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THE LEGACY OF GREECE.*

This is a most attractive book. All concerned in its production deserve our heartiest thanks, and especially • The Legacy of Greece: Essays. By Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L eatb, D'Arey W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingstone, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Bloruflehl. Edited by B. W. Livingstone. Oxford; at the Clarendon Press. l7s. 6d. net.] Mr. Livingstone, who, in the dramatic sense of the word, is the producer of the volume. With his short preface we are in accord. "No age," he tells us, "has had closer affinities with Ancient Greece than our own ; none has based its deeper life so largely on ideals which the Greeks brought into the world." The fifth and following centuries before Christ—which were, of course, par excellence the centuries of Hellenic and Hellenistic culture—are, he goes on to say, our "nearest spiritual kin." We agree, generally, though, perhaps, we should differ a little in our explanation. Mr. Livingstone, we gather, or at any rate expect, would put the- fact aforesaid down to certain special characteristics of the present age. For ourselves, though we believe the fact to be true, we attribute it rather to the einumstance that whenever there is great activity in human mind, general unrest, great lust for new knowledge and discovery in the spiritual fields and in the fields of art, men turn instinctively to the Greeks. It was this that made the Renaissance, not the sack of Constantinople and the dispersal of a few scholars and their MSS. over Europe. Greek culture had always smouldered in Europe ; but suddenly the wood became dry, or a favourable wind blew, or some other cause arose, and flame blazed forth. So it is now. We turn to the Greek spirit because we need it ; and as men always will in like case. In the Arta, in Science, in Poetry and in Philosophy,. Greece, or rather Athens and Attica which were the epitome of Greece, has the quality of touchwood. It is the medium in which to cultivate the divine spark of inspiration. 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 those things which make a nation great and keep it so, and, again, if you want to know what ruins kingdoms and lays cities flat, you must

turn from the philosophers of Greece to the Hebrew prophets :—

" As men divinely taught, and better teaching

The solid rules of civil government In their majestic unaffected style, Than all the Oratory of Greece and Rome. In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt, What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so,

What ruins kingdoms, and lays cities flat."

But though we must make that proviso, our business is not to assert the claim of the Hebrew in the matter of the world's spiritual endowments but to deal with The Legacy of Greece. With almost all that Professor Gilbert Murray tells us in his enchanting essay, "The Value of Greece to the Future of the World," we are in agreement. We use the word " enchanting " advisedly, for it breathes that atmosphere of surprise which is inherent in the magical, and does so with a moderation, a suavity and a generosity worthy of that Greek spirit which' is its exemplar as it is its theme. For instance, speaking of the style of Greek poetry, he tells us that the scholar, "when ho opens one of his ancient poets, feels at once the presence of something lofty and rare—something like the atmosphere of Paradise Lost. But the language of Paradise Lost is elaborately twisted and embellished into loftiness and rarity ; the language of the Greek poem is simple and direct." We yield to none in our admiration of Paradise Lost, but that is a true bill. Professor Murray rightly goes Gil to ask "What does this mean ? " for it is a vital fact. He gives, we think, the right answer : "I can only suppose that the normal language of Greek poetry is in itself in some sense sublime." We cannot quote the whole of his explanation, but the following passage is a good example of his exposition :— " What is it that gives words their character and makes a style high or low ? Obviously, their associations ; the company they -habitually keep in the minds of those who use. them. A word which belongs to the language of bars and billiard saloons will become permeated by the normal standard of mind prevalent in such places ; a word which suggests Milton or Carlyle will have the flavour of those men's minds about it. I therefore cannot resist the conclusion that, if the language of Greek poetry has, to those who know it intimately,,, this special quality of keen austere beauty, it is because the minds of the poets who used that language were habitually' toned to a higher level both of intensity and of nobility than ours. It is 'a 'finer language because it expresses the minds of finer men. By 'finer men' I do not necessarily mean men who behaved better, either by our standards or by their own ; I mean men to whom the fine things Of the world, sunrise and sea and stars and the love of man for man, and strife and the • facing of evil for the sake of good, and even common things like meat and drink, and evil things like hate and terror, had, as it were, a keener edge than they have for us and rolled a swifter and a nobler reaction."

