The Greek language is being ousted from education, here, in France, and
in America. The speech of the earliest democracies is not democratic
enough for modern anarchy. There is nothing to be gained, it is said, by
a knowledge of Greek. We have not to fight the battle of life with
Hellenic waiters; and, even if we had, Romaic, or modern Greek, is much
more easily learned than the old classical tongue. The reason of this
comparative ease will be plain to any one who, retaining a vague memory
of his Greek grammar, takes up a modern Greek newspaper. He will find
that the idioms of the modern newspaper are the idioms of all newspapers,
that the grammar is the grammar of modern languages, that the opinions
are expressed in barbarous translations of barbarous French and English
journalistic _cliches_ or commonplaces. This ugly and undignified
mixture of the ancient Greek characters, and of ancient Greek words with
modern grammar and idioms, and stereotyped phrases, is extremely
distasteful to the scholar. Modern Greek, as it is at present printed,
is not the natural spoken language of the peasants. You can read a Greek
leading article, though you can hardly make sense of a Greek rural
ballad. The peasant speech is a thing of slow development; there is a
basis of ancient Greek in it, with large elements of Slavonic, Turkish,
Italian, and other imposed or imported languages. Modern literary Greek
is a hybrid of revived classical words, blended with the idioms of the
speeches which have arisen since the fall of the Roman Empire. Thus,
thanks to the modern and familiar element in it, modern Greek "as she is
writ" is much more easily learned than ancient Greek. Consequently, if
any one has need for the speech in business or travel, he can acquire as
much of it as most of us have of French, with considerable ease. People
therefore argue that ancient Greek is particularly superfluous in
schools. Why waste time on it, they ask, which could be expended on
science, on modern languages, or any other branch of education? There is
a great deal of justice in this position. The generation of men who are
now middle-aged bestowed much time and labour on Greek; and in what, it
may be asked, are they better for it? Very few of them "keep up their
Greek." Say, for example, that one was in a form with fifty boys who
began the study--it is odds against five of the survivors still reading
Greek books. The worldly advantages of the study are slight: it may lead
three of the fifty to a good degree, and one to a fellowship; but good
degrees may be taken in other subjects, and fellowships may be abolished,
or "nationalised," with all other forms of property.
Then, why maintain Greek in schools? Only a very minute percentage of
the boys who are tormented with it really learn it. Only a still smaller
percentage can read it after they are thirty. Only one or two gain any
material advantage by it. In very truth, most minds are not framed by
nature to excel and to delight in literature, and only to such minds and
to schoolmasters is Greek valuable.
This is the case against Greek put as powerfully as one can state it. On
the other side, we may say, though the remark may seem absurd at first
sight, that to have mastered Greek, even if you forget it, is not to have
wasted time. It really is an educational and mental discipline. The
study is so severe that it needs the earnest application of the mind. The
study is averse to indolent intellectual ways; it will not put up with a
"there or thereabouts," any more than mathematical ideas admit of being
made to seem "extremely plausible." He who writes, and who may venture
to offer himself as an example, is naturally of a most slovenly and
slatternly mental habit. It is his constant temptation to "scamp" every
kind of work, and to say "it will do well enough." He hates taking
trouble and verifying references. And he can honestly confess that
nothing in his experience has so helped, in a certain degree, to
counteract those tendencies--as the labour of thoroughly learning certain
Greek texts--the dramatists, Thucydides, some of the books of Aristotle.
Experience has satisfied him that Greek is of real educational value,
and, apart from the acknowledged and unsurpassed merit of its literature,
is a severe and logical training of the mind. The mental constitution is
strengthened and braced by the labour, even if the language is forgotten
in later life.
It is manifest, however, that this part of education is not for
everybody. The real educational problem is to discover what boys Greek
will be good for, and what boys will only waste time and dawdle over it.
Certainly to men of a literary turn (a very minute percentage), Greek is
of an inestimable value. Great poets, even, may be ignorant of it, as
Shakespeare probably was, as Keats and Scott certainly were, as Alexandre
Dumas was. But Dumas regretted his ignorance; Scott regretted it. We
know not how much Scott's admitted laxity of style and hurried careless
habit might have been modified by a knowledge of Greek; how much of
grace, permanence, and generally of art, his genius might have gained
from the language and literature of Hellas. The most Homeric of modern
men could not read Homer. As for Keats, he was born a Greek, it has been
said; but had he been born with a knowledge of Greek, he never, probably,
would have been guilty of his chief literary faults. This is not
certain, for some modern men of letters deeply read in Greek have all the
qualities of fustian and effusiveness which Longinus most despised. Greek
will not make a luxuriously Asiatic mind Hellenic, it is certain; but it
may, at least, help to restrain effusive and rhetorical gabble. Our
Asiatic rhetoricians might perhaps be even more barbarous than they are
if Greek were a sealed book to them. However this may be, it is, at
least, well to find out in a school what boys are worth instructing in
the Greek language. Now, of their worthiness, of their chances of
success in the study, Homer seems the best touchstone; and he is
certainly the most attractive guide to the study.
