Are Our Pearls Real?

by GILBERT MURRAY

1

CLASSICAL studies have in our time made, like other special subjects, immense advances. Our knowledge of Greek papyri, both literary and non-literary, is far greater than ever before. So is our knowledge of ancient art in all its forms. We know more of Minoan problems, both historical and linguistic; more also of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid periods; far more about the early Greek or pre-Greek relations with the various Hittite and Anatolian peoples whose languages have been recently deciphered and understood. Of course, we understand far better than our fathers the anthropological problems of Greek religion and custom. While no doubt the prospects of a Latin quotation in the House of Commons or a sermon are much less bright than they were in Mr. Gladstone’s time, or even in Mr. Asquith’s, I think there is among non-classical people a certain general desire, much more widespread than in the last century, to know something about these famous old Greeks and Romans—provided it does not involve too much trouble or loss of time.

I am thinking of classical studies in a sense which may almost be called traditional in the more cultivated classes in England. I remember once examining at Winchester and being struck by the readiness with which the good boys quoted Shakespeare and Milton. I asked Dr. Burge, the headmaster, if at Winchester they laid great stress on the teaching of English literature. He said no, but explained that a boy in college would be rather laughed at if he did not know his Shakespeare and Milton. That is, a properly cultivated man would know the great classics of his own literature, but would realize that the great classics of England and of all modern Europe cannot be even approximately understood and enjoyed except with some knowledge of the basic Greek and Latin classics on which they stand. With some writers this is obvious; who could begin to understand Milton or Shelley or Racine without Greek? But Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe really stand upon the same original base.

Does this make the field almost impossibly wide except for an omnivorous reader? Yes; of course no one can cover it all. But it is worth remembering that there is a vast difference between the Greek and Latin classics on the one hand and the literature of ancient Mesopotamia and modern Europe on the other. The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Hittite remains are the accidental and unselected remains of a very large literature; legal decrees, contracts, royal records, private letters, magical charms, and religious formulae, mixed up with a few songs and epics. Modern literature, since the invention of printing, is so overpoweringly voluminous that of the books in the great libraries 1 dare say hardly one in a hundred expects to be read again. But a fair familiarity with the Greek and Latin classics provides a key to all the modern European classics. These words written down and copied again and again, represent moments of experience which mankind would not allow to die, moments too precious to be forgotten. In these passages, the soul of man stands at the door and knocks; it is for each one of us to open or not to open, and if we do not open, the message that should have been immortal dies.

Are we classical scholars perhaps absurdly overestimating our province, proclaiming as true pearls ornaments which are only imitations? We can, of course, claim that what we call a classical education does, as a matter of fact, seem to produce good results. In most of the leading departments of life, in the bar, the civil service, the Church, or the House of Commons, people with the traditional classical education have a singularly high record. Nay, when Lord Asquith of Bishopstone remarks that India was probably never so well governed as when its rulers were trained to write Latin verse, it is difficult to contradict him.

A critic can only point out that the best administrators, if they mostly used to write Latin verses, also used to wear top hats and whiskers; such customs arc equally irrelevant and equally obsolete. “Surely,” the critic will proceed, “the whole system is absurd. To spend most of your education in learning two languages which you never mean to speak, and would nowhere be understood if you did. You say it is for the sake of the literature? But the literature has all been translated again and again and again. Surely some of the translations are satisfactory? Is it for the historical significance of those ages? But modern Europe has for generations been studying Greek and Roman history and poring over the pages of Greek and Roman philosophers. Surely any message, any revelation, which they may have for us must long ago have permeated our whole tradition. Think of the vast fields of knowledge and culture which you are leaving neglected through this concentration on classical literature. Learn,” he will say, “practical technology, learn nuclear fission, learn medicine and surgery, learn modern languages, learn at least something new, and you will have some chance of meeting the most urgent needs of your generation. Do not go on digging in an utterly exhausted mine for metal which is not there, and which, except to a narrow-minded grammarian, would not be of much value if it was.”

