CORRESPONDENCE.

"APOLOGIA PRO ANE11A. GRAECA."

[TO THE EDITOR. OF THE "SPECTATOR:1

Sra,—There will probably be many reasons why you will not publish this letter, one at least being that long before it. reaches you others on the same subject far more complete will have been published by you. I would, however, wish to make something of a protest against one of the tones—there are two and they are at variance—that pervade your review of The Legacy. of Greece, which appeared in -the Spectator of February-11th.

Your reviewer says as follows :—" If you want• to light your torch go to Athens. But we must not forget that this is a matter of the intellect. If you, want the highest moral and religious inspiration," in matters of national moment, " you must turn from the philosophers of Greece to the Hebrew prophets." Is

this the whole truth And if it is, will he account for the fact that our moral and political philosophy is rooted in the Greek thinkers and not in Hebraic literature ? Take so simple a. conception as the seven cardinal virtues or the seven deadly sins, can he imagine their formularization with Greek thought taken away ? And our political philosophy, the principles necessary to " make a nation great and keep it so " ? If he will take these in order and-try to affix a Hebraic—better say, a Biblical—origin to each of these, ho will find that for. many of them there is no Biblical origin, for the good reason that their origin is Greek—at second-hand, bien entendu, for they mainly roach us through Cicero.

These, however, are generalizations. The argument can better be pointed by definite instances. I would in all serious- ness ask your reviewer to road again—I select these two instances out of many that would be equally relevant—Gergias 508 D. E. (better still all the passages in the Gorgias where Socrates shows that to do evil is worse than to suffer it) and Laws 726 et sqq., and then, with these passages fresh in. his mind, to ask himself if all this is " a matter of the intellect " ? Palpably. it is not, and I am certain that there are many other people besides myself who have " anima naturaliter Christiana" noted against these passages in their Plato. Certainly your reviewer, where he quotes from Dean Inge, takes back his statement that " this is a matter of the intellect." His earlier verdict stands part of the review none the less.

He goes on to state :—" We must never forget the handicap which Greek gets by the fact that what we call Greek literature has gone through a sieve with a very fine mesh. As was natural enough, it was the best. things of Greek literature that were preserved and the worst and most trivial things that were allowed to die." Was this any relation, I wonder, to the Latin sieve which lost us three-fourths of Livy, certainly half of Tacitus and a great deal of Cicero, yet preserved us the.Historia Augusta ? (Observe, I am following his argument, "the best things," not the things which give information and tell us of facts and personages that would otherwise be lost to us entirely.) But this Greek sieve, with its " very fine mesh," allowed the escape of the Lyric poets, of at least five-sixths of those dramatists works by whom have come down to us, of the whole of the New Comedy, upon which later Comedy is, at second-hand, based, and all but a small portion of the philosophic literature of Greece, and if there is one thing in which Greek is admittedly hors concours it is philosophy. (Again we have to thank Cicero for preserving us a little of the cargo.) I would ask your reviewer— once more the definite instance rather than generalization—to re-read Nauck's introduction to his edition of Euripides and then, with that testimony to the caprices of Byzantine education before him, to ask himself whether this " very fine sieve " did not have in places a somewhat irregular mesh. Of course it did, and the fate which has given us the Andromache of Euripides,

and takes from. ue.his Andromeda, weuld_of. ge fer to. put the " fine sieve " theory ant, of court.

Ho. thewspeaks, of the " p.hysicelnausea.." which. affects him from" the-vie and degrading side ef.Greek eivilization." That clearly is his attitude towards the-Greeks—he alludes to itegain rater in his review—and if so there is no more to be said. It is his personal standpoint, and criticism is personal or it is nothing. Still, let us at leastheeertain of-thefacte -on-whieh our " nausea " is based, and I will take the " hideous depravity " which he mentions, since that is,, and must. be, the central. point .1:IL his attack.

I would ask your reviewer to make a Greek- book his livre de chevet for the next year, or two. At the end of that- time ha will have read a great deal of Greek and he• will have found that the " hideous depravity." to which he refers will have been of singularly rare occurrence in his reading. You can. read literally thousands of pages of Greek and not come across a trace of it. Where will he find it .? In Theognis, and he was a Dorian. In Theocritus he will find far too many traces of it, too, and Theocritus was a Dorian likewise. And he will find it in the Socratic portions of Plato. Why ? This " depravity," condemned by law in Athens—one need not go so far- as the In Timarchum, the Symposium itself- furnishes categorical proof of the fact—was a Dorian depravity—in particular, consecrated by the military educational system of Sparta-- and the Socratic circle was philo-Dorian ; its members affected this as they did other Dorian, to be more accurate, Spartan, habits. Your reviewer's feeling of: "nausea sympathize emphatically—poisons everyone's reading of what otherwise is perhaps the most perfect bit of prose over -written by man, but at least let us read the Symposium as it was meant to be read. As Socrates gradually- takes hold of and .dominates the company the disgust, the nausea, which no one can help experiencing from the earlier parts, fades, into the background and then (unique thing, even in Plato), se-he -effaced others, so Socrates effaces-himself and the wise woman of Mantineia takes his place, instructs. him, and the drama—for that it is.—passes into the diviner air. Is the irruption of tho -drunken Alcibiades an anti-climax ? Certainly not, for the personal stainlossness of. Socrates is the dou of the whole drama and Alcibiades, disgusting as he is, adds the final proof of that.

