Let us first remember, says Taine, that the evils which depress the

public will also depress the artist. His risks are no less than those of

less gifted people. He is liable to suffer from plague or famine, to

be ruined by unfair taxation or conscription, or to see his children

massacred and his wife led into captivity by barbarians. And if these

ills do not reach him personally, he must at least behold those around

him affected by them. In this way, if he is joyous by temperament, he

must inevitably become less joyous; if he is melancholy, he must become

more melancholy.

Secondly, having been reared among melancholy contemporaries, his

education will have exerted upon him a corresponding influence. The

prevailing religious doctrine, accommodated to the state of affairs,

will tell him that the earth is a place of exile, life an evil, gayety

a snare, and his most profitable occupation will be to get ready to

die. Philosophy, constructing its system of morals in conformity to the

existing phenomena of decadence, will tell him that he had better never

have been born. Daily conversation will inform him of horrible events,

of the devastation of a province, the sack of a town by the Goths, the

oppression of the neighbouring peasants by the imperial tax-collectors,

or the civil war that has just burst out between half a dozen pretenders

to the throne. As he travels about, he beholds signs of mourning and

despair, crowds of beggars, people dying of hunger, a broken bridge

which no one is mending, an abandoned suburb which is going to ruin,

fields choked with weeds, the blackened walls of burned houses. Such

sights and impressions, repeated from childhood to old age (and we must

remember that this has actually been the state of things in what are now

the fairest parts of the globe), cannot fail to deepen whatever elements

of melancholy there may be already in the artist's disposition.

The operation of all these causes will be enhanced by that very

peculiarity of the artist which constitutes his talent. For, according

to the definitions above given, that which makes him an artist is his

capacity for seizing upon the essential characteristics and the salient

traits of surrounding objects and events. Other men see things in part

fragmentarily; he catches the spirit of the ensemble. And in this way

he will very likely exaggerate in his works the general average of

contemporary feeling.

Lastly, our author reminds us that a man who writes or paints does not

remain alone before his easel or his writing-desk. He goes out, looks

about him, receives suggestions from friends, from rivals, from books,

and works of art whenever accessible, and hears the criticisms of the

public upon his own productions and those of his contemporaries. In

order to succeed, he must not only satisfy to some extent the popular

taste, but he must feel that the public is in sympathy with him. If in

this period of social decadence and gloom he endeavours to represent

gay, brilliant, or triumphant ideas, he will find himself left to his

own resources; and, as Taine rightly says, the power of an isolated man

is always insignificant. His work will be likely to be mediocre. If

he attempts to write like Rabelais or paint like Rubens, he will get

neither assistance nor sympathy from a public which prefers the pictures

of Rembrandt, the melodies of Chopin, and the poetry of Heine.

Having thus explained his position by this extreme instance, signified

for the sake of clearness, Taine goes on to apply such general

considerations to four historic epochs, taken in all their complexity.

He discusses the aspect presented by art in ancient Greece, in the

feudal and Catholic Middle Ages, in the centralized monarchies of the

seventeenth century, and in the scientific, industrial democracy

in which we now live. Out of these we shall select, as perhaps the

simplest, the case of ancient Greece, still following our author

closely, though necessarily omitting many interesting details.

The ancient Greeks, observes Taine, understood life in a new and

original manner. Their energies were neither absorbed by a great

religious conception, as in the case of the Hindus and Egyptians, nor

by a vast social organization, as in the case of the Assyrians and

Persians, nor by a purely industrial and commercial regime, as in the

case of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians. Instead of a theocracy or a

rigid system of castes, instead of a monarchy with a hierarchy of civil

officials, the men of this race invented a peculiar institution, the

City, each city giving rise to others like itself, and from colony

to colony reproducing itself indefinitely. A single Greek city, for

instance, Miletos, produced three hundred other cities, colonizing with

them the entire coast of the Black Sea. Each city was substantially

self-ruling; and the idea of a coalescence of several cities into a

nation was one which the Greek mind rarely conceived, and never was able

to put into operation.

In these cities, labour was for the most part carried on by slaves.

In Athens there were four or five for each citizen, and in places like

Korinth and Aigina the slave population is said to have numbered four

or five hundred thousand. Besides, the Greek citizen had little need of

personal service. He lived out of doors, and, like most Southern people,

was comparatively abstemious in his habits. His dinners were slight, his

clothing was simple, his house was scantily furnished, being intended

chiefly for a den to sleep in.

Serving neither king nor priest, the citizen was free and sovereign in

his own city. He elected his own magistrates, and might himself serve

as city-ruler, as juror, or as judge. Representation was unknown.

Legislation was carried on by all the citizens assembled in mass.

Therefore politics and war were the sole or chief employments of the

citizen. War, indeed, came in for no slight share of his attention. For

society was not so well protected as in these modern days. Most of these

Greek cities, scattered over the coasts of the Aigeian, the Black

Sea, and the Mediterranean, were surrounded by tribes of barbarians,

Scythians, Gauls Spaniards, and Africans. The citizen must therefore

keep on his guard, like the Englishman of to-day in New Zealand, or

like the inhabitant of a Massachusetts town in the seventeenth century.

Otherwise Gauls Samnites, or Bithynians, as savage as North American

Indians, would be sure to encamp upon the blackened ruins of his town.

Moreover, the Greek cities had their quarrels with each other, and their

laws of war were very barbarous. A conquered city was liable to be razed

to the ground, its male inhabitants put to the sword, its women sold as

slaves. Under such circumstances, according to Taine's happy expression,

a citizen must be a politician and warrior, on pain of death. And not

only fear, but ambition also tended to make him so. For each city strove

to subject or to humiliate its neighbours, to acquire tribute, or to

exact homage from its rivals. Thus the citizen passed his life in

the public square, discussing alliances, treaties, and constitutions,

hearing speeches, or speaking himself, and finally going aboard of his

ship to fight his neighbour Greeks, or to sail against Egypt or Persia.

War (and politics as subsidiary to it) was then the chief pursuit of

life. But as there was no organized industry, so there were no machines

of warfare. All fighting was done hand to hand. Therefore, the great

thing in preparing for war was not to transform the soldiers into

precisely-acting automata, as in a modern army, but to make each

separate soldier as vigorous and active as possible. The leading object

of Greek education was to make men physically perfect. In this respect,

Sparta may be taken as the typical Greek community, for nowhere else was

physical development so entirely made the great end of social life. In

these matters Sparta was always regarded by the other cities as taking

the lead,--as having attained the ideal after which all alike were

striving. Now Sparta, situated in the midst of a numerous conquered

population of Messenians and Helots, was partly a great gymnasium and

partly a perpetual camp. Her citizens were always in training. The

entire social constitution of Sparta was shaped with a view to the

breeding and bringing up of a strong and beautiful race. Feeble or

ill-formed infants were put to death. The age at which citizens might

marry was prescribed by law; and the State paired off men and women as

the modern breeder pairs off horses, with a sole view to the excellence

of the off-spring. A wife was not a helpmate, but a bearer of athletes.

Women boxed, wrestled, and raced; a circumstance referred to in the

following passage of Aristophanes, as rendered by Mr. Felton:--

LYSISTRATA.

Hail! Lampito, dearest of Lakonian women.

How shines thy beauty, O my sweetest friend!

How fair thy colour, full of life thy frame!

Why, thou couldst choke a bull.

LAMPITO.

Yes, by the Twain;

For I do practice the gymnastic art,

And, leaping, strike my backbone with my heels.

LYSISTRATA.

In sooth, thy bust is lovely to behold.

The young men lived together, like soldiers in a camp. They ate

out-of-doors, at a public table. Their fare was as simple as that of a

modern university boat-crew before a race. They slept in the open

air, and spent their waking hours in wrestling, boxing, running races,

throwing quoits, and engaging in mock battles. This was the way in which

the Spartans lived; and though no other city carried this discipline to

such an extent, yet in all a very large portion of the citizen's life

was spent in making himself hardy and robust.

