XXI

I listened the other day, at a public function, to an eloquent

panegyric, pronounced by a man of great ability and sympathetic

cultivation, on the Greek spirit. I fell for the moment entirely under

the spell of his lofty rhetoric, his persuasive and illuminating

argument. I wish I could reproduce what he said; but it was like a

strain of beautiful music, and my mind was so much delighted by his

rich eloquence, his subtle transitions, his deft modulations, that I

had neither time nor opportunity to commit what he said to memory. One

thing he said which struck me very much, that the Greek spirit

resembled rather the modern scientific spirit than any other of the

latter-day developments of thought. I think that this is true in a

sense, that the Greeks were penetrated by an insatiable curiosity, and

desired to study the principles and arrive at the truth of things. But

I do not, upon reflection, think that it is wholly true, because the

modern spirit is greatly in love with classification and with detail,

while the Greek spirit rather aimed at beauty, and investigated the

causes of things with wonder and delight, in what may be called the

romantic, the poetical spirit.

The mistake that the orator seemed to me to make was that he implied,

or appeared to imply, that the Greek spirit could be attained by the

study of Greek. My own belief is that the essence of the Greek spirit

was its originality, its splendid absence of deference, its disregard

of what was traditional. The Greeks owed nothing to outside influences.

If the dim origins of their art were Egyptian, they strode forward for

themselves, and spent no time in investigating the earlier traditions.

Again, in literature, they wasted no force in attempting to imbibe

culture from outside influences; they merely developed the capacities

of their own sonorous and graceful language; they infused it with their

own vivid and beautiful personality.

Of course, it may be urged that there probably did not exist in the

world at that date treasures of ancient literature and art. The

question is what the Greeks would have done if they had found

themselves in a later world, stocked, and even overstocked, with old

masterpieces and monuments of human intellect and energy and skill. The

doubt is whether the creative impulse would have died away, and whether

the Greeks would have tended to fling themselves into the passionate

study, the eager apprehension, of the beautiful inheritance of the

ages. I cannot myself believe it. They would have had, I believe, an

intense and ardent appreciation of what had been, but the desire to see

and hear some new thing of which St. Paul spoke, the deep-seated desire

for self-expression, would have kept them free from any tame surrender

to tradition, any danger of basing their cultivation on what had been

represented or thought or sung by their human predecessors. I cannot,

for instance, conceive of the Greeks as devoting themselves to

erudition; I cannot imagine their giving themselves up to the same

minute appreciation of ancient forms of expression which we give to the

Greek literature itself.

Moreover, unless we concede to the Greek literature the position of the

high-water mark of human expression, and believe that the intellect of

man had since that day suffered decline and eclipse, we ought not to

allow an ancient literature to overshadow our own energies, or to give

up the hope of creating a vivid literature, at once classical and

romantic, of our own.

And even if we did concede to Greek literature this august supremacy, I

cannot believe that our best intellect ought to be practised in the

awestruck submissiveness of mind that too often results from our

classical education. That is why I admire the American spirit in

literature. The Americans seem to have little of the reverent,

exclusive attitude which we value so highly. They are preoccupied in

their own native inspiration. They will speak, without any sense of

absurdity, of Shakespeare and E.A. Poe, of Walter Scott and Hawthorne,

as comparable influences. They are like children, entirely absorbed in

the interest and delight of intent creation. But though their

productions are at present, with certain notable exceptions, lacking in

vitality and quality, this spirit is, I believe, the spirit in which

new ideas and new literatures are produced. I do not desire to see the

Americans more critical of the present or more deferential to the past.

I do not desire to see them turn with a hopeless wonder to the study of

the great English masterpieces. Indeed, I think that our own tendency

in England to reverence, our constant appeal to classical standards, is

an obstacle to our intellectual and artistic progress. We are like

elderly writers who tend to repeat their own beloved mannerisms, and

who contemn and decry the work of younger men, despairing of the

future. A nation may reach a point, like an ancient and noble dynasty

of princes, where it is overshadowed and overweighted by its own past

glories, and where it learns to depend upon prestige rather than upon

vigour, to wrap itself in its own dignity. What I would rather see is

an elasticity, a recklessness, a prodigal trying of experiments, a

discontented underrating of past traditions, than a meek acquiescence

in their supremacy. What is our present condition? We have few poets of

the first rank, few essayists or reflective writers, few dramatists,

few biographers. I do not at all wish to underrate the immense vitality

of our imaginative faculties, which shows itself in our vast output of

fiction; but even here we have few masters, and our critics know and

care little for style; they are entirely preoccupied with plot and

incident and situation. What we lack is true originality, tranquil

force; we are all occupied in trying to startle and surprise, to make a

sensation. How little the Greeks cared for that! It was beauty and

charm, delicate colour, fine subtlety of which they were, in search;

they held all things holy, yet nothing solemn. Their dignity was not a

pompous dignity, but the dignity of high tragedy, of unconquerable

courage and ruthless fate; not the dignity of the well-appointed house

and the tradition of excellent manners.

Of course our love of wealth and comfort is to a certain extent

responsible for this. We have been thrown off our balance by the vast

and rapid development of the resources of the earth, the binding of

natural forces to do our bidding; it is the most complicated thing in

the world nowadays to live the simple life; and not until we can gain a

rich simplicity, not until we can recover an interest in ideas rather

than an appetite for comforts, will our force and vitality return to

us.

We are all too anxious to do the right thing and to be known to the

right people; but unfortunately for us the right people are not the

people of vivacity and intellectual zest, but the possessors of

industrial wealth or the inheritors of scrupulous traditions and

historical names. The sad fact, the melancholy truth, is that we have

become vulgar; and until we can purge ourselves of vulgarity, till we

can realise the ineffable ugliness of pomposity and pretension and

ostentation, we shall effect nothing. Even our puritan forefathers,

with their hatred of art, were in love with ideas. They sipped theology

with the air of connoisseurs; they drank down Hebrew virtues with a

vigorous relish. Then came a rococo and affected age, neat, conceited,

and trim; yet in the middle of that stood out a great rugged figure

like Johnson, full to the brim of impassioned force. Then again the

intellect, the poetry of the nation stirred and woke. In Wordsworth, in

Scott, in Keats and Shelley and Byron, in Tennyson and Browning, in

Carlyle and Ruskin, came an age of passionate sincerity of protest

against the dulness of prosperity. But now we seem to have settled down

comfortably to sleep again, and are content to fiddle melodiously on

delicate instruments. The trumpet and the horn are silent.

Perhaps we must content ourselves with the vigorous advance of science,

the determination to penetrate secrets, to know all that is to be

known, not to form conclusions without evidence. But the scientific

attitude tends, except in the highest minds, to develop a certain

dryness, a scepticism about spiritual and imaginative forces, a dulness

of the inner apprehension, a hard quality of judgment. Not in such a

mood as this does humanity fare further and higher. Men become

cautious, prudent, and decisive thus, instead of generous, hopeful, and

high-hearted.

But to despair too soon of an era, to despise and satirise an age, a

national temper, is a deep and fatal mistake. The world moves onwards

patiently and inevitably, obeying a larger and a mightier law. What is

rather the duty of all who love what is noble and beautiful is not to

carp and bicker over faulty conditions, but to realise their aims and

hopes, to labour abundantly and patiently, to speak and feel sincerely,

to encourage rather than to condemn, _Serviendum lietandum_ says the

brave motto. To serve, one cannot avoid that; but to serve with

blitheness, that is the secret.