Finds comfort in himself and in his cause; That every man in arms should wish to be. 'Remember,' said Wordsworth to his nephew, 'first read the ancient classical authors; then come to us; and you will be able to judge for yourself which of us is worth reading.' The apathy of the rulers of the civilized world to the astonishing circumstance of the descendants of that nation to which they owe their civilization, rising as it were from the ashes of their ruin [1822], is something perfectly inexplicable to a mere spectator of the shows of this mortal scene. We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece. But for Greece, Rome-the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors—would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still have been savages and idolaters; or, what is worse, might have arrived at such a stagnant and miserable state of social institution [s] as China and Japan possess. The human form and the human mind attained to a perfection in Greece which has impressed its image on those faultless productions, whose very fragments are the despair of modern art, and has propagated impulses which cannot cease, through a thousand channels of manifest or imperceptible operation, to ennoble and delight mankind until the extinction of the race. HERALD OF ETERNITY. Within the circuit of this pendent orb Temples and cities and immortal forms And harmonies of wisdom and of song, And thoughts, and deeds worthy of thoughts so fair. And when the winter of its glory came, The winds that stripped it bare blew on and swept [1 The first of these four extracts is from the Preface to Hellas, Shelley's Poetical Works, Oxford Edition, ed. Hutchinson, p. 442.-EDITOR.] Temples and towers, Citadels and marts, and they Who live and die there, have been ours, Rule the present from the past; On all this world of men inherits Through exile, persecution, and despair, Rome was, and young Atlantis shall become Of all whose step wakes Power lulled in her savage lair. Whose fairest thoughts and limbs were built She knew not pain or guilt. And now, O Victory, blush! and Empire, tremble If Greece must be A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble, To Amphionic music on some Cape sublime, [2 From the Prologue to Hellas 31-43, ibid., p. 444.—EDITOR.] II THE LEGACY OF GREECE: THE LAND AND ITS PEOPLE 1 BY JOHN CLARKE STOBART 'Greece' and 'Greek' mean different things to different people. To the man in the street, if he exists, they stand for something proverbially remote and obscure, as dead as Queen Anne, as heavy as the British Museum. To the average finished product of 'higher education' in England they recall those dog-eared text-books and grammars which he put away with much relief when he left school; they waft back to him the strangely close atmosphere of the classical form-room. The historian, of course, will inform us that all Western civilization has Greece for its mother and nurse, and that unless we know something about her our knowledge of the past must be built upon sand. That is true-only nobody cares very much what historians say, for they deal with the past, and the past is dead and disgusting. To some cultured folk who have read Swinburne (but not Plato) the notion of the Greeks presents a world of happy pagans, children of nature, without any tiresome ideas of morality or self-control, sometimes making pretty poems and statues, but generally basking in the sun without much on. There are also countless earnest students of the Bible who remember what St. Paul said about those Greeks who thought the Cross foolishness and those Athenians who were always wanting to hear something new. St. Paul forgot that 'the Cross' was a typical Stoic paradox. Then there are a vast number of people who do not distinguish between 'Greek' and 'classical.' By 'classics' they understand certain tyrannous conventions and stilted affectations against which every free-minded soul longs to rebel. They distinguish the classical element in Milton and Keats as responsible for all that is dull and far-fetched and unnatural. Classicism repels many people of excel [1 From The Glory that Was Greece (pp. 1-11). London and New York, 1911. The selection is reprinted by permission of J. B. Lippincott, Publishers, Philadelphia.-EDITOR.] lent taste, and Greek art is apt to fall under the same condemnation. It is only in the last generation that scholars have been able to distinguish between the true Greek and the false mist of classicism which surrounds it. Till then everybody had to look at the Greeks through Roman and Renaissance spectacles, confounding Pallas with Minerva and thinking of Greek art as represented by the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön. We are now able, thanks to the labors of scholars and archaeologists, to see the Greeks as they were, perfectly direct, simple, natural, and reasonable, quite as antagonistic to classicism as Manet and Debussy themselves. Lastly, there are a few elderly people who have survived the atmosphere of 'the classics,' and yet cherish the idea of Greece as something almost holy in its tremendous power of inspiration. These are the people who are actually pleased when a fragment of Menander is unearthed in an Egyptian rubbish-heap, or a fisherman fishing for sponges off Cape Matapan finds entangled in his net three-quarters of a bronze idol. And they are not all schoolmasters, either. Some of them spend their time and money in digging the soil of Greece under a blazing Mediterranean sun. Some of them haunt the auction-rooms and run up a fragment of pottery, or a marble head without a nose, to figures that seem quite absurd when you look at the shabby clothes of the bidders. They talk of Greece as if it were in the same latitude as heaven, not Naples. The strange thing about them is that, though they evidently feel the love of old Greece burning like a flame in their hearts, they find their ideas on the subject quite incommunicable. Let us hope they end their days peacefully in retreats with classical façades, like the Bethlehem Hospital. Admitting something of this weakness, it is my aim here to try and throw some fresh light upon the secret of that people's greatness, and to look at the Greeks, not as the defunct producers of antique curios, but, if I can, as Keats looked at them, believing what he said of Beauty, that It will never Pass into nothingness, but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. It cannot be done by studying their history only. Their history must be full of battles, in which they were only moderately great, and petty quarrels, to which they were immoderately prone. Their literature, which presents the greatest bulk of varied excellence |