PROFESSOR BUTCHER ON SOME ASPECTS OF GREEK GENIUS.*
PROFESSOR BUTCHER modestly expresses his fear that there is little in his book " which can be of value to the professed scholar in any given department of Greek learning." Whether such a scholar will learn from these pages anything absolutely new, we need not inquire ; it is certain that he will find in them an influence which will give vitality to the results of study, in themselves often forming an inert and useless mass, the suggestions of a keen and sympathetic intelligence. These chapters—transcripts, for the most part, of lectures delivered to the Professor's own class, or of addresses given to academical audiences elsewhere—preserve in an unusual degree the fresh- ness and force of the living voice. In modern life, wherein States have enormously outgrown the modest proportions which ancient philosophy prescribed for its ideal commonwealth, we must be content with the written in the place of the spoken word. Were Great Britain Athens, we might share the privi- lege of actual audience which fortune has given to the students of Edinburgh. As it is not, and we have to be content with hearing through the medium of the printing- press, we must be thankful for the happy gift which gives so living an inspiration to Professor Butcher's pen. " The Written and the Spoken Word" is, indeed, the title of what is perhaps the most eloquent portion of the volume ; in this the writer gives us what may be called an apologia pro offiQio into. He begins by insisting on a fact which we do not remember to have seen so vividly expounded elsewhere, the attitude of suspicion, almost of dislike, which the Greeks took up with regard to the art of writing. " Curious as they were to find out, and to tell all that their neighbours knew or did, quick to borrow and to adapt the ideas of others, they were yet slow to appreciate the full value and significance of this one art. For centuries they employed it, not as a vehicle of thought, but almost wholly for memorial purposes, such as registering treaties and commercial contracts, preserving the names of Olympian victors, fixing boundaries, and the like."
• Some Aspects of Greek Genius. By S. B. Butcher, M.A. London : Macmillan and Co. 'ROL
(This has a bearing on the question as to the written or oral transmission of the Homeric poems.) Nor was this dislike without some reason. Professor Butcher finds an analogy in the scientific definition of life as the " continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations;" whereas death is the "non-correspondence of the organism with its environ- ment." Another might be suggested by the familiar utterance: " The letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive." Nor, in- deed, could a more forcible illustration be found than the example from religion which is suggested by these words. The most narrow theologians are, happily, broader in practice than they seem to be when they theoretically define their position ; but it cannot )3e doubted that the attempt to restrict truth within the limits of a writing has a lamentably depres- sing and degrading effect. Our author, after describing the effect, often apparently out of proportion to its intrinsic merit, produced by the written word, goes on :-
" Most books are in a sense unhuman. How few men write like themselves and give us a true impression of what they are Once on paper, men are apt to lose their own character, and either to become neutral and impersonal, or to take—unconsciously—a fictitious personality. When we meet the writer afterwards we are tantalised, almost angry with him, for having led us astray. Now, the speaker, or at least the teacher, cannot long wear a mask. He cannot keep up the neutrality of a book. You get to know him at the same time that you learn the subject e'he is talking about. To come into contact with learning in a human and embodied form has a peculiar mental stimulus of its own."
But Professor Butcher does not forget the other side of the question. He states it in a very fine passage :-
" The life of a great work of literature consists precisely in its faculty of continuous adjustment' to a changing environment. Plus ca change plus c'est la. name chose. There are books, poems in particular, whose vitality is inexhaustible, which have fresh meanings for every age. The author,' we are sometimes reminded, was not conscious of all these meanings ; your interpretation of him is fanciful ; you are reading into him the ideas of other times ; you find in him more than was intended.' Yes, but this is the very evidence that the book has life, that it is a living organism of a high and complex character. mobile and sensitive to its surroundings. It has latent correspondences with human nature, which time alone discovers ; it has the spontaneous activity, the unconscious self-adapting power of genius. The greater the genius of the writer the more responsive will the book be to its environment, the greater will be the area over which its relations extend, the more far-reaching, both in time and space, the range of its correspondences. For genius is, in fact, life and the faculty of engendering life in others."
" The Unity of Learning " is an able plea against the ten- dency to excessive specialisation which is one of the educa- tional dangers ahead of us, and which suggests a most weighty consideration against the proposed displacement of a literary by a scientific training. Science, indeed, is bound to specialise more and more. Even one of its provinces is seen to be too great to be properly subjugated by one mind. The individual must be content with acquiring a district which must always be becoming more and more narrowly limited. Professor Butcher states this with much force :— " Excessive specialisation would moreover ultimately involve the dissolution of society. Conceive, if you can, a world of specialists, in which each man's vision and labour are concen- trated on some microscopic point in the field of human activity, and the very idea of a political and social organism disappears. Thera is a point at which the subdivision of labour in the intel- lectual sphere must be checked, and some unifying principle introduced, if we are to retain any rational conception of man, or of the world or of human life. The commonwealth of learning is at present endangered by disintegrating tendencies. A single science in the course of a few years is multiplied into half-a-dozen sciences; mere disiecta 'umbra of knowledge they will be useless, they are reunited by constructive thought and held together by some regulative and master principle. Here, then, comes in the function of Philosophy,—to survey the whole field of labour even to its farthest limits ; to exhibit the common principles underlying the several sciences, the laws of thought which govern their methods ; to harmonise their results and reduce to unity their highest generalisations : in a word, to bind together the many domains and outlying provinces of learning, and to form them into a system. Plato, you will remember, formed a grand idea of Philo- s)phy, as that comprehensive science which embraces not only logic and ethics and metaphysics, but also the study of politics, of religion, of fine art, of social science, of language, and of education. It was an idea impossible to realise in the infancy of the sciences, but it was a vision from the mount of prophecy ; it is still a vision, but a waking vision, and no mere dream. Philo- s 3phy may hope to be restored to something like her old supremacy through the agency of those very sciences which have dethroned hoc. Their highest generalisations are for her the points of de- parture, they are the materials on which she works. Philosophy should aspire to become the Science of the Sciences, the unity and meeting-point of all; including all and yet distinct from each."