Your reviewer says that Socrates made his protest; and "in the wisest way." He treated it with humour, as a joke, as his personal purity entitled him to. But the condemnation— strange that your reviewer should miss this—comes not from Socrates but from Plato, speaking no longer as the chronicler of Socrates and his circle, but in propria persona (Laws, 836 et sqq.) ; and be it observed that it is Dorian, whom he admires in so many respects, that Plato is reproving. Your reviewer finds the true " backing " of Socrates in this matter in Xenophon. I envy him. As a task and a penance I have read the Memora- bilia—they are pastiche, as, of course, your reviewer is aware— and the Oeconomieus, and have stuck half-way in,tha Xenophon- tic Symposium ; no doubt the reprobation of this depravity. occurs in the latter part of that work which I found. myself unable to manage, so I must go by the critics who have read it to the end. I think your reviewer's verdict would occasion them surprise. As to the Socrates of Xenophon, if. he was really, guilty of the platitudes of the Memorabilia and the rest, why on earth did the Athenians put him to death ? In my estimate of Xenophon I am, I fear, of your reviewer's "-worldly and fas- tidious," and if I want to know what the " naturally Christian " soul of Socrates was like, I seem to find it better in Plato.

Where else in Greek literature do we find this depravity ? (I pass over Straton, for he raked together from every corner a. dunghill which, unfortunately, has come down to us entire ; the " sieve " again, I suppose.) I have omitted Aristophanes. Now, this author was one who neglected no indecency whatsoever, :provided ho thought he could get a. laugh out of- it. In this respect (criticism, as I have said, is a matter of 'personal view) he seems tome to get a little ahead even of Rabelais. Yet how few are the allusions to this depravity among the mass of his obscenities.

The Orators ? Well, there is the In Timarchum, which does not help your reviewer's case, and one speech by Lysias. A wide though, I admit, not exhaustive reading of them . has failed to discover anything else.

If there is one form of expression that should sot forth the, Athenian mind more than another—and.it is Athens pre-emi. neatly that your reviewer is dealing with—it is the drama.. The dramatist depended for his existence on_ the: suffrages of the Athenian mob—there is no other. word for it. And what is found as to this depravity in the Athenian drama ? Comedy apart, thirty-three plays have come down to us complete, and it is mentioned-in them once, and that mention is nut into the mouth cif-the Cyclops; a thing that is drunken, man-eating, and non-human.

- But 'your reviewer-willobject that these thirtrthree dramas are but a minute portion of what once existed. Certainly, but Ne'elcnow a' good deal about those that aro lost ; we have their -titles and subject-matter and sometimes fragments—in the case of 'Euripides fairly copious fragments—and wo have the com- ments on them of later critics, and these things entitle us to say with reasonable certainty that this depravity occurred in but two plays only out of the very large number of which we have testimony—in tho Myrmidons of Aeschylus certainly, probably also in the Chrysippaa of Euripides.

If a feeling of " nausea " or " physical repugnance " is to be created by Greek literature on this score, at least lot us observe as right proportion in the matter and remember how small is the • part of it which can excite such a fooling.

Inevitably one next passes to youy reviewer's condemnation of the treatment of " women as the Greeks treated theirs." I agree, and, particularly as regards Athens, no valid defence can bo made. But wo are dealing with Greek literature, and where, save in the too-famous sentence towards the end of the Funeral Oration and in the Orators, does this fact obtrude itself upon one in that literature ? Even in that of Athens it is the other way. Tho women characters are as fine as the men. The Cassandra of tho Agamemnon, the Antigone in the play named from her and in the Oedipus Coloncus, the wonderful pro- cession of women who pass through the plays of Euripides, can the people that created these characters have been so indifferent, so obtuse, as their laws and social arrangements suggest ? H- and your reviewer is speaking hero of Greeks, not of Athenians only—we pass behind the something which had caused the change (the Dorian invasion, I suppose, which possibly led the earlier races to seclude their women much as the Moham- medan invasion of India is said to have made the Hindus seclude theirs) and get back to the world of Homer, we shall have an almost more wonderful array of women characters to consider— Andromache, Helen at tho Scaean gates, Nausicaa and Penelope and Euryoleia. The-literature of the people who treated women in the way your reviewer condemns contains a gallery -of women portraits second only to that of Shakespeare. It is a paradox which I do not profess to explain, but the fact is beyond argument.