The ideal man, in the eyes of a Greek, was, therefore not the

contemplative or delicately susceptible thinker but the naked athlete,

with firm flesh and swelling muscles. Most of their barbarian neighbours

were ashamed to be seen undressed, but the Greeks seem to have felt

little embarrassment in appearing naked in public. Their gymnastic

habits entirely transformed their sense of shame. Their Olympic

and other public games were a triumphant display of naked physical

perfection. Young men of the noblest families and from the farthest

Greek colonies came to them, and wrestled and ran, undraped, before

countless multitudes of admiring spectators. Note, too, as significant,

that the Greek era began with the Olympic games, and that time was

reckoned by the intervals between them; as well as the fact that the

grandest lyric poetry of antiquity was written in celebration of these

gymnastic contests. The victor in the foot-race gave his name to

the current Olympiad; and on reaching home, was received by his

fellow-citizens as if he had been a general returning from a successful

campaign. To be the most beautiful man in Greece was in the eyes of

a Greek the height of human felicity; and with the Greeks, beauty

necessarily included strength. So ardently did this gifted people admire

corporeal perfection that they actually worshipped it. According to

Herodotos, a young Sicilian was deified on account of his beauty, and

after his death altars were raised to him. The vast intellectual power

of Plato and Sokrates did not prevent them from sharing this universal

enthusiasm. Poets like Sophokles, and statesmen like Alexander, thought

it not beneath their dignity to engage publicly in gymnastic sports.

Their conceptions of divinity were framed in accordance with these

general habits. Though sometimes, as in the case of Hephaistos, the

exigencies of the particular myth required the deity to be physically

imperfect, yet ordinarily the Greek god was simply an immortal man,

complete in strength and beauty. The deity was not invested with the

human form as a mere symbol. They could conceive no loftier way of

representing him. The grandest statue, expressing most adequately the

calmness of absolutely unfettered strength, might well, in their eyes,

be a veritable portrait of divinity. To a Greek, beauty of form was

a consecrated thing. More than once a culprit got off with his life

because it would have been thought sacrilegious to put an end to such

a symmetrical creature. And for a similar reason, the Greeks, though

perhaps not more humane than the Europeans of the Middle Ages, rarely

allowed the human body to be mutilated or tortured. The condemned

criminal must be marred as little as possible; and he was, therefore,

quietly poisoned, instead of being hung, beheaded, or broken on the

wheel.

Is not the unapproachable excellence of Greek statuary--that art never

since equalled, and most likely, from the absence of the needful social

stimulus, destined never to be equalled--already sufficiently

explained? Consider, says our author, the nature of the Greek sculptor's

preparation. These men have observed the human body naked and in

movement, in the bath and the gymnasium, in sacred dances and public

games. They have noted those forms and attitudes in which are revealed

vigour, health, and activity. And during three or four hundred years

they have thus modified, corrected and developed their notions of

corporeal beauty. There is, therefore, nothing surprising in the fact

that Greek sculpture finally arrived at the ideal model, the perfect

type, as it was, of the human body. Our highest notions of physical

beauty, down to the present day, have been bequeathed to us by the

Greeks. The earliest modern sculptors who abandoned the bony, hideous,

starveling figures of the monkish Middle Ages, learned their first

lessons in better things from Greek bas-reliefs. And if, to-day,

forgetting our half-developed bodies, inefficiently nourished, because

of our excessive brain-work, and with their muscles weak and flabby from

want of strenuous exercise, we wish to contemplate the human form in its

grandest perfection, we must go to Hellenic art for our models.

The Greeks were, in the highest sense of the word, an intellectual race;

but they never allowed the mind to tyrannize over the body. Spiritual

perfection, accompanied by corporeal feebleness, was the invention of

asceticism; and the Greeks were never ascetics. Diogenes might scorn

superfluous luxuries, but if he ever rolled and tumbled his tub about as

Rabelais says he did, it is clear that the victory of spirit over body

formed no part of his theory of things. Such an idea would have been

incomprehensible to a Greek in Plato's time. Their consciences were not

over active. They were not burdened with a sense of sinfulness. Their

aspirations were decidedly finite; and they believed in securing the

maximum completeness of this terrestrial life. Consequently they never

set the physical below the intellectual. To return to our author, they

never, in their statues, subordinated symmetry to expression, the body

to the head. They were interested not only in the prominence of the

brows, the width of the forehead, and the curvature of the lips, but

quite as much in the massiveness of the chest, the compactness of the

thighs, and the solidity of the arms and legs. Not only the face, but

the whole body, had for them its physiognomy. They left picturesqueness

to the painter, and dramatic fervour to the poet; and keeping strictly

before their eyes the narrow but exalted problem of representing the

beauty of symmetry, they filled their sanctuaries and public places with

those grand motionless people of brass, gold, ivory, copper, and marble,

in whom humanity recognizes its highest artistic types. Statuary was

the central art of Greece. No other art was so popular, or so completely

expressed the national life. The number of statues was enormous. In

later days, when Rome had spoiled the Greek world of its treasures, the

Imperial City possessed a population of statues almost equal in number

to its population of human beings. And at the present day, after all the

destructive accidents of so many intervening centuries, it is estimated

that more than sixty thousand statues have been obtained from Rome and

its suburbs alone.

In citing this admirable exposition as a specimen of M. Taine's method

of dealing with his subject, we have refrained from disturbing the

pellucid current of thought by criticisms of our own. We think the

foregoing explanation correct enough, so far as it goes, though it deals

with the merest rudiments of the subject, and really does nothing toward

elucidating the deeper mysteries of artistic production. For this there

is needed a profounder psychology than M. Taine's. But whether his

theory of art be adequate or not, there can be but one opinion as to the

brilliant eloquence with which it is set forth. June, 1868.

XIV. ATHENIAN AND AMERICAN LIFE.

IN a very interesting essay on British and Foreign Characteristics,

published a few years ago, Mr. W. R. Greg quotes the famous letter of

the Turkish cadi to Mr. Layard, with the comment that "it contains the

germ and element of a wisdom to which our busy and bustling existence is

a stranger"; and he uses it as a text for an instructive sermon on the

"gospel of leisure." He urges, with justice, that the too eager and

restless modern man, absorbed in problems of industrial development, may

learn a wholesome lesson from the contemplation of his Oriental brother,

who cares not to say, "Behold, this star spinneth round that star, and

this other star with a tail cometh and goeth in so many years"; who

aspires not after a "double stomach," nor hopes to attain to Paradise by

"seeking with his eyes." If any one may be thought to stand in need of

some such lesson, it is the American of to-day. Just as far as the Turk

carries his apathy to excess, does the American carry to excess his

restlessness. But just because the incurious idleness of the Turk is

excessive, so as to be detrimental to completeness of living, it

is unfit to supply us with the hints we need concerning the causes,

character, and effects of our over-activity. A sermon of leisure, if it

is to be of practical use to us, must not be a sermon of laziness. The

Oriental state of mind is incompatible with progressive improvement of

any sort, physical, intellectual, or moral. It is one of the phenomena

attendant upon the arrival of a community at a stationary condition

before it has acquired a complex civilization. And it appears

serviceable rather as a background upon which to exhibit in relief our

modern turmoil, than by reason of any lesson which it is itself

likely to convey. Let us in preference study one of the most eminently

progressive of all the communities that have existed. Let us take an

example quite different from any that can be drawn from Oriental

life, but almost equally contrasted with any that can be found among

ourselves; and let us, with the aid of it, examine the respective

effects of leisure and of hurry upon the culture of the community.

