The Legacy of Greece | Page 9

the language of Greek poetry is markedly
different from that of prose, and there are even clear differences of
language between different styles of poetry. And further, the poetry is
very seldom about the present. It is about the past, and that an ideal past.
What we have to notice there is that this kind of rule, which has been
usual in all great ages of poetry, is apparently not an artificial or
arbitrary thing but a tendency that grew up naturally with the first great
expressions of poetical feeling.
Furthermore, this closeness to nature, this absence of a unifying or
hide-bound system of thought, acting together with other causes, has
led to the extraordinary variety and many-sidedness which is one of the
most puzzling charms of Ancient Greece as contrasted, say, with Israel
or Assyria or early Rome. Geographically it is a small country with a
highly indented coast-line and an interior cut into a great number of
almost isolated valleys. Politically it was a confused unity made up of
numerous independent states, one walled city of a few thousand
inhabitants being quite enough to form a state. And the citizens of these
states were, each of them, rather excessively capable of forming
opinions of their own and fighting for them. Hence came in practice
much isolation and faction and general weakness, to the detriment of
the Greeks themselves; but the same cause led in thought and literature
to immense variety and vitality, to the great gain of us who study the
Greeks afterwards. There is hardly any type of thought or style of
writing which cannot be paralleled in ancient Greece, only they will
there be seen, as it were, in their earlier and simpler forms. Traces of all
the things that seem most un-Greek can be found somewhere in Greek
literature: voluptuousness, asceticism, the worship of knowledge, the
contempt for knowledge, atheism, pietism, the religion of serving the
world and the religion of turning away from the world: all these and
almost all other points of view one can think of are represented
somewhere in the records of that one small people. And there is hardly
any single generalization in this chapter which the author himself could
not controvert by examples to the contrary. You feel in general a great
absence of all fetters: the human mind free, rather inexperienced,
intensely interested in life and full of hope, trying in every direction for

that excellence which the Greeks called aretê, and guided by some
peculiar instinct toward Temperance and Beauty.
The variety is there and must not be forgotten; yet amid the variety
there are certain general or central characteristics, mostly due to this
same quality of freshness and closeness to nature.
If you look at a Greek statue or bas-relief, or if you read an average
piece of Aristotle, you will very likely at first feel bored. Why?
Because it is all so normal and truthful; so singularly free from
exaggeration, paradox, violent emphasis; so destitute of those
fascinating by-forms of insanity which appeal to some similar faint
element of insanity in ourselves. 'We are sick', we may exclaim, 'of the
sight of these handsome, perfectly healthy men with grave faces and
normal bones and muscles! We are sick of being told that Virtue is a
mean between two extremes and tends to make men happy! We shall
not be interested unless some one tells us that Virtue is the utter
abnegation of self, or, it may be, the extreme and ruthless assertion of
self; or again, that Virtue is all an infamous mistake! And for statues,
give us a haggard man with starved body and cavernous eyes, cursing
God--or give us something rolling in fat and colour....'
What is at the back of this sort of feeling? which I admit often takes
more reasonable forms than these I have suggested. It is the same
psychological cause that brings about the changes of fashion in art or
dress: which loves 'stunts' and makes the fortunes of yellow newspapers.
It is boredom or ennui. We have had too much of A; we are sick of it,
we know how it is done and despise it; give us some B, or better still
some Z. And after a strong dose of Z we shall crave for the beginning
of the alphabet again. But now think of a person who is not bored at all;
who is, on the contrary, immensely interested in the world, keen to
choose good things and reject bad ones; full of the desire for
knowledge and the excitement of discovery. The joy to him is to see
things as they are and to judge them normally. He is not bored by the
sight of normal, healthy muscles in a healthy, well-shaped body; he is
delighted.