Next-, the " Slime of slavery." Lot us put your reviewer's argument more strongly than he has put it himself. If these people had been barbarians there would be little to say, but it is their transcendence in literature and art which makes the fact that they were slavoowners so unendurable. Does he, I wonder, experience the_ same disgust when he reads Catullus or Virgil, and remembers the society they wore part of ? In estimating Greek, and particularly Athenian, slavery, one has, of necessity, to go beyond Greek testimony, since they could not very well say how their slavery compared with " the middle passage," let us say, of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and one must rely on the conclusions of modern writers. There does, however, seem to be a consensus of opinion among those entitled to speak that slavery in Greece, and, above all, at Athens—and I am not forgetting the mines of Laurium, or the references to :slave evidence under torture in the Orators— was Milder than in almost any other slave-holding civilization of which we have record. There are passages in the Athenian writers which are good evidence that it was mild, that here, as in -other matters, the Athenians certainly and other Greeks possibly, were less cruel and more humane than-any other people of that ancient world -wherein slavery was universal. No worse than your neighbours is a poor •defoneo, but the Greeks seem to have been better than theirs—bettor than their slavo-holding successors of the modern world, too.

Next., cruelty. Your reviewer blames Thucydides for not " making a protest " against the words of the Athenian envoys in the Mellen. dialogue. This is really too nail. He must quarrel, then, with Shakespeare for not having definitely labelled his characters in his stage directions—" This man is good, this one is bad." Thucydides had as -keen a sense of right and wrong, of virtue and wickedness, as any man need to have ; there .are the reflections on the anarchy at Corcyra to prove it, enshrined in -which is the remark, worthy of Pascal, about simplicity of character, and when the trend of his argument requires it, -he brands evil unmistakably. The Mohan dialogue did not require it ; it speaks for itself, and its effect would be utterly spoiled by comment of -any kind. This on Thucydides is the least happy thing in the whole review ; it implies a failure in comprehension, in intelligence.

I repeat the -admission that criticism is a personal thing, and if to your reviewer " the slime of elavory, cruelty and unbridled lust " that has come down to us from the Greek world is " a torrent" " that seems " overwhelming," that is his view and

there is no-more to be said. I can only ask him to consider for a moment the rest of history—ancient, mediaeval and modern— and then perhaps he may perceive other races and other times in which this " torrent " -was more " overwhelming " still— far more so, if he gives to events their due proportion.

I am not forgetting that the review does, in places, speak of Greek thought and letters with unstinted praise, for, as I said before, it has two tones and they do not agree. Perhaps I may attempt a further argument in favour of the greatness of Greek literature, and if so, would introduce it by an aphorism •of Gibbon, " a musical and prolific language that gives a soul to the objects of sense and a body to the abstractions of philosophy " —has Greek over been better or more concisely defined ? Now, to each form of human expression there are languages which are appropriate—generally one language only, occasionally more than one. Who, for instance, writing memoirs or " maximos " would wish to write thorn in any language save French ? If we can conceive a man of literary power who added thereto the possession of half a dozen or more languages so that he was equally master of them all, and then suppose this man to bo writing on mental or moral philosophy, which out of his store of languages would he select wherein to express himself ? Greek, beyond question, and, as near as he could, the Greek of Plato with the terminology of Aristotle added, for in Greek, philosophic conceptions which in any other language would bo a huddle of dry and barren terms (at least to the ordinary man, I am not talking of the professed metaphysician) take on form, content and life—you rise from their perusal with something that has enriched soul and mind. Suppose our master of many languages to be writing poetry. Hero ho would have two languages to select from as alone adequate, English or Greek. So, then, if men would properly express themselves in philosophy or in poetry, this is what, wore the power but given to them, they would be compelled to do. Yet all -this, the expression of some of the highest needs-in man, is only " matter of the intellect."

Permit mo to say that I regret your review profoundly. At a moment when the humanities are fighting for very existence, when they are liable to attack from that envy, " I cannot have it and therefore you shall not," which is one of the nastiest of many nasty features of the day, something better was expected of tho Spectator.

I repeat that it is extremely improbable for many reasons that you will publish this letter. You, however, will have seen it, as will doubtless your reviewer also, and were it not that all it contains is so familiar to him, I could even wish that it might be seen by the editor of the book itself.—I am, Sir, &o., elsewhere.—En. Spectator.]