The Legacy of Greece | Page 7

probably taken place in daily life, in
ideas, and in the general aspect of the earth during the last century than
during any four other centuries since the Christian era: and this fact has
tended to make us look on rapid progress as a normal condition of the
human race, which it never has been. And another such period of
bloom, a bloom comparatively short in time and narrow in area, but
amazingly swift and intense, occurred in the lower parts of the Balkan
peninsula from about the sixth to the fourth centuries before Christ.
Now it is this kind of bloom which fills the world with hope and
therefore makes it young. Take a man who has just made a discovery or
an invention, a man happily in love, a man who is starting some great
and successful social movement, a man who is writing a book or
painting a picture which he knows to be good; take men who have been
fighting in some great cause which before they fought seemed to be
hopeless and now is triumphant; think of England when the Armada
was just defeated, France at the first dawn of the Revolution, America
after Yorktown: such men and nations will be above themselves. Their
powers will be stronger and keener; there will be exhilaration in the air,
a sense of walking in new paths, of dawning hopes and untried
possibilities, a confidence that all things can be won if only we try hard
enough. In that sense the world will be young. In that sense I think it
was young in the time of Themistocles and Aeschylus. And it is that
youth which is half the secret of the Greek spirit.
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.
These Greeks whom you call so "noble" have been long since 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 everything 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 petty little towns, like so many wasps' nests,
each at war with its next-door neighbour, and half of them at war with
themselves!'
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, were
separated by a thin and precarious interval from the savage. Scratch a
civilized Russian, they say, and you find 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 the 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 statesmanlike. 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'. They built up
their civilization for themselves. We must listen with due attention to
the critics who have pointed out all the remnants of savagery and

superstition that they find in Greece: the slave-driver, the
fetish-worshipper and the medicine-man, the trampler on women, the
bloodthirsty hater of all outside his own town and party. But it is not
those people that constitute Greece; those people can be found all over
the historical world,