Gilbert Murray at Ninety

by LUCIEN PRICE

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YATSCOMBE is a red-brick house on Boars Hill, overlooking the lowers, spires, and the one great dome of Oxford. The house is spacious, pleasant, and in the style of the 1870s. There is a gate lodge, same style, which “in the time of the troubles” was usually tenanted by some family of refugees from Central Europe. This is the home of Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek emeritus in Oxford University, and his wife, Lady Mary Henrietta Howard, eldest daughter of the 9th Earl of Carlisle.

Since multitudes have already met the Murrays unawares on the stage and in the film, it may be explained at once that Shaw, an old comrade of Fabian Socialist days, dramatized them in his Major Barbara — Murray as the young professor of Greek, Adolphus Cusins, and Lady Mary as Barbara Undershaft, the Salvation Army lass, granddaughter of an earl and daughter of a Machiavellian-Mephistophelean armament manufacturer.

The other principal scene is a lecture room up a stone staircase in a stone building, the main quadrangle of Christ Church, built by the ill-starred Cardinal Wolsey, where on certain days Professor Murray, robed in his scholar’s gown of black, stood at a lectern, his back to a huge stone fireplace under a low Tudor arch, discoursing on Greek drama. One remembers a June morning in 1933, when he gave his last lecture of the term; it was on the closing pages in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the grandest of tragic dramas. He had edited its Greek text, had translated the play into rhyming English Verse, and had written a valuable book on the dramatist, enjoyable within the scope of the lay reader.

At the time of this glimpse he was sixty-seven years old and still in his prime, though he carried one arm in a sling. Being asked what happened, he replied with a twinkle of mischief: “I spoke disrespectfully of Apollo in his temple at Delphi. It is true, he had been there a short while before with the Thomas La moots, and I also knew he had no high opinion of the Apollo in Euripides’ Ion, but he never said just how Apollo got back at him.

Now, on January 2, 1956, he is ninety years old and the world he has labored so manfully to help civilize delights to honor him as one of its most civilized citizens. Born in Sydney, New South Wales, of a Roman Catholic family, he left Australia at the age of eleven, to be schooled first at Merchant Taylors’ in London, then at St. John’s College, Oxford. He was Fellow of New College in 1888, Professor of Greek at Glasgow University, 1889 to 1899, and finally in the University of Oxford he was holder of the Regius Professorship of Greek until his retirement — retirement for him being a relative term — in 1936.

Let it be said at once. This uncloistered academic scholar who, starting in frail health, is one of the forty-volume men has been voiceful in the major crises which during the present century have shaken first the Western world and finally the whole of modern so-called civilization. His was one of the first voices raised against war hysteria (“Herd Instinct and the War,” Atlantic Monthly, June, 1915), and throughout the two decades between our two greatest orgies of mass fratricide, he pitched in with all his might to make the League of Nations work: sat in the Foreign Office Committee concerned with drafting the Covenant, and attended the Assembly in 1921, 1922, and 1923 as a member of the South African delegation and in 1924 as a member of the British delegation. Meanwhile, he was one of the promoters of the; League of Nations Union, its chairman repeatedly, and finally its co-president. He does not easily despair. As recently as 1948 he published his From The League to U.V.

For it was the learned Grecians with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in their brains and veins — the Lowes Dickinsons, the Gilbert Murrays, and presently their colleagues: Livingstone Cornford, Zimmern, Glover, Casson who grasped at once the sinister significance of what befell us in 1914, and the magnitude of the disaster. More than three decades later, at Yatscombe, Murray, being asked who started the League of Nations, thought a moment, then replied, “I should have said Lowes Dickinson.” It was Dickinson who first reprinted in English in 1915 Uomain Holland’s Above the Battle, and in January, 1916, he was in Cambridge at the Harvard president’s house on Quincy Street persuading Lawrence Lowell to the League, who then persuaded ex-President Taft anti Edward Filenc, anti it was Mr. Filenc who largely financed the publicizing which President Wilson had told them would have to be done before ho could openly espouse the cause.

