THE CONSOLATIONS OF THE CLASSICS.
T AM no classical scholar. By this I mean that the attempt made by my masters at school and at Oxford and by my many private tutors to impregnate my mind with the Greek grammar and the Latin grammar was a profound failure. They never succeeded in getting more than a very small lodgment on the countersearp of my mind, and from there they have been easily driven off by a defective memory. With the aid of one of Dr. Giles's " cribs " I can still read a little Cicero or Caesar, but of Creek I have almost forgotten the alphabet. Happily, however, about the time that I abandoned the faint hope of ever reading the classics in the originals, it occurred to me that there were such things as translations, and that I need not wholly forfeit the delights lying ready for me in the literature and languages of Greece and Rome because I could not master the grammars of those tongues. I resolved to read Plato and Homer as I read Isaiah and the Book of Job—in translations. It seemed to me then a bold, almost a blasphemous resolve, but I persisted in the wild and anarchic attempt I am, of course, pitied by my scholarly friends for my impotence of mind ; but, curiously enough, they do not appear • to pity themselves because they are ignorant of the Hebrew grammar, and do not even know the Hebrew alphabet. In any case, I believe I have been able to derive as much comfort and stimulus from the classics during the war as even ex-scholars with two Firsts to their account. Many of them are content, I expect, to repose on their laurels and dream of old victories over the "enclitic De" rather than tackle "the blessed original." For example, I was able (with a certain amount of pride and self-gratification, I admit) to remind a man who took a F;rst in Mods. and a First in Greats that the best arguments against the shirker and the pseudo-conscientious objector are to be found in the sublime passage in the Republic in which Socrates envisages the incarnate Laws, upbraiding the man who is too idle or too proud or too indifferent to fight for his country. The Laws and Socrates conduct their duologue as follows (I quote through- out from Jowett's translation) :— " Tell us,—What complaint have you to make against us which justifies you in attempting to destroy us and the state ? In the first plaoe did we not bring you into existence ? Your father married your mother by our aid and begat you. Say whether you have any objection to urge against those of us who regulate marriage ? ' None, I should reply. 'Or against those of us who after birth regulate the nurture and education of children, in which you also were trained ? Were not the Laws, which have the charge of education, right in commanding your father to train you in music and gymnastic' ' Right, I should reply. 'Well then, since you were brought into the world and nurtured and educated by us, can you deny in the first place that you are our child and slave, as your fathers were before you ? And if this is true you are not on equal terms with us ; nor can you think that you have a right to do to us what we are doing to you. Would you have any right to strike or revile or do any other evil to your father or your master, if you had one, because you have been struck or reviled by him, or received some other evil at his hands I—you would not say this? And because we think right to destroy you, do you think that you have any right to destroy us in return, and your country as far as in you lies ? Will you, 0 professor of true virtue, pretend that you are justified in this ? Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of under- standing ? also to be soothed, and gently and reverently entreated when angry, even more than a father, and either to be persuaded, or if not persuaded, to be obeyed ? And when we are punished by her, whether with imprisonment or stripes, the punishment is to be endured in silence ; and if she lead us to wounds or death in battle, thither we follow as is right ; neither may any one yield or retreat or leave his rank, but whether in battle or in a court of law, or in any other place, he must do what his city and his country order him ; or he must change their view of vrhat is just ; and if he may do no violence to Ina father or mother, much less may ho do violence to his country.'"
In the worst days of the autumn of 1914 I found no little mental stimulus and consolation in that splendid passage in Li vy which describes how the imperturbability of the Roman people broke the hopes of HannibaL He could conquer and destroy their legions, but the Roman's unconquerable mind made him afraid. When I looked round and saw how the better part of our own people knew no doubts and knew no fears as to the end, I remembered that the Germans must, when they saw this, like Hannibal, fear and tremble :—
" Two other circumstances also, one inconsiderable, the other im- portant, diminished his hopes. The important one was, that while he lay with his armed troops near the walls of the city, he was informed that troops had marched out of it with colours flying, as reinforcements for Spain. That of lees importance was, that he was informed by one of his prisoners, that the very ground on which his camp stood was sold at this very time without any diminution in its price. Indeed, so great an insult and indignity did it appear to him that a purchaser should be found at Rome for the very soil which he held and possessed by right of conquest, that he immediately called a crier and ordered that the silversmiths' shops, which at that time stood round the Roman forum, should be put up for aale."—Livy, Book %XV I., cap.
When, too, the pessimists were filling the air with their cries, and were trying, after their manner, to find scapegoats among our soldiers and our statesmen, I thought of the nobler Retrain way, and how the general who had done his best, though defeated by the force of circumstances, received the thanks of the Senate because he had not "despaired of the Republic."