This criticism seems at first sight obvious and convincing. One can only wonder why it is that practically no really civilized country has acted upon it. All civilized people have their classics. Our European practice is only a particular treatment of a problem that is world-wide.

I had a visit several years ago from a Chinese savant. It was before the rise of Communism, but well in the midst of the general revolutionary movement associated with Sun Yat-sen. My visitor was troubled about the growing neglect of the classics in China. He was a supporter of Sun Yat-sen and was friendly to the American missionaries; but in neglecting the classics, he felt, China was forgetting her own soul. The classics were the sayings and thoughts which had been chosen by the judgment of twenty or thirty generations as the most valuable, the best worth remembering. They were not new discoveries. They were permanent truths or good counsels which all the more because of their remoteness, because all irrelevancies are taken away, can say at certain crises just what we want said.

And the same with our memories of Greek and Latin classics. The true classic must have weathered the ages and have stood out above the fashions of literary cliques. It ought also to be a link of united feeling bet ween people otherwise separate, as a phrase from the Bible or Pilgrim’s Progress is — or used to be — in England; as a phrase from Virgil still is among educated men throughout Europe. What a loss it would be to any people to have lost this trusted link, the common joy, this guidance!

2

Now the study of the classics with us in England follows in the main the same lines as that in all the countries that have any ancient culture at all, but in some ways it is peculiar. For one thing, we do not attach any specially religious or superstitious value to our Latin and Greek classics, though of course Greek has its special place as the language of the New Testament. Nor do we associate them with any nationalist feeling such as almost all nations feel about their respective classics, and the French and Italians, for instance, tend to feel about Latin and Greek. Further, like the other nations of Europe, but unlike most Eastern nations, we have to learn not one language but two. That is no doubt a burden.

The case for Latin is clear. Most cultivated Europeans know some Latin, and for several centuries they normally spoke and wrote it. But what of Greek? Well, to the Romans themselves the classics were in Greek. To Cicero, Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, the source of all culture was in the exemplaria Graeca, and we children of Rome naturally try to learn the classics that the Romans learned. But is that a sufficient reason? Would it not be more sensible to be content with Latin and not take on the heavy burden of two classical languages? I think not, chiefly because the exemplaria Graeca are so extraordinarily good. They are our best pearls.

Human history is not a flat plain, nor yet a continuous slope, neither upward nor downward. It is all mountain peaks and valleys and flats. Almost every human art or capability has its Blütezeit, its flowering time, in which it produces work that becomes classic to other periods. In modern times one sees, speaking roughly, a great Blütezeit for painting in the Renaissance, from Giotto to Rembrandt; in music perhaps in a period just over, from Bach to Wagner; in science perhaps a period of which we are just in the zenith, or, as some scientific friends tell me, just approaching the zenith.

Now, from that point of view, and it is one of obvious good sense and importance, it seems undeniable that ancient Greece provides a period of extraordinary and unique importance. The Greeks produced and handed on to us work which has served as a sort of permanent model to all Europe — poems of which a plain prose translation, with most of the beauty lost, can sell today, two thousand years later, in hundreds of thousands. They produced drama over which men still weep and laugh, and to which man never created anything approximately equal till the Elizabethan period, two thousand years later; philosophy of which one can say much the same. Are not our philosophers still finding it worth while to study Plato, and Aristotle, and even the pre-Socratios? Is it not amazing that, in England alone, there have been five different translations of the Republic within the last few years? Plato has many faults, every critic lately has been dwelling on them, but he is still alive, still full of living beauty.

Something very similar can be said of other forms of art, such as sculpture and architecture, and such types of prose literature as the strictly political history of Thucydides and the looser, wider, and more anthropological research of Herodotus. They are works of genius; they cannot die. Nor can anyone say of them what Voltaire impudently said of Dante, that their reputation is established forever because no one will ever read them again. Our philosophers and historians are constantly re-examining them and have as a rule no doubt about their surpassing greatness.