What Professor Murray- says about the association of words. -

and of words thus becoming—as Frederick Myers put it—centres of emotional force in themselves, is perfectly true. We cannot, however, help thinking that the suggested comparison with our own language is to some extent misleading. We must never forget the handicap which Greek gets by the feet 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. We should think much better of the English language if all we possessed of it were the beat plays of Shakespeare, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, the translation of the Bible, Orme's History of the War in the East Indies, Boswell's Johnson, Horace Walpole's letters, the best things of Dryden and Pope, and the poems of Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge.

It must not be supposed, however, that Professor Gilbert Murray is a servile admirer of the Greeks. Lover as he is, and inspired by a lover's loyalty, he has the good sense to see that there are many things in which the Greeks were not noble, but infamous. But here Professor Murray had better speak for himself :—

"And here I may meet an objection that has perhaps been lurking in the minds of many readers. 'All this, they may say, professes to be a simple analysis of known facts, but in reality is sheer idealization. Those Greeks whom you call so " noble " have long since been exposed. Anthropology has turned its searchlights upon them. It is not only their ploughs, their weapons, their musical instruments, and their painted idols that resemble those of the savages ; it is every- thing else about them. Many of them were sunk in the most degrading superstitions : many practised unnatural vices : in times of great fear some were apt to think that the best " medicine " was a human sacrifice. After that, it is hardly worth mentioning that their social structure was largely based on slavery ; that they lived in pretty little towns, like so many wasps' nests, each at war with its next-door neighbour, and half of them at war with themsel7es !' If our anti-Greek went further he would probably cease to speak the truth. We will stop him while we can still agree with him. These charges are on the whole true, and, if we are to understand what Greece means, we must realize and digest them. We must keep hold of two facts : first, that the Greeks of the fifth century produced some of the noblest poetry and art, the finest political thinking, the most vital philosophy, known to the world ; second, that the people who heard and saw, nay perhaps, even the people who produced these wonders, wore separated by a thin and precarious interval from the savage. Scratch a civilized Russian, they say, and you will fiitd a wild Tartar. Scratch an ancient Greek, and you hit, no doubt, on a very primitive and formidable- being, somewhere between a Viking and a Polynesian. That is just the magic and wonder of it. The spiritual effort implied is so tremendous. We have read stories of savage chiefs converted by Christian or Buddhist missionaries, who within a year or so have turned from drunken corroborees and bloody witch-smellings to a life that is not only godly but even philanthropic and statesman- like. We have seen the Japanese lately go through some centuries of normal growth in the space of a generation. But in all such examples men have only been following the teaching of- a superior civilization, and after all, they have not ended by producing works of extraordinary and original genius. it seems quite clear that the Greeks owed exceedingly little to foreign influence. Even in their decay they were a race, as Professor Bury observes, accustomed 'to take little and to give much.'"

Though Professor Murray sees and condemns the darker

side of Greek life, he does not, we -think, make sufficient allowance for the sense of physical nausea, as well as what

Swift called mesa indignatio, which is created by the vile and degrading side of Greek civilization. Even in spite of the sieve of which we have spoken, the slime of slavery, cruelty and unbridled lust has come down to us in a torrent that sometimes seems overwhelming. We admit that in this matter it is a misfortune to have a weak stomach, arid that it is much

better to be one Of those people who like the things they like

. .

more than they hate the things they hale. Still, even apart from the hideous depravity which made " love " mean what it meant in Athens, what are we to say of a people who treated women as the Greeks treated theirs, what of the inhuman logic, the pitiless, merciless wickedness which one sees exposed in such a document as "the Mellen controversy in Thucydides ? Here is hell let loose with a vengeance. What is worse is that so good a man as Thucydides—f or clearly he was by nature a good man—did not think it necessary to make any, protest in regard to the cold-blooded infamies which he attributed- to the Athenian envoys.