What do modern critics mean by the "healthy completeness" of ancient

life, which they are so fond of contrasting with the "heated,"

"discontented," or imperfect and one-sided existence of modern

communities? Is this a mere set of phrases, suited to some imaginary

want of the literary critic, but answering to nothing real? Are they to

be summarily disposed of as resting upon some tacit assumption of that

old-grannyism which delights in asseverating that times are not what

they used to be? Is the contrast an imaginary one, due to the softened,

cheerful light with which we are wont to contemplate classic antiquity

through the charmed medium of its incomparable literature? Or is it a

real contrast, worthy of the attention and analysis of the historical

inquirer? The answer to these queries will lead us far into the

discussion of the subject which we have propounded, and we shall best

reach it by considering some aspects of the social condition of ancient

Greece. The lessons to be learned from that wonderful country are not

yet exhausted Each time that we return to that richest of historic

mines, and delve faithfully and carefully, we shall be sure to dig up

some jewel worth carrying away.

And in considering ancient Greece, we shall do well to confine our

attention, for the sake of definiteness of conception, to a single

city. Comparatively homogeneous as Greek civilization was, there was

nevertheless a great deal of difference between the social circumstances

of sundry of its civic communities. What was true of Athens was

frequently not true of Sparta or Thebes, and general assertions about

ancient Greece are often likely to be collect only in a loose and

general way. In speaking, therefore, of Greece, I must be understood

in the main as referring to Athens, the eye and light of Greece, the

nucleus and centre of Hellenic culture.

Let us note first that Athens was a large city surrounded by pleasant

village-suburbs,--the demes of Attika,--very much as Boston is closely

girdled by rural places like Brookline, Jamaica Plain, and the rest,

village after village rather thickly covering a circuit of from ten

to twenty miles' radius. The population of Athens with its suburbs may

perhaps have exceeded half a million; but the number of adult freemen

bearing arms did not exceed twenty-five thousand. [67] For every one

of these freemen there were four or five slaves; not ignorant, degraded

labourers, belonging to an inferior type of humanity, and bearing the

marks of a lower caste in their very personal formation and in the

colour of their skin, like our lately-enslaved negroes; but intelligent,

skilled labourers, belonging usually to the Hellenic, and at any rate

to the Aryan race, as fair and perhaps as handsome as their masters, and

not subjected to especial ignominy or hardship. These slaves, of whom

there were at least one hundred thousand adult males, relieved the

twenty-five thousand freemen of nearly all the severe drudgery of life;

and the result was an amount of leisure perhaps never since known on an

equal scale in history.

[67] See Herod. V. 97; Aristoph. Ekkl. 432; Thukyd. II. 13;

Plutarch, Perikl. 37.

The relations of master and slave in ancient Athens constituted, of

course, a very different phenomenon from anything which the history of

our own Southern States has to offer us. Our Southern slaveholders lived

in an age of industrial development; they were money-makers: they had

their full share of business in managing the operations for which their

labourers supplied the crude physical force. It was not so in Athens.

The era of civilization founded upon organized industry had not begun;

money-making had not come to be, with the Greeks, the one all-important

end of life; and mere subsistence, which is now difficult, was then

easy. The Athenian lived in a mild, genial, healthy climate, in a

country which has always been notable for the activity and longevity

of its inhabitants. He was frugal in his habits,--a wine-drinker and

an eater of meat, but rarely addicted to gluttony or intemperance. His

dress was inexpensive, for the Greek climate made but little protection

necessary, and the gymnastic habits of the Greeks led them to esteem

more highly the beauty of the body than that of its covering. His house

was simple, not being intended for social purposes, while of what we

should call home-life the Greeks had none. The house was a shelter at

night, a place where the frugal meal might be taken, a place where the

wife might stay, and look after the household slaves or attend to the

children. And this brings us to another notable feature of Athenian

life. The wife having no position in society, being nothing, indeed,

but a sort of household utensil, how greatly was life simplified! What a

door for expenditure was there, as yet securely closed, and which no one

had thought of opening! No milliner's or dressmaker's bills, no evening

parties, no Protean fashions, no elegant furniture, no imperious

necessity for Kleanthes to outshine Kleon, no coaches, no Chateau

Margaux, no journeys to Arkadia in the summer! In such a state of

society, as one may easily see, the labour of one man would support half

a dozen. It cost the Athenian but a few cents daily to live, and even

these few cents might be earned by his slaves. We need not, therefore,

be surprised to learn that in ancient Athens there were no paupers or

beggars. There might be poverty, but indigence was unknown; and because

of the absence of fashion, style, and display, even poverty entailed

no uncomfortable loss of social position. The Athenians valued wealth

highly, no doubt, as a source of contributions to public festivals and

to the necessities of the state. But as far as the circumstances of

daily life go, the difference between the rich man and the poor man was

immeasurably less than in any modern community, and the incentives to

the acquirement of wealth were, as a consequence, comparatively slight.

I do not mean to say that the Athenians did not engage in business.

Their city was a commercial city, and their ships covered the

Mediterranean. They had agencies and factories at Marseilles, on the

remote coasts of Spain, and along the shores of the Black Sea. They

were in many respects the greatest commercial people of antiquity,

and doubtless knew, as well as other people, the keen delights of

acquisition. But my point is, that with them the acquiring of property

had not become the chief or only end of life. Production was carried

on almost entirely by slave-labour; interchange of commodities was the

business of the masters, and commerce was in those days simple. Banks,

insurance companies, brokers' boards,--all these complex instruments

of Mammon were as yet unthought of. There was no Wall Street in

ancient Athens; there were no great failures, no commercial panics,

no over-issues of stock. Commerce, in short, was a quite subordinate

matter, and the art of money-making was in its infancy.

The twenty-five thousand Athenian freemen thus enjoyed, on the whole,

more undisturbed leisure, more freedom from petty harassing cares,

than any other community known to history. Nowhere else can we find,

on careful study, so little of the hurry and anxiety which destroys the

even tenour of modern life,--nowhere else so few of the circumstances

which tend to make men insane, inebriate, or phthisical, or prematurely

old.

This being granted, it remains only to state and illustrate the obverse

fact. It is not only true that Athens has produced and educated a

relatively larger number of men of the highest calibre and most complete

culture than any other community of like dimensions which has ever

existed; but it is also true that there has been no other community, of

which the members have, as a general rule, been so highly cultivated,

or have attained individually such completeness of life. In proof of

the first assertion it will be enough to mention such names as those of

Solon, Themistokles, Perikles, and Demosthenes; Isokrates and Lysias;

Aristophanes and Menander; Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides; Pheidias

and Praxiteles; Sokrates and Plato; Thukydides and Xenophon: remembering

that these men, distinguished for such different kinds of achievement,

but like each other in consummateness of culture, were all produced

within one town in the course of three centuries. At no other time and

place in human history has there been even an approach to such a fact as

this.

My other assertion, about the general culture of the community in which

such men were reared, will need a more detailed explanation. When I say

that the Athenian public was, on the whole, the most highly cultivated

public that has ever existed, I refer of course to something more than

what is now known as literary culture. Of this there was relatively

little in the days of Athenian greatness; and this was because there was

not yet need for it or room for it. Greece did not until a later time

begin to produce scholars and savants; for the function of scholarship

does not begin until there has been an accumulation of bygone literature

to be interpreted for the benefit of those who live in a later time.

Grecian greatness was already becoming a thing of the past, when

scholarship and literary culture of the modern type began at Rome and

Alexandria. The culture of the ancient Athenians was largely derived

from direct intercourse with facts of nature and of life, and with the

thoughts of rich and powerful minds orally expressed. The value of this

must not be underrated. We moderns are accustomed to get so large a

portion of our knowledge and of our theories of life out of books,

our taste and judgment are so largely educated by intercourse with the

printed page, that we are apt to confound culture with book-knowledge;

we are apt to forget the innumerable ways in which the highest

intellectual faculties may be disciplined without the aid of literature.

We must study antiquity to realize how thoroughly this could be done.