And yet, are we deceiving ourselves? Can it really be reasonable, as I suggested before, to spend most of your education in rereading, relearning matter that has been read and known before — to be always learning, never creating, seldom making any new discovery? This argument has much weight. I think the main answer to it is that the alternative is to have no classics at all. The classics are never mere books of information. They are essentially the books that you can read and reread, learn and venerate and love; and to be destitute of such books is to a civilized nation repulsive. It comes near to being absorbed, like an animal, in the necessities of day to day, the prison of the personal material present.

Yes, a critic may say, but granted that Greece has largely taught us our philosophy, and that the effort of learning the Greek language helps us to get our thoughts down to clearer and simpler forms, does it not follow that it also puts us more under the influence of Greek thought than is really wholesome? Many people think that Greek modes of thought are already far too dominant.

There is something in this. I can quite sympathize with that writer to the Times about a chair of philosophy at one of the newer universities, who wished to make it a necessary qualification that the candidate should never have learned Greek. If all the others know Greek, it may well be desirable that one at least should approach his problems by some totally different road. Philosophy advances by contradictions and corrections, and a new line of approach to its problems is always welcome. How is it, then, that the sort of philosophy that becomes a classic, though corrected and contradicted, is never killed? How many times has Plato been contradicted, disproved, re-explained, and again disproved? I suspect that the best and most classic philosophy does not profess to give a clear and final answer to a definite problem; it helps you to see deeper and more clearly into subjects about which you will never reach the whole truth. The whole may be beyond human intelligence, but it is a great thing to be able to follow or accompany a great mind in penetrating deeper into the mystery.

Most people make a distinction here between real philosophy and physical science, saying that science just gives you the true answer to a limited question and goes no further. But I doubt whether that is true. I should have thought that the really great scientist, like the great philosopher, was always conscious that his answer was likely in course of time to be corrected, and that beyond his ascertained facts there remained, and perhaps would always remain, a region of wonder. Thus even our philosophy requires always to be rethought over, and reread.

3

THIS is more obviously and profoundly true of the other great heritage which the Greeks have left us, poetry. Philosophy is primarily a matter of hard thinking; it implies criticism, contradiction, statements with a sharp intellectual edge. Poetry depends on our sense of beauty, on admiration and delight, on emotion and sympathy with emotion. It may sometimes give an exact statement of the facts, but its true aim is always something beyond the facts. It loves traditional language and traditional form because the value to poetry lies not in the statement but in the connotation or atmosphere that clings about it. Nay, if we look at the continuous tradition of poetry from Homer onward, we find that poetry needs a language of its own, a voice of its own. The poet, we know, often feels himself a vehicle for some power outside or above him. When Homer begins the Iliad, it is not a story in everyday human speech that we are given; nor is it the poet himself who gives it. It is a goddess who tells the tale, and the goddess sings.

To have a special language for poetry is not an artificial invention. It springs from nature. There is a special language for poetry in Hebrew, in Latin, in Old Icelandic, and, so I am told, in the languages of Australia and the Polynesian islands; but most markedly there is a special language in Greek, where poetry has perhaps reached its highest point. Homer’s goddess speaks a language entirely her own. The words are different, the inflectional terminations are different; there are repetitions and conventional formulae and perpetual epithets which would be intolerable in prose but serve some purpose of their own in making the poetry more beautiful. They seem, as it were, almost to hypnotize the reader so that his purely intellectual and critical faculties are lulled, his emotions and his sense of beauty are given the more scope.

This applies particularly to dactylic and lyric poetry; in drama there is a closer approach to normal speech, though even there hardly a line of tragedy could ever be taken for prose. The meter is the very essence of Homeric poetry, as it later becomes the very essence of Virgil or Ovid. To read a prose translation of Homer or Virgil is like reading a musical score without the music. Throughout the whole vast range of Greek poetry one may say there is never a fault in the meter; there are, at most, certain legitimate licenses admitted to give variety or to enable strange foreign words or proper names to find a place in the verse. In Latin verse there is the same correctness, though in Latin the words have not to any great extent been actually formed or changed by the meter. One may say on the whole that Greek and Latin poetry insist upon the same high degree of metrical regularity that in English is required by a sonnet.

