The Legacy of Greece | Page 8

commoner than blackberries. It is not anything
fixed and stationary that constitutes Greece: what constitutes Greece is
the movement which leads from all these to the Stoic or fifth-century
'sophist' who condemns and denies slavery, who has abolished all cruel
superstitions and preaches some religion based on philosophy and
humanity, who claims for women the same spiritual rights as for man,
who looks on all human creatures as his brethren, and the world as 'one
great City of gods and men'. It is that movement which you will not
find elsewhere, any more than the statues of Pheidias or the dialogues
of Plato or the poems of Aeschylus and Euripides.
From all this two or three results follow. For one thing, being built up
so swiftly, by such keen effort, and from so low a starting-point, Greek
civilization was, amid all its glory, curiously unstable and full of flaws.
Such flaws made it, of course, much worse for those who lived in it,
but they hardly make it less interesting or instructive to those who
study it. Rather the contrary. Again, the near neighbourhood of the
savage gives to the Greek mind certain qualities which we of the safer
and solider civilizations would give a great deal to possess. It springs
swift and straight. It is never jaded. Its wonder and interest about the
world are fresh. And lastly there is one curious and very important
quality which, unless I am mistaken, belongs to Greek civilization more
than to any other. To an extraordinary degree it starts clean from nature,
with almost no entanglements of elaborate creeds and customs and
traditions.
I am not, of course, forgetting the prehistoric Minoan civilization, nor
yet the peculiar forms--mostly simple enough--into which the
traditional Greek religion fell. It is possible that I may be a little misled
by my own habit of living much among Greek things and so forgetting
through long familiarity how odd some of them once seemed. But when
all allowances are made, I think that this clean start from nature is, on
the whole, a true claim. If a thoughtful European or American wants to

study Chinese or Indian things, he has not only to learn certain data of
history and mythology, he has to work his mind into a particular
attitude; to put on, as it were, spectacles of a particular sort. If he wants
to study mediaeval things, if he takes even so universal a poet as Dante,
it is something the same. Curious views about the Pope and the
emperor, a crabbed scholastic philosophy, a strange and to the modern
mind rather horrible theology, floating upon the flames of Hell: all
these have somehow to be taken into his imagination before he can
understand his Dante. With Greek things this is very much less so. The
historical and imaginative background of the various great poets and
philosophers is, no doubt, highly important. A great part of the work of
modern scholarship is now devoted to getting it clearer. But on the
whole, putting aside for the moment the possible inadequacies of
translation, Greek philosophy speaks straight to any human being who
is willing to think simply, Greek art and poetry to any one who can use
his imagination and enjoy beauty. He has not to put on the fetters or the
blinkers of any new system in order to understand them; he has only to
get rid of his own--a much more profitable and less troublesome task.
This particular conclusion will scarcely, I think, be disputed, but the
point presents difficulties and must be dwelt upon.
In the first place, it does not mean that Greek art is what we call
'naturalist' or 'realist'. It is markedly the reverse. Art to the Greek is
always a form of Sophia, or Wisdom, a Technê with rules that have to
be learnt. Its air of utter simplicity is deceptive. The pillar that looks
merely straight is really a thing of subtle curves. The funeral bas-relief
that seems to represent in the simplest possible manner a woman saying
good-bye to her child is arranged, plane behind plane, with the most
delicate skill and sometimes with deliberate falsification of perspective.
There is always some convention, some idealization, some touch of the
light that never was on sea or land. Yet all the time, I think, Greek art
remains in a remarkable degree close to nature. The artist's eye is
always on the object, and, though he represents it in his own style, that
style is always normal and temperate, free from affectation, free from
exaggeration or morbidity and, in the earlier periods, free from
conventionality. It is art without doubt; but it is natural and normal art,

such as grew spontaneously when mankind first tried in freedom to
express beauty. For example,