But even in our day, how much more fruitful is the direct influence of

an original mind over us, in the rare cases when it can be enjoyed, than

any indirect influence which the same mind may exert through the

medium of printed books! What fellow of a college, placed amid the most

abundant and efficient implements of study, ever gets such a stimulus to

the highest and richest intellectual life as was afforded to Eckermann

by his daily intercourse with Goethe? The breadth of culture and the

perfection of training exhibited by John Stuart Mill need not surprise

us when we recollect that his earlier days were spent in the society of

James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. And the remarkable extent of view, the

command of facts, and the astonishing productiveness of such modern

Frenchmen as Sainte-Beuve and Littre become explicable when we reflect

upon the circumstance that so many able and brilliant men are collected

in one city, where their minds may continually and directly react upon

each other. It is from the lack of such personal stimulus that it is

difficult or indeed wellnigh impossible, even for those whose resources

are such as to give them an extensive command of books, to keep up to

the highest level of contemporary culture while living in a village or

provincial town. And it is mainly because of the personal stimulus

which it affords to its students, that a great university, as a seat of

culture, is immeasurably superior to a small one.

Nevertheless, the small community in any age possesses one signal

advantage over the large one, in its greater simplicity of life and its

consequent relative leisure. It was the prerogative of ancient Athens

that it united the advantages of the large to those of the small

community. In relative simplicity of life it was not unlike the modern

village, while at the same time it was the metropolis where the foremost

minds of the time were enabled to react directly upon one another.

In yet another respect these opposite advantages were combined. The

twenty-five thousand free inhabitants might perhaps all know something

of each other. In this respect Athens was doubtless much like a New

England country town, with the all-important difference that the sordid

tone due to continual struggle for money was absent. It was like the

small town in the chance which it afforded for publicity and community

of pursuits among its inhabitants. Continuous and unrestrained social

intercourse was accordingly a distinctive feature of Athenian life.

And, as already hinted, this intercourse did not consist in evening

flirtations, with the eating of indigestible food at unseasonable hours,

and the dancing of "the German." It was carried on out-of-doors in

the brightest sunlight; it brooked no effeminacy; its amusements were

athletic games, or dramatic entertainments, such as have hardly since

been equalled. Its arena was a town whose streets were filled with

statues and adorned with buildings, merely to behold which was in itself

an education. The participators in it were not men with minds so dwarfed

by exclusive devotion to special pursuits that after "talking shop" they

could find nothing else save wine and cookery to converse about. They

were men with minds fresh and open for the discussion of topics which

are not for a day only.

A man like Sokrates, living in such a community, did not need to write

down his wisdom. He had no such vast public as the modern philosopher

has to reach. He could hail any one he happened to pass in the street,

begin an argument with him forthwith, and set a whole crowd thinking

and inquiring about subjects the mere contemplation of which would raise

them for the moment above matters of transient concern. For more

than half a century any citizen might have gratis the benefit of oral

instruction from such a man as he. And I sometimes think, by the way,

that--curtailed as it is to literary proportions in the dialogues of

Plato, bereft of all that personal potency which it had when it flowed,

instinct with earnestness, from the lips of the teacher--even to this

day the wit of man has perhaps devised no better general gymnastics for

the understanding than the Sokratic dialectic. I am far from saying that

all Athens listened to Sokrates or understood him: had it been so, the

caricature of Aristophanes would have been pointless, and the sublime

yet mournful trilogy of dialogues which pourtray the closing scenes of

the greatest life of antiquity would never have been written. But the

mere fact that such a man lived and taught in the way that he did

goes far in proof of the deep culture of the Athenian public. Further

confirmation is to be found in the fact that such tragedies as the

Antigone, the Oidipous, and the Prometheus were written to suit the

popular taste of the time; not to be read by literary people, or to be

performed before select audiences such as in our day listen to Ristori

or Janauschek, but to hold spell-bound that vast concourse of all kinds

of people which assembled at the Dionysiac festivals.

Still further proof is furnished by the exquisite literary perfection

of Greek writings. One of the common arguments in favour of the study

of Greek at the present day is based upon the opinion that in the best

works extant in that language the art of literary expression has reached

wellnigh absolute perfection. I fully concur in this opinion, so far

as to doubt if even the greatest modern writers, even a Pascal or a

Voltaire, can fairly sustain a comparison with such Athenians as Plato

or Lysias. This excellence of the ancient books is in part immediately

due to the fact that they were not written in a hurry, or amid the

anxieties of an over-busy existence; but it is in greater part due to

the indirect consequences of a leisurely life. These books were written

for a public which knew well how to appreciate the finer beauties of

expression; and, what is still more to the point, their authors lived

in a community where an elegant style was habitual. Before a matchless

style can be written, there must be a good style "in the air," as the

French say. Probably the most finished talking and writing of modern

times has been done in and about the French court in the seventeenth

century; and it is accordingly there that we find men like Pascal and

Bossuet writing a prose which for precision, purity, and dignity has

never since been surpassed. It is thus that the unapproachable literary

excellence of ancient Greek books speaks for the genuine culture of the

people who were expected to read them, or to hear them read. For one of

the surest indices of true culture, whether professedly literary or not,

is the power to express one's self in precise, rhythmical, and dignified

language. We hardly need a better evidence than this of the superiority

of the ancient community in the general elevation of its tastes and

perceptions. Recollecting how Herodotos read his history at the Olympic

games, let us try to imagine even so picturesque a writer as Mr. Parkman

reading a few chapters of his "Jesuits in North America" before the

spectators assembled at the Jerome Park races, and we shall the better

realize how deep-seated was Hellenic culture.

As yet, however, I have referred to but one side of Athenian life.

Though "seekers after wisdom," the cultivated people of Athens did not

spend all their valuable leisure in dialectics or in connoisseurship.

They were not a set of dilettanti or dreamy philosophers, and they were

far from subordinating the material side of life to the intellectual.

Also, though they dealt not in money-making after the eager fashion of

modern men, they had still concerns of immediate practical interest with

which to busy themselves. Each one of these twenty-five thousand free

Athenians was not only a free voter, but an office-holder, a legislator,

a judge. They did not control the government through a representative

body, but they were themselves the government. They were, one and all,

in turn liable to be called upon to make laws, and to execute them after

they were made, as well as to administer justice in civil and criminal

suits. The affairs and interests, not only of their own city, but of a

score or two of scattered dependencies, were more or less closely to be

looked after by them. It lay with them to declare war, to carry it on

after declaring it, and to pay the expenses of it. Actually and not by

deputy they administered the government of their own city, both in its

local and in its imperial relations. All this implies a more thorough,

more constant, and more vital political training than that which is

implied by the modern duties of casting a ballot and serving on a jury.

The life of the Athenian was emphatically a political life. From early

manhood onward, it was part of his duty to hear legal questions argued

by powerful advocates, and to utter a decision upon law and fact; or to

mix in debate upon questions of public policy, arguing, listening, and

pondering. It is customary to compare the political talent of the Greeks

unfavourably with that displayed by the Romans, and I have no wish to

dispute this estimate. But on a careful study it will appear that the

Athenians, at least, in a higher degree than any other community of

ancient times, exhibited parliamentary tact, or the ability to sit still

while both sides of a question are getting discussed,--that sort of

political talent for which the English races are distinguished, and to

the lack of which so many of the political failures of the French are

egregiously due. One would suppose that a judicature of the whole town

would be likely to execute a sorry parody of justice; yet justice was

by no means ill-administered at Athens. Even the most unfortunate and

disgraceful scenes,--as where the proposed massacre of the Mytilenaians

was discussed, and where summary retribution was dealt out to the

generals who had neglected their duty at Arginusai,--even these scenes

furnish, when thoroughly examined, as by Mr. Grote, only the more

convincing proof that the Athenian was usually swayed by sound reason

and good sense to an extraordinary degree. All great points in fact,

were settled rather by sober appeals to reason than by intrigue or

lobbying; and one cannot help thinking that an Athenian of the time

of Perikles would have regarded with pitying contempt the trick of the

"previous question." And this explains the undoubted pre-eminence

of Athenian oratory. This accounts for the fact that we find in the

forensic annals of a single city, and within the compass of a single

century, such names as Lysias, Isokrates, Andokides, Hypereides,

Aischines, and Demosthenes. The art of oratory, like the art of

sculpture, shone forth more brilliantly then than ever since, because

then the conditions favouring its development were more perfectly

combined than they have since been. Now, a condition of society in

which the multitude can always be made to stand quietly and listen to a

logical discourse is a condition of high culture. Readers of Xenophon's

Anabasis will remember the frequency of the speeches in that charming

book. Whenever some terrible emergency arose, or some alarming quarrel

or disheartening panic occurred, in the course of the retreat of the

Ten Thousand, an oration from one of the commanders--not a demagogue's

appeal to the lower passions, but a calm exposition of circumstances

addressed to the sober judgment--usually sufficed to set all things in

order. To my mind this is one of the most impressive historical lessons

conveyed in Xenophon's book. And this peculiar kind of self-control,

indicative of intellectual sobriety and high moral training, which was

more or less characteristic of all Greeks, was especially characteristic

of the Athenians.