Something of the same kind may be observed in the world of material industry. The excessive subdivision of labour answers, in a way, to the excessive specialisation of know- ledge, and is even more depressing in its influence on the individual worker. When a worker made the whole or the greater part of the article on which he laboured, there was an interest and a dignity in his work which is wanting when his life is spent in the absolutely mechanical production of some minute fraction of it.
"What We Owe to Greece," is a masterly and many-sided exposition of a great subject. The Greeks' love of knowledge for its own sake, their view of the " sovereign efficacy of reason," their effort to find a rational basis for ethics, their development of literature, their foundation, still fertile of good to the world, of the science of politics, are effectively stated; but perhaps the most striking part of the essay is that which treats of their art in its relation to Oriental influences :—
"Let us go back for a few minutes to that early time of which Homer and Herodotus have left us a picture. By land and by sea there came to Hellas the marvels of the East. Golgos, Idalia, Curium, Larnaka, and Nimroud have yielded to us their treasures, and all tell the same story—the story of the splendour of the East and the wonder of the West. The picture of Herodotus is still fresh : the Phoenician trader—the carrier of the ancient world—voyaging in his black ship, freighting his vessel with the wares of Egypt and Assyria ; the landing on the Argive coast ; the five days' fair ; the throng of eager Hellenes. And those very wares for which they bartered are scattered now throughout the museums of Europe ; fantastic carved shells, bronze idols, silver bowls graven with zones of tigers and with hybrid monsters— winged sphinxes, chimaeras, human-headed birds—things born of an unbridled Eastern imagination, and wrought with prolific in- dustry in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. Egyptian art, like Egyptian thought, was, we know, heavy with the incubus of an all-powerful priesthood ; it was an elaborate cult of the dead, haunted, half-scared with the shadows of the underworld. It was the art of a people who called their houses hostelries' (KaTaMicress), places of temporary sojourn, while their tombs they called the eternal homes.' Among their gods were dog-headed apes, whose animal forms, born of a totemism never wholly extinct, were to later days hybrid symbols, incarnate dogmas ; their proportions were conventional, their individuality floating and confused, and their virtue lay rather in size than in symmetry. Assyrian art, on the other hand, was the outcome, and bore the impress, of a despotism not religious but secular. The king was to the Euphrates what the priest was to the Nile. With laborious detail the Assyrian artist inscribes upon the palace walls the story of the monarch's prowess, of his fierce license, of his inhuman courage. of the abject multitude that abase themselves before him. Six thousand square metres are not enough for the tedious iteration. Even the kings are typ a, not individuals ; the artist works by precept, almost by prescript on ; he is but the lifeless mouthpiece of a system, a servile chronicler, now rising to bom- bast, now sinking to garrulity. All this we know in the light of a mature art-criticism ; but how is the Greek to fare when some thirty centuries ago he looks on this world of fantastic wonder with child-like eyes ? We might tremble for the issue did we not know the sequel. It is as though he said to himself,—' I will borrow from this artist of the East his technical skill ; I will learn of him his sleight of hand ; he shall teach me to carve and to grave, to inlay with metal and to fashion with clay.' That he did so learn, literature and art alike tell us. The silver bowl which Achilles gave as a prize at the funeral of Patroclus was made by Sidonian artists, and brought by Phmnicians over the sea ; Helen's silver work-basket, which ran on wheels, was fashioned in Egyptian Thebes. But against the spirit of the East the spirit of the Hellene revolted. To the Egyptian priest he appears to say : am a layman; I worship in the sunshine a god who is both human and divine, who is to me a familiar pre- sence, who dwells with men, not remote and inaccessible, not incarnate in the form of a beast. I pray to him with upright form and uplifted hands, as man to man.' And to the Assyrian : I am a freeman, the slave of no despot ; I reject your splendour for the one, your cowering misery for the many. Your monarch is a tyrant, your boasted magnificence is barbarism.' And to both he said as an artist : 'Your art is monotonous and lifeless, because it is priest and tyrant ridden, because the individual artist is nothing, the precept he inculcates everything. Your history, that should live and breathe upon your sculptured walls, is a bare chronicle. Your gods are not persons but attributes : you tolerate the ugly for the sake of dogma. You are a nation of symbols, of abstractions, of fantastic speculation. In religion as in art, at one moment licentious, at another you are rigidly didactic. Because you disallow reason you are forced to be chimerical.' This profession of faith was not put into words, but we read it in Greek history."
Thus Greece had won a victory over degrading Powers of the East long before the day of Marathon. We must not forget to mention, though we have not space to criticise, the longest and most elaborate of Professor Butcher's essays, "Aristotle's Conception of Fine Art and Poetry." This is, in fact, an exposition of the Poetics, and may be most advantageously consulted by the student.
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