It is not, however, only in the region of war or of politics that the literatures of Greece and Rome could bring comfort. When towns and cities went to the ground before the ruinous onslaught of the Huns, there was consolation for fathers and mothers in the famous passage in the letter to Cicero, rendered so exquisitely by the subtlest of English humorists. [Readers of Tristram Shandy may remember that when Mr. Shandy quoted these words "My Uncle Toby" concluded that when his brother was in the Turkey trade he must have made an expedition to Greece!] :— " Returning out of Asia, when I sailed from Aegina towards Megara, I began to view the country round about. Aegina was behind me, Megara was before, Piraeus on the right hand, Corinth on the left. What flourishing towns now prostrate upon the earth ! Alas ! alas! said I to myself, that man should disturb his soul for the loss of a child, when 80 much as this lies awfully buried in his presence. Remember, said I to myself again, remember thou art a man."—Extract from Servius Sulpicia a consolatory letter to Cicero.
Surely the swallowing up of private griefs in great public calamities has never been more nobly acknowledged. But even greater is that quieting of the soul of the patriot wife who must wait, enduring all things, and with the shock of battle ever before her eyes. I speak, of course, of Hector's farewell to Andromache, the passage which succeeds the description of Hector's taking his son into his arms, after he had put off his trench helmet with its horsehair crest :—
"So spake he, and laid his son in his dear wife's arms ; and she took him to her fragrant bosom, smiling tearfully. And her husband had pity to see her, and caressed her with his hand, and spake and called upon her name : Dear one, I pray thee be not of oversorrowful heart ; no /MR against my fate shall hurl me to Hades ; only destiny, I ween, no man hath escaped, be he coward or be he valiant, when once he hath been born. But go thou to thine house and see to thine own tasks, the loom and the distaff, and bid thine handmaidens ply their work ; but for war shall men provide, and I in chief of all men that dwell in Bios.' "
It is this passage, so well translated by Lang, Leaf, and Myers, to which Pope contrived to give a gratuitously fatalistic twist, though I admit that he was a splendid traitor :—
" Fix'd is the term to all the race of earth, And such the hard conditions of our birth, No force can then resist, no fight can save, All sink alike, the fearful and the brave."
Even from the pessimism of Lucretius we may gather consolation. The famous Invocation of the Second Book teaches us to hold the Hill of Truth at all costs :— "It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships toot upon the Sea ; A pleasure to stand in the window of a Castle, and to see a Battaile, and the Adventures thereof, below ; But no pleasure is com- parable to the standing upon the vantage ground of Truth (A hill not to be commanded, and where the Ayre is alwaies cleare and serene,) And to see the Errours, and Wandrings, and Mists, and Tempests, in the vale below."
And here I cannot forbear to add Bacon's comment ; for it is his immortal paraphrase which I quote :— " So alwaies, that this prospect be with Pity, and not with Swelling or Pride. Certainly, it is Heaven upon Earth, to have a Man's Minds Move in Charitie, Rest in Providence, and Turne upon the Poles of Truth."
But though I, doubtless like thousands of others, have gained consolation from the classics, I should be giving a very false impres- sion if my readers were to think that I turn to these in preference to the divine lessons of patriotism in the Old and in the New Testament. They lie open, however, to every heart. Again, however highly we may value the classics, there is, I confess, a nobler note struck in the English poets, and most of all in Shakespeare and in Wordsworth. Though it is not the measured, almost frigid, wisdom of Plato, the same lesson as to compulsory service is conveyed, and with a far deeper emotion, in the scene In Henry IV. where Falstaff and Baxdolph are applying an
• unjust type of conscription—letting off the well-to-do shirkers for a money payment, and thereby forcing a double duty upon the poor. It is in this scene that Shakespeare rises to a _greater height of patriotic feeling than even in old John of , Gaunt's famous speech. In the prose of Milton and of Halifax, and perhaps most of all in Wordsworth's sonnets and odes . and war pamphlets, the divine flame is bright. I am not, however,
• undertaking the duty of writing an anthology of patriotic prose and verse, but merely trying to show how the classics have helped even the most unclassical of men during the Great War.
But perhaps I ought not to have ventured upon the hallowed ground of classical literature, or indeed of literature at all, for I remember that the learned scholars in the most learned of the Colleges of Oxford who failed in their frontal attack upon my mind, en- trenched in its native mud as they would have said, always led me to understand that he who could not read the classics in the original must be wholly unable to appreciate any literature, ancient or modern, in the true sense. But no one, they also told me, no doubt truly, could understand the classics without understanding the Greek and Latin grammars. The logical conclusion was plain ! How Shakespeare managed was not explained. But then I was so
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