of them, rather excessively capable of forming opinions of
their own and fighting for them. Hence came in practice much isolation and
faction and general weakness, to the detriment of the Greeks themselves; but
the same cause led in thought and literature to immense variety and vitality,
to the great gain of us who study the Greeks afterwards. There is hardly any
type of thought or style of writing which cannot be paralleled in ancient Greece
The
variety is there and must not be forgotten; yet amid the variety there are
certain general or central characteristics, mostly due to this same quality of
freshness and closeness to nature.
If
you look at a Greek statue or bas-relief, or if you read an average piece of Aristotle,
you will very likely at first feel bored. Why? Because it is all so normal and
truthful; so singularly free from exaggeration, paradox, violent emphasis; so
destitute of those fascinating by-forms of insanity which appeal to some
similar faint element of insanity in ourselves. ‘We are sick’, we may exclaim,
‘of the sight of these handsome, perfectly healthy men with grave faces and
normal bones and muscles! We are sick of being told that Virtue is a mean
between two extremes and tends to make men happy! We shall not be interested
unless some one tells us that Virtue is the utter abnegation of self, or, it
may be, the extreme and ruthless assertion of self; or again, that Virtue is
all an infamous mistake! And for statues, give us a haggard man with starved
body and cavernous eyes, cursing God—or give us something rolling in fat and
colour....’
What
is at the back of this sort of feeling? Which I admit often takes more
reasonable forms than these I have suggested. It is the same psychological
cause that brings about the changes of fashion in art or dress: which loves
‘stunts’ and makes the fortunes of yellow newspapers. It is boredom or ennui.
We have had too much of A; we are sick of it, we know how it is done and
despise it; give us some B, or better still some Z. And after a strong dose of
Z we shall crave for the beginning of the alphabet again. But now think of a person who
is not bored at all; who is, on the contrary, immensely interested in the
world, keen to choose good things and reject bad ones; full of the desire for
knowledge and the excitement of discovery. The joy to him is to see things as
they are and to judge them normally. He is not bored by the sight of normal,
healthy muscles in a healthy, well-shaped body; he is delighted. If you distort
the muscles for emotional effect, he would say with disappointment: ‘But that
is ugly!’ or ‘But a man’s muscles do not go like that!’ He
will have noted that tears are salt and rather warm; but if you say like a
modern poet that your heroine’s tears are ‘more hot than fire, more salt than
the salt sea’, he will probably think your statement απιθανον ‘unpersuasive’,
and therefore ψυχρον ‘chilling’.
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(изв. "The Legacy of Greece", edited by R. W. Livingstone, OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS)
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