The poetical tradition in England, France, Italy, Germany, has on the whole followed this model. The meters in these languages have not been nearly as sonorous and unmistakable as the dactylic or lyric meters of Greek or Latin, but we have made up for that by introducing rhyme in most forms of verse. We even call verses which do not rhyme “blank,” and we generally confine blank verse to the widely known and easily recognized ten-syllable line. In sum, the entire tradition of poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson, from the Song of Roland to Victor Hugo, from the Nibelungenlied to Heine, has associated the whole idea of poetry with meter; to speak of a prose poem was a metaphor or a paradox.

4

I SUPPOSE there is in every art, as there is in every society, not exactly a set of fixed rules but a traditional norm, a way of living and behaving, which the Greeks might call Themis — the thing that is expected, that is always done, and which implies of course a number of things that are not Themis, that are simply “not done,” at least by people who behave themselves. In poetry this is the general way in which all the classic poets have behaved, from Homer to Tennyson, embracing generally three things: a poetical language or diction, rich in overtones and associations of emotion or beauty; secondly, a recognizable meter or form, producing music or something that is felt as music; and thirdly, poetical subjects, or at least an avoidance of subjects that are obviously unpoetical — that is, allergic to high emotion or beauty — such as statistics, dirt, mean feelings, and bad smells. Of course it is almost all a question of treatment; with the right treatment almost any subject might produce the emotion proper to poetry. And apart from such extremes a sudden drop into the unexpected in matter or diction is a well-known and approved trick of the poet’s trade.

From the point of view of the classical tradition, what are we to make of the changes in poetical taste which are so frequent, so adventurous, and often so valuable? Of course some general causes of change are always at work. It is only natural that a younger generation should sometimes feel that it has had more than enough of the style which its elders and betters are always commending. Youth is always hopeful of finding out some real secret of truth or some new form of beauty, not known to the conventions of its parents.

Another influence constantly at work is the eternally seductive dream, appealing in different forms to most artists, that they are concerned not with show but with truth, not with mere art but with nature. In drama this is almost always the watchword of every new change in style. This desire to reject all mere ornamentation and strike straight at the heart of reality is no doubt of immense value in the history of the arts, yet if made a main principle it is suicidal. It implies an attempt to deny that art itself is art, a mimesis, a make-believe; an attempt which, carried to its logical end, would turn art into science or dogma. If poetry is meant in a sense to reveal truth, as no doubt it is, it does so not, like science, by its direct statements, which are almost never true and do not need to be true, but always by the overtones of its music, by the connotations and associations of its words, by the atmosphere with which it surrounds itself. The first book of Paradise Lost narrates as fact imaginary conversations between persons who never existed, yet those speeches of the fallen angels in the burning marl convey just the kind of truth that poetry can convey and that plain prose cannot.

I think also that a true artist, however different his own outlook, will always feel some love and reverence for the works of his great predecessors. It is a bad sign when a new fashion speaks with contempt of the whole tradition before it. When I find one fashionable critic today saying contentedly that Milton’s reputation as a poet is now finally exploded, or another deciding that the Odyssey is bad poetry but a good novel, I seem to see that they are, as it, were, tone-deaf or colorblind. They have lost the specific feeling for poetry in the sense in which previous generations of poets and poetry-lovers have used the word.

However, in such criticism one must make some allowance for the critic’s pugnacity and desire to shock. I once met a Spanish poet who boasted that he had used in his poetry certain words so indecorous that they had never before been printed. I hold firmly that that was not a thing to be proud of; but what really makes me lose my temper is when some of these dabblers in obscenity think they are being Greek. As if serious Greek poetry ever tolerated an indecent word! Of course there is almost always a certain element of strife between the poet and his ordinary bourgeois public, still more between the poet and the professional critic. I remember that, when it came to judging poetry, Aeschylus “did not get on with the Athenians, but thought the rest of the world mere rubbish.”

