The Preserving Myths
The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries. By R. R. Bolgar. (C.U.P., 45s.) TROUBLED like many another by the uncertain future of classi- cal studies, Dr. Bolgar has done an heroic thing. He has under- taken an immense inquiry into what kept them going through the dark centuries and on into the light of the Renaissance. Few people can have read quite so many medieval manuals of grammar and rhetoric, medieval translations of, or commentaries on Aristotle, medieval anthologies of what was both useful and 'safe' to read in the literature of Greece and Rome. He has come to the conclusion that for a thousand years, from the middle of the sixth century to the middle of the sixteenth, classical scholarship was maintained by the vital practical need for it of very important people. In the Dark Ages you could not train administrators or have a competent clergy without teaching them Latin. For in that language was enshrined the necessary minimum of information and it was at all events the only available one capable of subtle and precise discussion. As intellectual activity awoke, the Church needed Latin, and beyond Latin, the intellectual equipment pro- vided by Aristotle, in order that her theologians should be able to deal with heresy. As te Renaissance slowly dawned from the fourteenth century onwards, classical studies assisted the new capitalist middle classes to rationalise society and make room in it for their individualism.
But from the sixteenth century onwards, Dr. Bolgar sorrowfully concludes, classical scholars have been supposing their place in the West European scheme of things was an essential one, whereas, in fact, it was already largely ornamental. As he shrewdly remarks, great eighteenth-century scholars like Porson and Bentley were no less remarkable than their medievalpredecessors like Bede and Alcuin or than the fifteenth-century Florentines who gave Europe Plato. But their place in general history is far smaller. Modern languages had become as efficient as Latin and Greek. `Logic, rather than literary taste, forged the strongest link that binds us to Greece and Rome,' he says severely in describing the heroic battle of scholars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to recover Aristotle. This was the apparent conviction of many scholars at the international classical congress at Copenhagen which met last August with, as its main theme, 'the classical pattern in modern western civilisation.' At first sight it sounds a rather grim opinion, but there is a heroic quality about the struggle of medieval scholars for efficacy of expression and thought that loses nothing in Dr. Bolgar's telling. His book gains in clarity by the resolute way he clings to his guiding thread—the method of teaching and the matter that was taught. It has few dull pages. Yet at the end it leaves one unconvinced.
I think it leaves Dr. Bolgar himself a little unconvinced. Other- wise how could he hold out hope for the future based on values
in the classics which are much less practical than those to which he attributes their survival? In his last chapter he expresses the hope that they will still be appreciated because they teach a conception of man as a whole, in contrast with so much modern specialisation which concentrates on only one or two of his aspects. They will also. he thinks, have a permanent value in our thinking about the naldre of society, by making uniquely accessible to us a type of society that is not our own. Dr. Bolgar evidently considers the classical heritage to contain more than the severely intellectual and utilitarian qualities by which he believes it to have survived. His history implies that these more lovable aspects have reached us almost by accident, yet in reading him I cannot escape the im- pression that they played a much bigger part in the survival of the classical heritage than he is willing to admit. He is particularly unconvincing in his account of Renaissance humanism, for though no doubt it did serve the practical needs of a middle class
seeking to emancipate itself from feudalism, it was also a fruit of emancipation, a means of enjoying the newly achieved individ- ualism. Even when we come to the last three or four centuries Dr. Bolgar seems to me quite unduly pessimistic about the number of educated people who have enjoyed the classics. Who, after all, were the purchasers of the innumerable pocket editions of Latin authors, obviously made to give pleasure. that poured from the printing presses of Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?
I suspect that throughout the centuries, even the darkest Middle Ages, the classical heritage owed its survival in part to an element that Dr. Bolgar never seems to consider—of its mythical content. In defining the heritage in the first case he describes it as above all the creation of the rationalist or rationalising city state of the sixth to fourth centuries BC and he seems to believe that Homer's sur- vival is due largely to the accident of his having been the main school text-book of those centuries. He has even an astounding reference to the age reflected in the Homeric poems as 'The Heroic Age of the tribal warfare when . . . man moved in a world he did not try to understand, content to see himself the plaything of supernatural forces beyond his ken.' In other words man in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages never thought! Why then did he tell, and constantly modify in the telling, tales of gods and heroes that remain so strangely significant today? It is surely a grave error to suppose that people who do not possess the intellectual equipment for abstract thinking are stupid or uninquiring. It is not only the rationalism of Greece and Rome that still holds us but the incom- parable transition from imaginative reaction to human experience in myth to intellectual reaction in critical philosophy. If Homer had only survived because he was the nursery background to Aristotle's mind, no new translation of the Iliad could have sold by tens of thousands. It is perhaps suggestive that those same twelfth and thirteenth centuries that recovered Aristotle and so much else for the intellectual life of Europe were also those which absorbed a new influx of myth from the Celtic world with far- reaching results for our contemporary civilisation.
Dr. Bolgar's book is admirable, but it makes me thirst for a supplementary volume that will be even longer and treat the subject quite differently—and would, I think, give much more substance to his hope that classical studies will survive to brighten
further ages. DARSIE GILLIB
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