These illustrations will, I hope, suffice to show that there is nothing

extravagant in the high estimate which I have made of Athenian culture.

I have barely indicated the causes of this singular perfection of

individual training in the social circumstances amid which the Athenians

lived. I have alleged it as an instance of what may be accomplished by

a well-directed leisure and in the absence or very scanty development of

such a complex industrial life as that which surrounds us to-day. But I

have not yet quite done with the Athenians. Before leaving this part of

the subject, I must mention one further circumstance which tends to

make ancient life appear in our eyes more sunny and healthy and less

distressed, than the life of modern times. And in this instance, too,

though we are not dealing with any immediate or remote effects of

leisureliness, we still have to note the peculiar advantage gained by

the absence of a great complexity of interests in the ancient community.

With respect to religion, the Athenians were peculiarly situated. They

had for the most part outgrown the primitive terrorism of fetishistic

belief. Save in cases of public distress, as in the mutilation of the

Hermai, or in the refusal of Nikias to retreat from Syracuse because of

an eclipse of the moon, they were no longer, like savages, afraid of the

dark. Their keen aesthetic sense had prevailed to turn the horrors of

a primeval nature-worship into beauties. Their springs and groves were

peopled by their fancy with naiads and dryads, not with trolls and

grotesque goblins. Their feelings toward the unseen powers at work

about them were in the main pleasant; as witness the little story about

Pheidippides meeting the god Pan as he was making with hot haste toward

Sparta to announce the arrival of the Persians. Now, while this original

source of mental discomfort, which afflicts the uncivilized man, had

ceased materially to affect the Athenians, they on the other hand

lived at a time when the vague sense of sin and self-reproof which was

characteristic of the early ages of Christianity, had not yet invaded

society. The vast complication of life brought about by the extension of

the Roman Empire led to a great development of human sympathies,

unknown in earlier times, and called forth unquiet yearnings, desire for

amelioration, a sense of short-coming, and a morbid self-consciousness.

It is accordingly under Roman sway that we first come across characters

approximating to the modern type, like Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and

Marcus Aurelius. It is then that we find the idea of social progress

first clearly expressed, that we discover some glimmerings of a

conscious philanthropy, and that we detect the earliest symptoms of that

unhealthy tendency to subordinate too entirely the physical to the moral

life, which reached its culmination in the Middle Ages. In the palmy

days of the Athenians it was different. When we hint that they were not

consciously philanthropists, we do not mean that they were not humane;

when we accredit them with no idea of progress, we do not forget how

much they did to render both the idea and the reality possible; when we

say that they had not a distressing sense of spiritual unworthiness, we

do not mean that they had no conscience. We mean that their moral and

religious life sat easily on them, like their own graceful drapery,--did

not gall and worry them, like the hair-cloth garment of the monk. They

were free from that dark conception of a devil which lent terror to

life in the Middle Ages; and the morbid self-consciousness which led

mediaeval women to immure themselves in convents would have been to an

Athenian quite inexplicable. They had, in short, an open and childlike

conception of religion; and, as such, it was a sunny conception. Any one

who will take the trouble to compare an idyl of Theokritos with a modern

pastoral, or the poem of Kleanthes with a modern hymn, or the Aphrodite

of Melos with a modern Madonna, will realize most effectually what I

mean.

And, finally, the religion of the Athenians was in the main symbolized

in a fluctuating mythology, and had never been hardened into dogmas. The

Athenian was subject to no priest, nor was he obliged to pin his faith

to any formulated creed. His hospitable polytheism left little room

for theological persecution, and none for any heresy short of virtual

atheism. The feverish doubts which rack the modern mind left him

undisturbed. Though he might sink to any depth of scepticism in

philosophy, yet the eternal welfare of his soul was not supposed to hang

upon the issue of his doubts. Accordingly Athenian society was not

only characterized in the main by freedom of opinion, in spite of the

exceptional cases of Anaxagoras and Sokrates; but there was also none of

that Gothic gloom with which the deep-seated Christian sense of infinite

responsibility for opinion has saddened modern religious life.

In these reflections I have wandered a little way from my principal

theme, in order more fully to show why the old Greek life impresses us

as so cheerful. Returning now to the keynote with which we started,

let us state succinctly the net result of what has been said about the

Athenians. As a people we have seen that they enjoyed an unparalleled

amount of leisure, living through life with but little turmoil and

clatter. Their life was more spontaneous and unrestrained, less

rigorously marked out by uncontrollable circumstances, than the life

of moderns. They did not run so much in grooves. And along with this

we have seen reason to believe that they were the most profoundly

cultivated of all peoples; that a larger proportion of men lived

complete, well-rounded, harmonious lives in ancient Athens than in

any other known community. Keen, nimble-minded, and self-possessed;

audacious speculators, but temperate and averse to extravagance;

emotionally healthy, and endowed with an unequalled sense of beauty and

propriety; how admirable and wonderful they seem when looked at across

the gulf of ages intervening,--and what a priceless possession to

humanity, of what noble augury for the distant future, is the fact that

such a society has once existed!

The lesson to be drawn from the study of this antique life will impress

itself more deeply upon us after we have briefly contemplated the

striking contrast to it which is afforded by the phase of civilization

amid which we live to-day. Ever since Greek civilization was merged

in Roman imperialism, there has been a slowly growing tendency toward

complexity of social life,--toward the widening of sympathies, the

multiplying of interests, the increase of the number of things to

be done. Through the later Middle Ages, after Roman civilization had

absorbed and disciplined the incoming barbarism which had threatened to

destroy it, there was a steadily increasing complication of society, a

multiplication of the wants of life, and a consequent enhancement of the

difficulty of self-maintenance. The ultimate causes of this phenomenon

lie so far beneath the surface that they could be satisfactorily

discussed only in a technical essay on the evolution of society. It will

be enough for us here to observe that the great geographical discoveries

of the sixteenth century and the somewhat later achievements of physical

science have, during the past two hundred years, aided powerfully

in determining the entrance of the Western world upon an industrial

epoch,--an epoch which has for its final object the complete subjection

of the powers of nature to purposes of individual comfort and happiness.

We have now to trace some of the effects of this lately-begun industrial

development upon social life and individual culture. And as we studied

the leisureliness of antiquity where its effects were most conspicuous,

in the city of Athens, we shall now do well to study the opposite

characteristics of modern society where they are most conspicuously

exemplified, in our own country. The attributes of American life which

it will be necessary to signalize will be seen to be only the attributes

of modern life in their most exaggerated phase.

To begin with, in studying the United States, we are no longer dealing

with a single city, or with small groups of cities. The city as a

political unit, in the antique sense, has never existed among us, and

indeed can hardly be said now to exist anywhere. The modern city is

hardly more than a great emporium of trade, or a place where large

numbers of people find it convenient to live huddled together; not a

sacred fatherland to which its inhabitants owe their highest allegiance,

and by the requirements of which their political activity is limited.

What strikes us here is that our modern life is diffused or spread out,

not concentrated like the ancient civic life. If the Athenian had been

the member of an integral community, comprising all peninsular Greece

and the mainland of Asia Minor, he could not have taken life so easily

as he did.