Still, I can remember a good many changes of taste which did not give rise to violent feelings. I once in my extreme youth met a man who rather deprecated my mother’s admiration for “young Mr. Tennyson”; she should have stuck to Byron. I remember the effect produced by the pre-Raphaelite painters, and the beginning of the Impressionists. More recently I remember the general welcome given to the first volumes of the Georgian poems, collected by Edward Marsh and Harold Monro in 1912 and 1913 and on into the early twenties, and containing specimens of Lascelles Abercrombie, Gordon Bottomley, Rupert Brooke, de la Mare, Davies, Drinkwater, Gibson, Masefield, Sturge Moore, James Stephens, and presently Hodgson and D. H. Lawrence. You might like some of these better than others; you might have your criticisms; but no one thought of doubting that the book was poetry.

Into the post-war brew there has slipped something different; is it a new revelation, or is it a touch of delirium, a real rebellion against Themis, expressing itself in all the arts? Is it really a sort of echo of the general barbarization of national life in post-war Europe? In most of the arts my opinion is of no value at all, but I cannot help noticing that in painting, in sculpture, and even I think in music and architecture, there is exceptionally violent dissension among artists, such as I never remember occurring before. Formerly, when some new style of art arose, critics might say that a picture was affected or sickly or badly drawn, but they did not say that it was not a picture at all. But now I have not only heard a highly competent critic say when he unveiled a new statue after a charming public speech about it, Upon my word, I was nearly sick”; I have heard painters say of some non-representational or surrealist picture that simply, it is not a picture; heard sculptors say of some new fashion in stone, or of the famous wire construction which won such a high prize, that it is not. sculpture, not a statue at all.

5

Now in poetry I do feel that I can form a judgment; I do not of course claim that my judgment is right, but I do at any rate know a good deal of poetry; poetry forms, I think, my greatest permanent pleasure in life. So I have a right to an opinion. But of course I am too old and too much a child of the classics to be unprejudiced, so I have looked about for an impartial report, and thought a good place would be the International P.E.N. News. There I found one coming, as it happened, from Greece. As for subject, it said, one prevailing fashion has been to choose “the dissolution of the soul of contemporary man”; “the monotony, misery, and ugliness of everyday life is the poet’s theme.” The movement, then, did not live, like older movements, “ by admiration, hope, and love,’ nor yet certainly by “terror and pity.” It lived by ennui, discontent, and disgust, which have not hitherto been found to be fruitful sources of poetry. “After 1930,” our critic adds, “union with the main stream of European literature was complete. Surrealism had considerable influence, and the traditional poetic forms wore completely abandoned. In Greece as elsewhere, unintelligibility became the order of the day.”

This does seem to me to be rejection of poetry itself, not merely a revolt against a particular style. The tradition from Homer onward has allotted to poetry some general characteristics of metrical form, language, and subject, all with overtones or associations of beauty or some of the higher emotions. With skillful treatment you can drop some of these requirements and get a good effect; but to reject them all does seem to me like rejecting poetry itself. As a jury of classical Dutch and Italian painters might say of surrealist or non-representational painting, “But that is not a picture" ; as a similar jury of sculptors would say that the famous wire object was not sculpture; as the architects of York Minster or the Taj Mahal would say of the United Nations Building at Lake Success, “That is not architecture. It is a denial of the whole art” — so I often feel that the sort of poetry described above is just not poetry.

Sometimes there is a deliberate — and certainly successful — attempt to be disgusting. I have just been reading a long detailed description of the bedroom of a paralytic who has been for a long time too sick to move. That sort of thing can be very effective if it is made to lead up to some redemption, as in Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich. But in this case there is no contrast, no redemption. I wonder if the writer, who has written some really good poems, thinks in his heart that this is poetry. I certainly feel pretty sure that any average jury of the people we thought poets before 1914 would say no. I think they would pronounce the same sort of verdict on many other highly prized examples of modern composition which are not in the least objectionable but merely have no special poetical quality of thought or language or metrical form. They would begin by saying that it might or might not be an interesting remark, but it was not poetry. If, in addition, it was deliberately unintelligible, they would be confirmed in their opinion.