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A MODERN Plutarch would have in the careers of Shaw and Murray already made to hand a pair of parallel lives. Both are dramatists, but they are antithetical. Shaw, Admirable Bashville that he was, pugilistically told the world its errors by, as it were, bashing it on the jaw and socking it in the eye. This he did on platform, stage, and in print for sixty years. Murray has wrought more quietly. Yes, he can say exactly what he means — and what he means is often a severe jolt — yet he can do it, as he says in his book on the touchy Homeric question, “without rousing the old lions that lie wakeful behind most of the larger stones. . . . The sportsman in me would like to go gun in hand and bag a few of the most dangerous; the philosopher is resolved to do them no injury, but merely try gradually and indirectly, to make them friends to man.” His is the art of putting provocative ideas into unprovocative language.

Shaw’s influence is wide; Murray’s is deep, a force that works in the cellarage among the massive arches of foundation thought. Shaw, in spirit, is Hebraist; Murray is Hellenist. Protagonist and deuteragonist in a classic drama of our time, they exchange places. When we are young and bellicose, Shaw is our man, head-on collision, “knock your adversary flat” (his prescription); when we mature, our man is Murray, urbane, patient, reasonable, and prepared in face of discouragement to keep at it for a lifetime. Your Hebraist wins in the short run (and, in the immense rhythms of history, the thousand years from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance is a short run); in the long run, I think, your winner is the Hellenist. Being taxed with the boldness of his thinking in three of his finest works of scholarship, The Bise of the Greek Epic, Five Stages of Greek Religion, and The Classical Tradition in Poetry: ‘A on are very polite to Christianity, but that is just the trouble; you are too polite,” his eyes sparkle and he says, laughing, “You know, there is more in those books than is strictly business.” And yet one of his best friends, a colleague at Oxford and himself an eminent Hellenist, says, “How surprised Murray will be to find himself, after all, in the Christian heaven! But his manners will be quite equal to the occasion.”

Although Shaw did stage the Murrays, it is probable that Murray has more influenced Shaw than Shaw has (Murray. Meeting Shawin the lobby of a London theater, Murray had said, “I have an idea for a play which you should write. It is a true-to-life version of Taming of the Shrew; while Petruchio is hectoring Katherine, she all the while is winding him around her little finger.”

“That would be good,” says Shaw, “but it happens that I am already writing a play about you, which should be entitled Murray’s Mother-in-Law.”

Now Murray’s mother-in-law was the redoubtable Lady Carlisle (than whom . . .) who, as Lady Britomurt in Major Barbara, amply fulfills her imperious habit as she walked. Shaw, anxious not to offend the family, asked if he might read His play to the Murrays. A few friends were had in to tea at Yatscombe, Shaw came down to Oxford, and read. The first act went swimmingly; the second, of course, as it always does, like a house afire; but alas, the third. ... It; could not be concealed, and has never yet been concealed, not even after Shaw, three decades later, carefully rewrote it for the film.

In retaliation for the play, (Murray recited an incident at the expense of the Shaws. It seems there was a Belgian Socialist, a Madame La Forgue, who starred herself as the most dangerous woman in Europe. She was Wont to stride out on the speakers’ platform in a great black cloak, which she swept from her shoulders with the flick of a bullfighter, displaying the lining, a deep bloody crimson. She is to call on the Shaws at their London apartment, No. 10 Adelphi Terrace. Her visiting card bears portentously the single word, Forgue. She now enters to the Shaws, prodigiously bigbusted, black-browed, and elaborately gowned, gloved, and hatted. One of her preoccupations is an increased liberality in the relationship between the sexes. “As the interview went on,” says Murray, “the Shaws became aware of an increasing glaciation in the atmosphere. Finally she rose, drew herself up to full height, and said icily, ‘I am told I am to meet one of the leading theoreticians of English Socialism, and what do I find? Bourgeois interieure, and Madame, who has every appearance of being your wife!”