Now our country is not only a very large one, but compared to its vast

territorial extent it contains a very small population. If we go on

increasing at the present rate, so that a century hence we number four

or five hundred millions, our country will be hardly more crowded than

China is to-day. Or if our whole population were now to be brought east

of Niagara Falls, and confined on the south by the Potomac, we should

still have as much elbow-room as they have in France. Political

economists can show the effects of this high ratio of land to

inhabitants, in increasing wages, raising the interest of money, and

stimulating production. We are thus living amid circumstances which

are goading the industrial activity characteristic of the last two

centuries, and notably of the English race, into an almost feverish

energy. The vast extent of our unwrought territory is constantly

draining fresh life from our older districts, to aid in the

establishment of new frontier communities of a somewhat lower or less

highly organized type. And these younger communities, daily springing

up, are constantly striving to take on the higher structure,--to

become as highly civilized and to enjoy as many of the prerogatives of

civilization as the rest. All this calls forth an enormous quantity

of activity, and causes American life to assume the aspect of a

life-and-death struggle for mastery over the material forces of that

part of the earth's surface upon which it thrives.

It is thus that we are traversing what may properly be called the

BARBAROUS epoch of our history,--the epoch at which the predominant

intellectual activity is employed in achievements which are mainly of a

material character. Military barbarism, or the inability of communities

to live together without frequent warfare, has been nearly outgrown

by the whole Western world. Private wars, long since made everywhere

illegal, have nearly ceased; and public wars, once continual, have

become infrequent. But industrial barbarism, by which I mean the

inability of a community to direct a portion of its time to purposes of

spiritual life, after providing for its physical maintenance,--this

kind of barbarism the modern world has by no means outgrown. To-day, the

great work of life is to live; while the amount of labour consumed

in living has throughout the present century been rapidly increasing.

Nearly the whole of this American community toils from youth to old

age in merely procuring the means for satisfying the transient wants of

life. Our time and energies, our spirit and buoyancy, are quite used up

in what is called "getting on."

Another point of difference between the structure of American and of

Athenian society must not be left out of the account. The time has gone

by in which the energies of a hundred thousand men and women could be

employed in ministering to the individual perfection of twenty-five

thousand. Slavery, in the antique sense,--an absolute command of brain

as well as of muscle, a slave-system of skilled labour,--we have never

had. In our day it is for each man to earn his own bread; so that the

struggle for existence has become universal. The work of one class does

not furnish leisure for another class. The exceptional circumstances

which freed the Athenian from industrial barbarism, and enabled him to

become the great teacher and model of culture for the human race, have

disappeared forever.

Then the general standard of comfortable living, as already hinted, has

been greatly raised, and is still rising. What would have satisfied the

ancient would seem to us like penury. We have a domestic life of which

the Greek knew nothing. We live during a large part of the year in the

house. Our social life goes on under the roof. Our houses are not mere

places for eating and sleeping, like the houses of the ancients. It

therefore costs us a large amount of toil to get what is called shelter

for our heads. The sum which a young married man, in "good society,"

has to pay for his house and the furniture contained in it, would have

enabled an Athenian to live in princely leisure from youth to old age.

The sum which he has to pay out each year, to meet the complicated

expense of living in such a house, would have more than sufficed to

bring up an Athenian family. If worthy Strepsiades could have got an

Asmodean glimpse of Fifth Avenue, or even of some unpretending street in

Cambridge, he might have gone back to his aristocratic wife a sadder but

a more contented man.

Wealth--or at least what would until lately have been called wealth--has

become essential to comfort; while the opportunities for acquiring

it have in recent times been immensely multiplied. To get money is,

therefore, the chief end of life in our time and country. "Success

in life" has become synonymous with "becoming wealthy." A man who is

successful in what he undertakes is a man who makes his employment

pay him in money. Our normal type of character is that of the shrewd,

circumspect business man; as in the Middle Ages it was that of the hardy

warrior. And as in those days when fighting was a constant necessity,

and when the only honourable way for a gentleman of high rank to

make money was by freebooting, fighting came to be regarded as an end

desirable in itself; so in these days the mere effort to accumulate has

become a source of enjoyment rather than a means to it. The same truth

is to be witnessed in aberrant types of character. The infatuated

speculator and the close-fisted millionaire are our substitutes for the

mediaeval berserkir,--the man who loved the pell-mell of a contest so

well that he would make war on his neighbour, just to keep his hand in.

In like manner, while such crimes as murder and violent robbery have

diminished in frequency during the past century, on the other hand such

crimes as embezzlement, gambling in stocks, adulteration of goods, and

using of false weights and measures, have probably increased. If Dick

Turpin were now to be brought back to life, he would find the New York

Custom-House a more congenial and profitable working-place than the

king's highway.

The result of this universal quest for money is that we are always in a

hurry. Our lives pass by in a whirl. It is all labour and no fruition.

We work till we are weary; we carry our work home with us; it haunts our

evenings, and disturbs our sleep as well as our digestion. Our minds are

so burdened with it that our conversation, when serious, can dwell upon

little else. If we step into a railway-car, or the smoking-room of

a hotel, or any other place where a dozen or two of men are gathered

together, we shall hear them talking of stocks, of investments, of

commercial paper, as if there were really nothing in this universe worth

thinking of, save only the interchange of dollars and commodities. So

constant and unremitted is our forced application, that our minds are

dwarfed for everything except the prosecution of the one universal

pursuit.

Are we now prepared for the completing of the contrast? Must we say

that, as Athens was the most leisurely and the United States is the

most hurried community known in history, so the Americans are, as a

consequence of their hurry, lacking in thoroughness of culture? Or,

since it is difficult to bring our modern culture directly into contrast

with that of an ancient community, let me state the case after a

different but equivalent fashion. Since the United States present

only an exaggerated type of the modern industrial community, since the

turmoil of incessant money-getting, which affects all modern communities

in large measure, affects us most seriously of all, shall it be

said that we are, on the whole, less highly cultivated than our

contemporaries in Western Europe? To a certain extent we must confess

that this is the case. In the higher culture--in the culture of the

whole man, according to the antique idea--we are undoubtedly behind all

other nations with which it would be fair to compare ourselves. It

will not do to decide a question like this merely by counting literary

celebrities, although even thus we should by no means get a verdict in

our favour. Since the beginning of this century, England has produced

as many great writers and thinkers as France or Germany; yet the general

status of culture in England is said--perhaps with truth--to be lower

than it is in these countries. It is said that the average Englishman is

less ready than the average German or Frenchman to sympathize with ideas

which have no obvious market-value. Yet in England there is an amount of

high culture among those not professionally scholars, which it would

be vain to seek among ourselves. The purposes of my argument, however,

require that the comparison should be made between our own country and

Western Europe in general. Compare, then, our best magazines--not solely

with regard to their intrinsic excellence, but also with regard to the

way in which they are sustained--with the Revue des Deux Mondes or the

Journal des Debats. Or compare our leading politicians with men like

Gladstone, Disraeli, or Sir G. C. Lewis; or even with such men as

Brougham or Thiers. Or compare the slovenly style of our newspaper

articles, I will not say with the exquisite prose of the lamented

Prevost-Paradol, but with the ordinary prose of the French or English

newspaper. But a far better illustration--for it goes down to the root

of things--is suggested by the recent work of Matthew Arnold on the

schools of the continent of Europe. The country of our time where

the general culture is unquestionably the highest is Prussia. Now, in

Prussia, they are able to have a Minister of Education, who is a member

of the Cabinet. They are sure that this minister will not appoint or

remove even an assistant professor for political reasons. Only once,

as Arnold tells us, has such a thing been done; and then public opinion

expressed itself in such an emphatic tone of disapproval that the

displaced teacher was instantly appointed to another position. Nothing

of this sort, says Arnold, could have occurred in England; but still

less could it occur in America. Had we such an educational system,

there would presently be an "Education Ring" to control it. Nor can this

difference be ascribed to the less eager political activity of Germany.

