DIARY
PETER LEVI Gilbert Murray's biography has prompted the thought that the study of Greek as a common pursuit of our culture is a lost cause that fittingly survives in Oxford. The old-Latin schools or grammar schools have gone, grammar has gone, Latin is going and, whatever claim may be made to the contrary, the state has no serious intention of offering the working class anything that you or I would recog- nise as a decent education. The last ripples of the dead Renaissance sighed mockingly on the English shore in Shakespeare's generation. The mind of Milton was honey- combed with the classics and greatly mag- nified their whispers. English literary cul- ture has been determined by the old grammar school syllabus from the 16th century until living memory. Now it is over.
All the same, the old Greek scholars did add to the gaiety of nations. Only one professor of Greek died in a cavalry charge, against Napoleon I believe, but the picaresque travels of Sambucus with his two enormous dogs have a hussar quality, and affection reserves a perpetual lamp for the French scholar Peyrescque (variously spelt) who domesticated a cat in his book- room to stop his manuscripts and books from being consumed by mice. Oxford has had fine professors of Greek from Murray until now, because the chair is Regius, and the appointment by patronage, not by a committee. The late E.R.Dodds, for ex- ample, was expelled from school, spotted by Murray in a verse translation class, and rusticated from his college for refusing to admit that all the Irish rebels in 1916, some of whom he knew, were wicked criminals. He had sympathy with pacifism and mar- ried a medium; he also loved poetry and knew poets. Against everyone's expecta- tion but Murray's he was a brilliant success as Regius. Nor have standards declined in the least since his day; indeed, they have never been higher. But now the General Board enquires of classicists whether they would care to sacrifice the Greek chair or the Latin chair, or some other position. All scholars are deemed equal, so all subjects must be equally cut; that convention is immutable.
Ifled to London to lose myself for an hour or two where traditional values still might flourish, in the Museum of Mankind. Like the model of a coal mine in the Science Museum that used to work if you put in sixpence, the Museuni of Mankind has unlikely addicts, some of them no doubt in search of that rock crystal skull that used to live in the Edward VII Gallery of the British Museum. The things that impressed me most on this visit were old favourites, like the two squatting figures of Bolivian spirits or dead men, placated with cigarettes between their lips and bottles strewn at their feet. I would love to be remembered with a monument like that, and I am sure no one in the village would mind, indeed it might start a fashion, though the vicar would be bound to object. The role of the most minor of the gods of wayside shrines, in whom no one really believes, is dignified and scarcely lucrative, like most of the positions I have occupied in life.
In the Madagascar exhibition the figures of 17th-century soldiers with muskets carry a notice that the natives liked fire-arms, which they treasured and regarded as magical, but for serious fighting they used spears. Their tombs were elaborate enclo- sures of carved wood, which assured their survival into the future, but royal tombs were less elaborate, because kings lived on in their subjects. Both these eccentric beliefs are close to home. It was the rich middle class as it arose that built the most enormous tombs, and the monarchy began to build them only when it lost its sanctity and joined the middle class. We regard atom bombs as magical, we love and treasure them, but for serious fighting we resort to stone-throwing and rubber bul- lets; real bullets are thought of as somehow unfair. The Eskimo exhibition was surpris- ing and pleasing, with a lot of exquisite embroidery. The model of an igloo drew few admirers, but that of a modern Eskimo but with lifesize figures slumped in front of a television set showing genuine Eskimo television drew the biggest crowd in the building, even though no one could under- stand a word of it. If Voltaire were writing this column, he would be quite funny about that.
Some such museum ought to bag exam- ples of the compliment slips and letter- heads that emerge from the offices of Euro-MPs, with photographs of the idiots concerned at the head of all their com- munications. Not even insurance salesmen stoop to that. Is this the advice of PR men, or just the acne of political adolescence, or does it have some European model? Does it derive from those unnerving little photo- graphs of the beloved dead to be found in southern cemeteries? Do the smartest and most thrusting European politicians do it, or only the obscurest, who know them- selves to be too dim to be otherwise recognised? It is a very rum custom.
Iobserve in my elementary Russian reader that Chekhov thinks glasnost is pretty vulgar. He sketches a Pooterish young man who got drunk and fell under a horse. The tiny incident has got into the papers and the young man is thrilled. 'You don't understand the power of glasnost in the papers,' he shouts at his poor old papa. `Now all Russia has heard of me!' It seems to be a mark of the severity of those days, or is it only of normal middle-class timid- ity, that the moment they hear his name has got into the papers, his father goes pale, and his mother eyes her ikon and crosses herself. I too was brought up to believe that glasnost of all kinds was a vulgarity: it was not done to get one's name in the papers. I think some feeling of the same kind lingers in the present Cabinet. Glasnost is not an easy dog to keep on a string, and the possibility that it will sooner or later bite the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is an intriguing one.
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