“Shaw,” says Hesketh Pearson, his biographer, “ranked (Murray’s translations as being in a class by themselves, and the highest in twentieth century drama.” Britannica goes so far, for it, as to say, “He brought Greek drama back to the modern stage.” In May, 1915, when the First World Mar had been ravening less than a year, Granville Barker produced Murray’s translation of Euripides’ Trojan Women with a notable cast in the Harvard Stadium. The audience sat as if stunned. One of my Harvard Greek professors, with whom I went, said, ‟ This is a knock-down for me. I have read this play time and again, and taught it. Had you asked me this morning, I would have told you, ‘It is not a very good play. And now I find it overwhelming. You never know a play until you see it acted.”

Murray’s translations began coming in 1902. By 1954, the number had reached two dozen, and what an event each was as it came — to memorize the stirring sea choruses of the I phegema in Tauris and the hauntingly and tenderly beautiful odes in the Bacchae, which are themselves one of the Varieties of Religious Experience. The seven surviving plays of Aeschylus (which include the three tragedies of the Oresteia): Sophocles’ Theban trilogy, the two Oedipus plays and Antigone; two of Aristophanes’ best comedies, Frogs and Birds; two comedies by Menander, and of course Murrays rehabilitation of Euripides in public favor—nine of his tragedies, among which the Hippolytus, Bacchae, Trojan Women, Electro, and I phegenia in Tauris have been acted in London, mainly at the Court Theatre (1902-1927) — even for one who has read and re-read a good many of these plays in Greek, thus to meet them in vibrant English verse is an encounter almost equal to the opening of the classical repertory in music by excellent phonograph records; lor both, Greek drama and the musical classics, are among the great literatures of the world.

And how this stream has broadened. For Greek drama is as haunting an art-form as the orchestral symphony; or, to speak more precisely, the sonata. Once in the blood, is there any getting it out? Poet after poet must have a go at it: Milton, Shelley, Arnold, Swinburne, and so on and on. The austerity of its form deepens a poet’s thoughtstream between high rock-walls. The alternation of dramatic dialogue and choric odes, the flashing cut-and-thrust line-for-line speeches, stichomnthiae; the Recognition Scene, the Messenger’s Speech, yes, and even to usof an alien religion, the Epiphany, these seemingly rigid and wooden conventions nevertheless come to life as sure-fire theater. In 1936, Louis MacNeice produced his starkly powerful verse translation of the Agamemnon, then Robinson Jeffers his modernized acting versions of the Medea and Hippolytus; next come brilliant translations into English verse of Sophocles by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald, both in collaboration and separately, and, most recently, Fitts’s daring and hilarious verse translations of Aristophanes Lysistrala and Frogs.

To these add modern plays touched off by the ancient ones, Eugene O’Neill’s Lazarus Laughed, with one act almost cribbed from Murray’s translation of the Bacchae, and Mourning Becomes Electro after (though a long way after) the Oresteia of Aeschylus; then Maxwell Anderson’s Wingless Victory, and, only a year ago, William Alfred’s Agamemnon, a superb modern verso drama on the ancient theme.

There has been, first: and last, a good deal of griping about Murray’s translations (‟not naming names) and a good deal of quiet fun is to be had at the expense of the belly-achers: ‟All right, Rufus; if you don’t like Murray’s, roll your own.” So the Rufuses do roll their own, and, it may be joyfully conceded, often very well. Only remember, Rufus: Murray has done brilliantly a cool two dozen to your possible six, and knows fifty times more about them in their Greek originals than . . . well, nothing pussoual of course. . . .

Aeschvlus described his tragedies as “slices from the great banquets of Homer. We come now to Murray’s meat course. He sols before us the great ideas which underlie Western civilization and which continue to animate the mind of Western man. “The seeds of Western civilization,” says Murray, “are mostly to be found in Greece and not elsewhere. . . . The classical books are in general the books which have possessed for mankind such vitality that they are still read and enjoyed when all other books written within ten centuries of them have long since been dead. There must be something peculiar about a book of which the world feels after two thousand years that it has not yet had enough.” You can make it three thousand, if you like, Professor Murray, for among our American paper-backed editions, year after year the one which oulsells every other is Homer’s Odyssey.