The Prussian state of things would have been possible in ancient Athens,

where political life was as absorbing and nearly as turbulent as in the

United States. The difference is due to our lack of faith in culture, a

lack of faith in that of which we have not had adequate experience.

We lack culture because we live in a hurry, and because our attention is

given up to pursuits which call into activity and develop but one side

of us. On the one hand contemplate Sokrates quietly entertaining a crowd

in the Athenian market-place, and on the other hand consider Broadway

with its eternal clatter, and its throngs of hurrying people elbowing

and treading on each other's heels, and you will get a lively notion of

the difference between the extreme phases of ancient and modern life. By

the time we have thus rushed through our day, we have no strength left

to devote to things spiritual. To-day finds us no nearer fruition than

yesterday. And if perhaps the time at last arrives when fruition is

practicable, our minds have run so long in the ruts that they cannot be

twisted out.

As it is impossible for any person living in a given state of society

to keep himself exempt from its influences, detrimental as well as

beneficial, we find that even those who strive to make a literary

occupation subservient to purposes of culture are not, save in rare

cases, spared by the general turmoil. Those who have at once the

ability, the taste, and the wealth needful for training themselves to

the accomplishment of some many-sided and permanent work are of course

very few. Nor have our universities yet provided themselves with the

means for securing to literary talent the leisure which is essential

to complete mental development, or to a high order of productiveness.

Although in most industrial enterprises we know how to work together so

successfully, in literature we have as yet no co-operation. We have not

only no Paris, but we have not even a Tubingen, a Leipsic, or a Jena, or

anything corresponding to the fellowships in the English universities.

Our literary workers have no choice but to fall into the ranks, and

make merchandise of their half-formed ideas. They must work without

co-operation, they must write in a hurry, and they must write for those

who have no leisure for aught but hasty and superficial reading.

Bursting boilers and custom-house frauds may have at first sight nothing

to do with each other or with my subject. It is indisputable, however,

that the horrible massacres perpetrated every few weeks or mouths by our

common carriers, and the disgraceful peculation in which we allow

our public servants to indulge with hardly ever an effective word of

protest, are alike to be ascribed to the same causes which interfere

with our higher culture. It is by no means a mere accidental coincidence

that for every dollar stolen by government officials in Prussia, at

least fifty or a hundred are stolen in the United States. This does not

show that the Germans are our superiors in average honesty, but it

shows that they are our superiors in thoroughness. It is with them an

imperative demand that any official whatever shall be qualified for his

post; a principle of public economy which in our country is not simply

ignored in practice, but often openly laughed at. But in a country where

high intelligence and thorough training are imperatively demanded, it

follows of necessity that these qualifications must insure for their

possessors a permanent career in which the temptations to malfeasance or

dishonesty are reduced to the minimum. On the other hand, in a country

where intelligence and training have no surety that they are to

carry the day against stupidity and inefficiency, the incentives to

dishonourable conduct are overpowering. The result in our own political

life is that the best men are driven in disgust from politics, and thus

one of the noblest fields for the culture of the whole man is given

over to be worked by swindlers and charlatans. To an Athenian such a

severance of the highest culture from political life would have been

utterly inconceivable. Obviously the deepest explanation of all this

lies in our lack of belief in the necessity for high and thorough

training. We do not value culture enough to keep it in our employ or to

pay it for its services; and what is this short-sighted negligence but

the outcome of the universal shiftlessness begotten of the habit of

doing everything in a hurry? On every hand we may see the fruits of

this shiftlessness, from buildings that tumble in, switches that are

misplaced, furnaces that are ill-protected, fire-brigades that are

without discipline, up to unauthorized meddlings with the currency, and

revenue laws which defeat their own purpose.

I said above that the attributes of American life which we should find

it necessary for our purpose to signalize are simply the attributes

of modern life in their most exaggerated phase. Is there not a certain

sense in which all modern handiwork is hastily and imperfectly done?

To begin with common household arts, does not every one know that old

things are more durable than new things? Our grandfathers wore better

shoes than we wear, because there was leisure enough to cure the leather

properly. In old times a chair was made of seasoned wood, and its joints

carefully fitted; its maker had leisure to see that it was well put

together. Now a thousand are turned off at once by machinery, out of

green wood, and, with their backs glued on, are hurried off to their

evil fate,--destined to drop in pieces if they happen to stand near the

fireplace, and liable to collapse under the weight of a heavy man.

Some of us still preserve, as heirlooms, old tables and bedsteads of

Cromwellian times: in the twenty-first century what will have become of

our machine-made bedsteads and tables?

Perhaps it may seem odd to talk about tanning and joinery in connection

with culture, but indeed there is a subtle bond of union holding

together all these things. Any phase of life can be understood only by

associating with it some different phase. Sokrates himself has taught us

how the homely things illustrate the grand things. If we turn to the art

of musical composition and inquire into some of the differences between

our recent music and that of Handel's time, we shall alight upon the

very criticism which Mr. Mill somewhere makes in comparing ancient with

modern literature: the substance has improved, but the form has in

some respects deteriorated. The modern music expresses the results of a

richer and more varied emotional experience, and in wealth of harmonic

resources, to say nothing of increased skill in orchestration, it is

notably superior to the old music. Along with this advance, however,

there is a perceptible falling off in symmetry and completeness of

design, and in what I would call spontaneousness of composition. I

believe that this is because modern composers, as a rule, do not drudge

patiently enough upon counterpoint. They do not get that absolute

mastery over technical difficulties of figuration which was the great

secret of the incredible facility and spontaneity of composition

displayed by Handel and Bach. Among recent musicians Mendelssohn is the

most thoroughly disciplined in the elements of counterpoint; and it is

this perfect mastery of the technique of his art which has enabled him

to outrank Schubert and Schumann, neither of whom would one venture to

pronounce inferior to him in native wealth of musical ideas. May we

not partly attribute to rudimentary deficiency in counterpoint the

irregularity of structure which so often disfigures the works of the

great Wagner and the lesser Liszt, and which the more ardent admirers of

these composers are inclined to regard as a symptom of progress?

I am told that a similar illustration might be drawn from the modern

history of painting; that, however noble the conceptions of the great

painters of the present century, there are none who have gained such a

complete mastery over the technicalities of drawing and the handling of

the brush as was required in the times of Raphael, Titian, and Rubens.

But on this point I can only speak from hearsay, and am quite willing

to end here my series of illustrations, fearing that I may already

have been wrongly set down as a lavulator temporis acti. Not the idle

praising of times gone by, but the getting a lesson from them which may

be of use to us, has been my object. And I believe enough has been said

to show that the great complexity of modern life, with its multiplicity

of demands upon our energy, has got us into a state of chronic hurry,

the results of which are everywhere to be seen in the shape of less

thorough workmanship and less rounded culture.

For one moment let me stop to note a further source of the relative

imperfection of modern culture, which is best illustrated in the case of

literature. I allude to the immense, unorganized mass of literature in

all departments, representing the accumulated acquisitions of past ages,

which must form the basis of our own achievement, but with which our

present methods of education seem inadequate to deal properly. Speaking

roughly, modern literature may be said to be getting into the state

which Roman jurisprudence was in before it was reformed by Justinian.

Philosophic criticism has not yet reached the point at which it may

serve as a natural codifier. We must read laboriously and expend a

disproportionate amount of time and pains in winnowing the chaff from

the wheat. This tends to make us "digs" or literary drudges; but I

doubt if the "dig" is a thoroughly developed man. Goethe, with all his

boundless knowledge, his universal curiosity, and his admirable capacity

for work, was not a "dig." But this matter can only be hinted at: it is

too large to be well discussed at the fag end of an essay while other

points are pressing for consideration.

