THE

I

INTRODUCTION

HE teasing perfection of Greek Literature will perhaps excite the world long after modern literature is forgotten. Shakespeare may come to his end and lie down among the Egyptians, but Homer will endure forever. We hate to imagine such an outcome, because, while we love Shakespeare, we regard the Greek classics merely with an overwhelmed astonishment. But the fact is that Homer floats in the central stream of History, Shakespeare in an eddy. There is, too, a real difference between ancient and modern art, and the enduring power may be on the side of antiquity.

The classics will always be the playthings of humanity, because they are types of perfection, like crystals. They are pure intellect, like demonstrations in geometry. Within their own limitations they are examples of miracle; and the modern world has nothing to show that resembles them in the least. As no builder has built like the

Greeks, so no writer has written like the Greeks. In edge, in delicacy, in proportion, in accuracy of effect, they are as marble to our sandstone. The perfection of the Greek vehicle is what attacks the mind of the modern man and gives him dreams.

What relation these dreams bear to Greek feeling it is impossible to say,-probably a very remote and grotesque relation. The scholars who devote their enormous energies in a life-and-death struggle to understand the Greeks always arrive at states of mind which are peculiarly modern. The same thing may be said of the severest types of Biblical scholar. David Friedrich Strauss, for instance, gave his life to the study of Christ, and, as a result, has left an admirable picture of the German mind of 1850. Goethe, who was on his guard if ever a man could be, has still been a little deceived in thinking that the classic spirit could be recovered. He has left imitations of Greek literature which are admirable in themselves, and rank among his most characteristic works, yet which bear small resemblance to the originals. The same may be said of Milton and of Racine. The Greeks seem to have used their material, their myths and ideas, with such supernal intellect that they leave this material un

touched for the next comer. Their gods persist, their mythology is yours and mine. We accept the toys, -the whole babyhouse which has come down to us: we walk in and build our own dramas with their blocks.

What a man thinks of influences him, though he chance to know little about it; and the power which the ancient world has exerted over the modern has not been shown in proportion to the knowledge or scholarship of the modern thinker, but in proportion to his natural force. The Greek tradition, the Greek idea became an element in all subsequent life; and one can no more dig it out and isolate it than one can dig out or isolate a property of the blood. We do not know exactly how much we owe to the Greeks. Keats was inspired by the very idea of them. They were an obsession to Dante, who knew not the language. Their achievements have been pressing in upon the mind of Europe, and enveloping it with an atmospheric appeal, ever since the Dark Ages.

Of late years we have come to think of all subjects as mere departments of science, and we are almost ready to hand over Greece to the specialist. We assume that scholars will work out the history of art. But it is not the right of the learned and scholarly only, to be

influenced by the Greeks, but also of those persons who know no Greek. Greek influence is too universal an inheritance to be entrusted to scholars, and the specialist is the very last man who can understand it. In order to obtain a diagnosis on Greek influence one would have to seek out a sort of specialist on Humanity-at-large.

INCE

SING

II

FALSE GUIDES

we cannot find any inspired teacher to lay before us the secrets of Greek influence, the next best thing would be to go directly to the Greeks themselves, and to study their works freshly, almost innocently. But to do this is not easy. The very Greek texts themselves have been established through modern research, and the foot-notes are the essence of modernity.

The rushing modern world passes like an express train; as it goes, it holds up a mirror to the classic world, -a mirror ever changing and ever false. For upon the face of the mirror rests the lens of fleeting fashion. We can no more walk straight to the Greeks than we can walk straight to the moon. In America the natural road to the classics lies through the introductions of German and English scholarship. We are met, as it were, on the threshold of Greece by guides who address us confidently in two very dis