Of course I am not forgetting the great amount of really beautiful work in the various arts that the present day is producing. Some of it seems to me to be a definite reaction against this harshness and anarchy, just as the extraordinary wealth of charity and loving-kindness now active in the world is a reaction against the horrors connected with war. It has been a great relief and comfort to me, when recently reading six or seven volumes of new English poetry, to see what a change seems to have set in. Nearly all the poets I read had a sense of meter and a sense of language. They all left with me something of that special delight which belongs to the tradition of poetry.

But what has all this to do with us classical scholars? Just this, I suggest: that the example of the classics does establish a sort of norm or Themis in letters and thought, as the example of various kinds of good life establishes a norm of what is done and what is “not done” by an honest man or a gentleman or a Christian. We have a standard to maintain, a standard of Sophrosyne, of piety, and of careful, sensitive work. For the disorder that has affected our own province of letters seems to be not a mere change of taste but a part of that terrific disorder — or shall I say delirium? — which has since the end of the first war gone so far to wreck the rule of Themis in our great Hellenic or European civilization.

And here we lovers of the classics can help. The essence of the classical spirit is to recognize standards, to know and admire and follow what is really good. I often think how greatly the good feeling of nations toward one another would be eased and bettered if instead of current news and scandals we would read one another’s classics. If we would habitually think of France in the light of Pascal, Molière, Voltaire, and Victor Hugo; Germany in the light of Goethe and Kant and the great musicians; Italy in the light of Dante and Mazzini, and without forgetting St. Francis, instead of thinking always of the crimes of the recent past or the frets and controversies of the noisy present. The classics are great upholders of the permanent against the merely fashionable, of high standards against the general easy level that suits the common man, or the fashionable piquancy beloved by the professional critic.

Do you remember Wilamowitz’s anecdote, how as a German soldier in the invasion of 1870 he was billeted on a French schoolmaster; and how host and invader sat up after supper comparing Racine’s Pheère and Euripides’ Hppolytus? The common tradition was a sort of bond connecting invader and invaded. One preferred Euripides and the other Racine, but they could not be completely enemies. Time after time at the assembly of the League of Nations one noticed how an apt quotation from Virgil or some Latin phrase would raise a smile all round the Hall, as when the Albanian Bishop of Noli, who was being rather difficult, was referred to by one of the Serbs as “Ce vieux Noli me tangere.” It suggests that mutual liaison of the “clerks” which held Europe together in the Middle Ages.

Of course those who care for classical standards are a minority. That has always been so; but they need not be a disheartened or defeatist minority. It is astonishing to me to see how the wrecked or impoverished nations of Western Europe keep up their output of classical work. I found in a new edition of Aeschylus at which I am working that I am getting good contributions from Holland, France, Italy, America, New Zealand, as well as Germany and Britain. In this country too, when I look at my Classical Review I am struck by the wide range of subjects treated and by the widely different sources of the articles. I think the meetings of the Classical Association show not less vitality, but more vitality, than before we were threatened by our present dangers. The International Meetings of classical scholars in Berlin, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen, and the existence of new literary periodicals, like Diogenes and Erasmus, with articles in two or sometimes three languages, indicate, I think, that Europe still values its cultural heritage and does not mean to let it die.

There are many forces at work actively rebarbarizing the civilized world. But the old phrase of Dionysius describing the Athenians as “those who made gentle the life of mankind” was true when spoken and remains true now of our Hellenic heritage. If Europe can preserve and America uphold the standards that we call “classic” or “Christian” or “ Hellenic,” there will be at least one great center at which the higher, gentler, nobler influences of the world can gather and stand fast. The success or failure of that enterprise will depend upon the forces that really actuate the great nations, but in every country of Western and Central Europe there will be a certain number of Grammatici, or lovers of letters, who will at least contribute their own mite by showing their faith that the Grammata prized so long by a great tradition are real pearls which they will not allow to perish.