A state of chronic hurry not only directly hinders the performance of

thorough work, but it has an indirect tendency to blunt the enjoyment of

life. Let us consider for a moment one of the psychological consequences

entailed by the strain of a too complex and rapid activity. Every one

must have observed that in going off for a vacation of two or three

weeks, or in getting freed in any way from the ruts of every-day life,

time slackens its gait somewhat, and the events which occur are apt

a few years later to cover a disproportionately large area in our

recollections. This is because the human organism is a natural timepiece

in which the ticks are conscious sensations. The greater the number of

sensations which occupy the foreground of consciousness during the day,

the longer the day seems in the retrospect. But the various groups of

sensations which accompany our daily work tend to become automatic from

continual repetition, and to sink into the background of consciousness;

and in a very complex and busied life the number of sensations or states

of consciousness which can struggle up to the front and get attended to,

is comparatively small It is thus that the days seem so short when we

are busy about every-day matters, and that they get blurred together,

and as it were individually annihilated in recollection. When we travel,

a comparatively large number of fresh sensations occupy attention, there

is a maximum of consciousness, and a distinct image is left to loom up

in memory. For the same reason the weeks and years are much longer to

the child than to the grown man. The life is simpler and less hurried,

so that there is time to attend to a great many sensations. Now this

fact lies at the bottom of that keen enjoyment of existence which is the

prerogative of childhood and early youth. The day is not rushed through

by the automatic discharge of certain psychical functions, but each

sensation stays long enough to make itself recognized. Now when once we

understand the psychology of this matter, it becomes evident that the

same contrast that holds between the child and the man must hold also

between the ancient and the modern. The number of elements entering into

ancient life were so few relatively, that there must have been far

more than there is now of that intense realization of life which we can

observe in children and remember of our own childhood. Space permitting,

it would be easy to show from Greek literature how intense was this

realization of life. But my point will already have been sufficiently

apprehended. Already we cannot fail to see how difficult it is to get

more than a minimum of conscious fruition out of a too complex and rapid

activity.

One other point is worth noticing before we close. How is this turmoil

of modern existence impressing itself upon the physical constitutions

of modern men and women? When an individual man engages in furious

productive activity, his friends warn him that he will break down. Does

the collective man of our time need some such friendly warning? Let

us first get a hint from what foreigners think of us ultra-modernized

Americans. Wandering journalists, of an ethnological turn of mind,

who visit these shores, profess to be struck with the slenderness,

the apparent lack of toughness, the dyspeptic look, of the American

physique. And from such observations it has been seriously argued that

the stalwart English race is suffering inevitable degeneracy in this

foreign climate. I have even seen it doubted whether a race of men can

ever become thoroughly naturalized in a locality to which it is not

indigenous. To such vagaries it is a sufficient answer that the English

are no more indigenous to England than to America. They are indigenous

to Central Asia, and as they have survived the first transplantation,

they may be safely counted on to survive the second. A more careful

survey will teach us that the slow alteration of physique which is

going on in this country is only an exaggeration of that which modern

civilization is tending to bring about everywhere. It is caused by the

premature and excessive strain upon the mental powers requisite to meet

the emergencies of our complex life. The progress of events has thrown

the work of sustaining life so largely upon the brain that we are

beginning to sacrifice the physical to the intellectual. We are growing

spirituelle in appearance at the expense of robustness. Compare any

typical Greek face, with its firm muscles, its symmetry of feature, and

its serenity of expression, to a typical modern portrait, with its more

delicate contour, its exaggerated forehead, its thoughtful, perhaps

jaded look. Or consider in what respects the grand faces of the

Plantagenet monarchs differ from the refined countenances of the leading

English statesmen of to-day. Or again, consider the familiar pictures of

the Oxford and Harvard crews which rowed a race on the Thames in 1869,

and observe how much less youthful are the faces of the Americans. By

contrast they almost look careworn. The summing up of countless such

facts is that modern civilization is making us nervous. Our most

formidable diseases are of nervous origin. We seem to have got rid of

the mediaeval plague and many of its typhoid congeners; but instead

we have an increased amount of insanity, methomania, consumption,

dyspepsia, and paralysis. In this fact it is plainly written that we are

suffering physically from the over-work and over-excitement entailed by

excessive hurry.

In view of these various but nearly related points of difference between

ancient and modern life as studied in their extreme manifestations, it

cannot be denied that while we have gained much, we have also lost a

good deal that is valuable, in our progress. We cannot but suspect that

we are not in all points more highly favoured than the ancients. And it

becomes probable that Athens, at all events, which I have chosen as my

example, may have exhibited an adumbration of a state of things which,

for the world at large, is still in the future,--still to be remotely

hoped for. The rich complexity of modern social achievement is attained

at the cost of individual many-sidedness. As Tennyson puts it, "The

individual withers and the world is more and more." Yet the individual

does not exist for the sake of society, as the positivists would have us

believe, but society exists for the sake of the individual. And the test

of complete social life is the opportunity which it affords for complete

individual life. Tried by this test, our contemporary civilization

will appear seriously defective,--excellent only as a preparation for

something better.

This is the true light in which to regard it. This incessant turmoil,

this rage for accumulation of wealth, this crowding, jostling, and

trampling upon one another, cannot be regarded as permanent, or

as anything more than the accompaniment of a transitional stage of

civilization. There must be a limit to the extent to which the standard

of comfortable living can be raised. The industrial organization of

society, which is now but beginning, must culminate in a state of things

in which the means of expense will exceed the demand for expense, in

which the human race will have some surplus capital. The incessant

manual labour which the ancients relegated to slaves will in course

of time be more and more largely performed by inanimate machinery.

Unskilled labour will for the most part disappear. Skilled labour will

consist in the guiding of implements contrived with versatile cunning

for the relief of human nerve and muscle. Ultimately there will be

no unsettled land to fill, no frontier life, no savage races to be

assimilated or extirpated, no extensive migration. Thus life will again

become comparatively stationary. The chances for making great fortunes

quickly will be diminished, while the facilities for acquiring a

competence by steady labour will be increased. When every one is able

to reach the normal standard of comfortable living, we must suppose

that the exaggerated appetite for wealth and display will gradually

disappear. We shall be more easily satisfied, and thus enjoy more

leisure. It may be that there will ultimately exist, over the civilized

world, conditions as favourable to the complete fruition of life as

those which formerly existed within the narrow circuit of Attika;

save that the part once played by enslaved human brain and muscle will

finally be played by the enslaved forces of insentient nature. Society

will at last bear the test of providing for the complete development of

its individual members.

So, at least, we may hope; such is the probability which the progress of

events, when carefully questioned, sketches out for us. "Need we fear,"

asks Mr. Greg, "that the world would stagnate under such a change?

Need we guard ourselves against the misconstruction of being held to

recommend a life of complacent and inglorious inaction? We think not. We

would only substitute a nobler for a meaner strife,--a rational for an

excessive toil,--an enjoyment that springs from serenity, for one that

springs from excitement only..... To each time its own preacher, to each

excess its own counteraction. In an age of dissipation, languor, and

stagnation, we should join with Mr. Carlyle in preaching the 'Evangel

of Work,' and say with him, 'Blessed is the man who has found his

work,--let him ask no other blessedness.' In an age of strenuous,

frenzied,.... and often utterly irrational and objectless exertion,

we join Mr. Mill in preaching the milder and more needed 'Evangel of

Leisure.'"

Bearing all these things in mind, we may understand the remark of

the supremely cultivated Goethe, when asked who were his masters: Die

Griechen, die Griechen, und immer die Griechen. We may appreciate the

significance of Mr. Mill's argument in favour of the study of antiquity,

that it preserves the tradition of an era of individual completeness.

There is a disposition growing among us to remodel our methods of

education in conformity with the temporary requirements of the age

in which we live. In this endeavour there is much that is wise and

practical; but in so far as it tends to the neglect of antiquity, I

cannot think it well-timed. Our education should not only enhance the

value of what we possess; is should also supply the consciousness of

what we lack. And while, for generations to come, we pass toilfully

through an era of exorbitant industrialism, some fragment of our time

will not be misspent in keeping alive the tradition of a state of things

which was once briefly enjoyed by a little community, but which, in the

distant future, will, as it is hoped, become the permanent possession of

all mankind.

January, 1873.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Unseen World and Other Essays, by John Fiske