Yet the present writer is sure that, in spite of the physical repugnance he feels for the Greeks, he is not doing justice to the Greek spirit if he lets repugnance prevail, and, does . not repay in honest homage what he owes to that spirit. After all, there were unstained men even in Greece. Did not Socrates make his protest against the Greek vice, and make it in the wisest way ? And was he not nobly backed by the soldier- scholar who, in spite of the scoffs of the worldly and fastidious, must be regarded as a true Greek ? Xenophon's Symposium as well as Xenophon's Memorabilia is indicative of this better side of Greek life, and affords one more proof of how unwise it is to draw an indictment against a whole nation. Therefore, once more, with all their faults we must bow in awe and reverence to the Greek spirit. What a people ! What a literature ! What a sense of the beautiful and the serene !

A very remarkable proof of the spiritual predominance of the Greek is to be found in the second essay in the volume— that by Dean Inge, entitled "Religion." Dean Inge has left us all under a debt of gratitude by his fearlessness, plain speaking and highly spiritualized criticism ; but we have never read anything better from his pen than the essay in question. Every line of it is worth studying. The end is so good that we must quote it, though, in a sense, it is half spoilt by being torn from its context. Still, we feel certain that a great many people who read it in these columns will be drawn thereby to seek the book for themselves :—

" The divorce between religion and humanism began, it must be admitted, under Plato's successors, who unhappily were indifferent to natural science, and did not even follow the best light that was to be had in physical knowledge. In the Dark Ages, when the link with Greece was broken, the separation become absolute. The luxuriant mythology of the early Greeks was not unscientific. In the absence of knowledge gaps wore filled up by the imagination, and the 'method of trial and error.' The dramatic fancy which creates myths is the raw material of both poetry and science. Of course religious myths may come to be a bar to progress in science ; they do so when, in a rationalizing age, the question comes to be one of fact or fiction. It is a mistake to suppose that the faith of a ' post-rational ' age, to use a phrase of Santayana, can be the same as that of an unscientific age, even when it uses the same formulas. The Greek spirit itself is now calling us away from some of the vestments of Greek tradition. l'he choice before us is between a post-rational ' traditionalism, fundamentally sceptical, pragmatistic' and intellectually dis- honest, and a trust in reason which rests really on faith in the divine Logos, the self-revealing soul of the universe. It is the belief of the present writer that the unflinching eye and the open mind will bring us again to the feet of Christ, to whom Greece, with her long tradition of free and fearless inquiry, became a speedy and willing captive, bringing her manifold treasures to Him, in the well-grounded confidence that He was not come to destroy but to fulfil."

Let us, before we leave Dean Inge's essay, say how thoroughly we agree with the last sentence. It is only when we use "the

unflinching eye and the open mind" that we have a right to proclaim ourselves the'followers of Christ. He is an unworthy disciple who seeks Christ except as a seeker after truth, for was it not our Lord who told' us that the truth should make us free ? Again, what did He mean when He told us "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God " ? The man who is pure in heart is the man with single motives—the man who has a pure aim, who is not the slave of mixed and therefore selfish desires—the man who can give himself whole- heartedly to following the Gleam. He sees God daily and hourly. His purity of heart makes him at ono with the Divine.

Though we have dwelt upon the essential questions involved in the study of the Greek spirit, it must not be supposed that in the work before us the other sides of Greek life are left untouched. There are fascinating essays on Philosophy, on Mathematics and Astronomy, on Natural Science, on Medicine, on Literature and on History. Again, "Political Thought is dwelt upon at length, as are also the Lamps of Greek Art." Finally, there is an admirable study of Greek Architecture by Sir Reginald Blomfield. And here we may add that there are a number of exceedingly well-chosen illustrations. Especially curious among these are the two photographs representing the reducing of a dislocated shoulder and the reducing of a dislocated jaw, taken from a ninth century MS., which was itself copied from a pre- Christian original.

Take the book as a whole, it is one of the most fascinating compilations of our time. Let us hope that Mr. Livingstone will get his crew together for a new venture and, like another Jason, bring us back another Golden Fleece.