During the Middle Ages, Greek was lost to Europe. Its rediscovery in the fifteenth century was equal in importance to the discovery of America: both were new worlds. There followed on their discovery, and largely as a consequence of it, a great liberation of the human mind. Now for the past half century, or more, we have been living on the moral and intellectual capital inherited by us. But wo have been and are using it up fast. That form of wealth, like others, becomes exhausted if it is not kept steadily replenished. This vitamin deficiency of the Greek and Latin classics in our own diet is already glaringly evident in American educat ion and equally so in the slovenliness of much contemporary American writing: —

“To suppose,” saxs Murray, as I believe some people do, that you can get the value of a great poem by studying an abstract of it in an encyclopedia or by reading cursorily an average translation of it, argues really a kind of mental deficiency, like deafness or colour-blindness. The things which we call eternal, the things of the spirit and imagination, always seem to be reached and enjoyed by somehow going through the process again. If the value of a particular walk lies in the scenery, you do not get that value by taking a short cut or using a fast motor car. . It is the process that matters more than the result.”

This is a striking concurrence with Whitehead’s dictum; “The process is itself the actuality.”

In our world-welter of events, we sometimes come to with a start and realize how much virtue can go forth from a single human being, and how far it can go, how wide, and how deep. To the solitary st river his effort may, in face of what is needed, look small and puny I dare say his own has often looked so to Murray, and yet his career is a living reminder that the individual does weigh, may prevail, and, in the final accounting, is all that does. Like Nansen and Schweitzer, he is one of the Great Europeans, world citizens, of whom we need several millions more. For not only is he a bridgespan from the nineteenth century at its best over into and on beyond the mid-point of the twentieth; he is even more a part of that greater span from the ancient world (which not to know is to be to ourselves unknown) over into our distracted epoch, and his career might be termed “Hellenist to the rescue of a world askew.”

For he brings us light without heat, though not without warmth. “Man,” he says, “having been on this planet, let us say, fifty thousand years more or less, spent mostly in eating and being eaten, hurting and being hurt, at last produced the Agamemnon or the Iliad or the Aeneid, or what you will. So there was some meaning in the process after all! It led somewhere, it may even have been worth while! That, properly understood, is an historical fact of the very first importance. The fact is the beauty of the poem or statue itself and you cannot understand that fact at all unless you can feel and appreciate the beauty. Otherwise the fact does not exist for you.”

The heart of Murray’s work is, 1 suppose, in three of his finest books of scholarship, and so beautifully written that whatever be their fate as Hellenic studies, they will live as belles-lettres. The Rise of the Greek Epic explains many a man to himself for the first time; Five Stages of Greek Religion, read and digested, leaves no room for surprise at what has turned up in the recently discovered scrolls from the Dead Sea; and The Classical Tradition in Poetry is a lifeline to tired swimmers in the surf of our modern confusion. Yet no sooner has one instanced these than he feels impelled hastily to add Euripides and His Age, which to read once is to re-read repeatedly; Tradition and Progress (now shamefully out of print); his Aeschylus, Creator of Tragedy, his Aristophanes, a Study; and his Greek Studies, cream of the cream; for even after his two dozen translations, Murray is still a twenty-volume man in his own right.

When he speaks of the great Greek centuries up to the end of the fifth B.C. as a “white-hot centre of spiritual life,” it is like a description of himself. Let him, in complete unself-consciousness, make it more precise: —

“Every Greek community was like a garrison of civilization amid wide hordes of barbarians, — a picked body of men, of w hom each individual had in some sense to five up to a higher standard than can be expected of the common human animal.

. . . It was everywhere a handful of men holding an outpost, men who wrought their wonderful day’s work in political and moral wisdom, in speculation, in beauty of outward form and inward imagining, with an ear ever open to the sternest of life’s calls, and the hated spear and shield never far out of reach.”

I often think, sometimes whimsically, and again quite seriously, that a man who wanted to make himself a genuinely civilized human being might do so by reading all that Murray has written from 1897 to 1955, and trying to put the ideas into daily practice. Of course it would take him the rest of his life; but then, these ideas have already been occupying Western man for three thousand years.