MRS. OGI ORDERS ETIQUETTE
“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “I see you have got down to the scandal.”
Her husband looks pained. “Do you call that scandal?”
“You accept people’s hospitality, and then come away and ridicule them,
and reveal secrets about how they got the family washing done--”
“Secrets!” cries Ogi. “But that was a reform movement, a crusade!” After
reflection, he adds: “If I really wanted to tell scandals, I could do
it. I might hint that John lost his faith in the radical movement as a
result of auto-intoxication.”
“Well, all I can say is that if you tell that, I’ll never speak to you
again.”
Ogi answers meekly, “Excuse me.” And then: “What do you think of my
thesis?”
“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “I see, of course--you are trying to irritate and
shock people as much as possible. Are you going to say that Greek art is
propaganda?”
“I can’t possibly help saying it.”
“You know that this art is always cited as the perfect type of pure art,
the expression of joy and love of beauty.”
“The Greeks were a beauty-loving race and a joy-seeking race, and they
embodied their ideals in the figures of gods and goddesses--extremely
lovely figures. No one can do better with the human body than they did;
but if you take those divinities on their good looks, you’ll simply be
repeating the bitter mistake of the Greeks--and without their excuse of
inexperience.”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “We’re to have a Christian sermon on naked marble idols?”
“We are going to understand the total art product of the Greeks, to draw
out of it what they put into it. These people constituted themselves an
experiment station to try out beauty-loving--that is, trust in
Nature--as a basis of civilization; and they found it didn’t work. It
led them into pain and failure and despair, and the record is written
all over their art. There is a book, Mackail’s ‘Greek Anthology,’ a
collection of various kinds of inscriptions, brief verses and sentiments
from all sources; and you search the pages and hardly find one happy
word. You discover that their art was to put sadness into beautiful and
melodious language. ‘Of all things,’ says Theognis, ‘it is best for men
not to be born.’ And Anacreon, poet of the joy-lovers, compares life to
a chariot wheel that ‘runs fast away.’”
“Well, but so it does!”
“Something endures, and we have to find out what. We have to take hold
of life, and learn to direct it; we cannot just play in a garden, like
happy children. The Greeks played, and their garden turned into a
charnel-house, a place of horror. I call it an amazing blunder of
criticism--the notion that Greek art is one of joy and freedom. The
culmination of their art impulse was the tragedies which the whole
community helped to create and maintain. These performances were
religious ritual, their supreme civic events; and what do they tell us?
There is one theme, immutably fixed, the helplessness of the human
spirit in the grip of fate. A black shadow hangs over the life of men,
they grope blindly in the darkness. Whole families, mighty dynasties of
kings and rulers are condemned to destruction. They are pursued by
bitter and fierce and relentless Nemesis. Somber prophecies are spoken
before men are born, and then we see these men, striving with all their
wit to evade their destiny--in vain. Our pleasure as spectators is to
watch this process, and be convinced of the helplessness of our kind. We
are lifted up to the heaven of the gods, we are endowed with omniscience
and omnipotence--in order to drive a dagger into our own bosoms, to
cohabit with our own mothers and sisters, to stab our own fathers and
brothers, to tear out our own eyeballs. Enacting such things with
majesty and solemnity, reciting them in melodious language to the rhythm
of beautiful music and the graceful motions of a chorus--that is the
final achievement of these lovers of beauty and joy!”
“You are becoming eloquent,” says Mrs. Ogi, who distrusts eloquence in
her cave. “What conclusion do you draw about this art?”
“We are physicians, called to a case after the patient is dead. We want
to know what killed this man, so that we can advise living patients.
From this post-mortem we learn that sensuous charm does not suffice to
secure life; it is not enough for people to carve beautiful figures of
the nude human body, and build marble temples to joy and love, while
their civic affairs are full of jealousy and greed and corruption.”
“Was there corruption in Greek public life?”
“So much that we in modern times cannot conceive it. Yes, I know about
the Teapot Dome and the black satchel with a hundred thousand dollars
worth of bills. Nevertheless, if anyone were to tell us about corruption
such as the Greeks took for granted, not even a movie audience would
swallow it.”
“Now that sounds interesting,” says Mrs. Ogi. “Tell us scandals about
these reverend ancients!”
“First I want to explain the class struggle in Greek society, and the
economic basis of their state--”
“You take my advice,” says Mrs. Ogi; “leave that lecture until the end,
and then forget it. Take your muck-rake and poke it into the Parthenon!”
“What I want to do,” says Ogi, “is to take a character out of ancient
Greece, and set him down in our world and see how he’d sound to us.
Something like this--”