At present boys are introduced to the language of the Muses by
pedantically written grammars, full of the queerest and most arid
metaphysical and philological verbiage. The very English in which these
deplorable books are composed may be scientific, may be comprehensible by
and useful to philologists, but is utterly heart-breaking to boys.
Philology might be made fascinating; the history of a word, and of the
processes by which its different forms, in different senses, were
developed, might be made as interesting as any other story of events. But
grammar is not taught thus: boys are introduced to a jargon about matters
meaningless, and they are naturally as much enchanted as if they were
listening to a _chimaera bombinans in vacuo_. The grammar, to them, is a
mere buzz in a chaos of nonsense. They have to learn the buzz by rote;
and a pleasant process that is--a seductive initiation into the
mysteries. When they struggle so far as to be allowed to try to read a
piece of Greek prose, they are only like the Marchioness in her
experience of beer: she once had a sip of it. Ten lines of Xenophon,
narrating how he marched so many parasangs and took breakfast, do not
amount to more than a very unrefreshing sip of Greek. Nobody even tells
the boys who Xenophon was, what he did there, and what it was all about.
Nobody gives a brief and interesting sketch of the great march, of its
history and objects. The boys straggle along with Xenophon, knowing not
whence or whither:
"They stray through a desolate region,
And often are faint on the march."
One by one they fall out of the ranks; they mutiny against Xenophon; they
murmur against that commander; they desert his flag. They determine that
anything is better than Greek, that nothing can be worse than Greek, and
they move the tender hearts of their parents. They are put to learn
German; which they do not learn, unluckily, but which they find it
comparatively easy to shirk. In brief, they leave school without having
learned anything whatever.
Up to a certain age my experiences at school were precisely those which I
have described. Our grammar was not so philological, abstruse and arid
as the instruments of torture employed at present. But I hated Greek
with a deadly and sickening hatred; I hated it like a bully and a thief
of time. The verbs in [Greek text] completed my intellectual
discomfiture, and Xenophon routed me with horrible carnage. I could have
run away to sea, but for a strong impression that a life on the ocean
wave "did not set my genius," as Alan Breck says. Then we began to read
Homer; and from the very first words, in which the Muse is asked to sing
the wrath of Achilles, Peleus' son, my mind was altered, and I was the
devoted friend of Greek. Here was something worth reading about; here
one knew where one was; here was the music of words, here were poetry,
pleasure, and life. We fortunately had a teacher (Dr. Hodson) who was
not wildly enthusiastic about grammar. He would set us long pieces of
the Iliad or Odyssey to learn, and, when the day's task was done, would
make us read on, adventuring ourselves in "the unseen," and construing as
gallantly as we might, without grammar or dictionary. On the following
day we surveyed more carefully the ground we had pioneered or skirmished
over, and then advanced again. Thus, to change the metaphor, we took
Homer in large draughts, not in sips: in sips no epic can be enjoyed. We
now revelled in Homer like Keats in Spenser, like young horses let loose
in a pasture. The result was not the making of many accurate scholars,
though a few were made; others got nothing better than enjoyment in their
work, and the firm belief, opposed to that of most schoolboys, that the
ancients did not write nonsense. To love Homer, as Steele said about
loving a fair lady of quality, "is a liberal education."
Judging from this example, I venture very humbly to think that any one
who, even at the age of Cato, wants to learn Greek, should begin where
Greek literature, where all profane literature begins--with Homer
himself. It was thus, not with grammars _in vacuo_, that the great
scholars of the Renaissance began. It was thus that Ascham and Rabelais
began, by jumping into Greek and splashing about till they learned to
swim. First, of course, a person must learn the Greek characters. Then
his or her tutor may make him read a dozen lines of Homer, marking the
cadence, the surge and thunder of the hexameters--a music which, like
that of the Sirens, few can hear without being lured to the seas and
isles of song. Then the tutor might translate a passage of moving
interest, like Priam's appeal to Achilles; first, of course, explaining
the situation. Then the teacher might go over some lines, minutely
pointing out how the Greek words are etymologically connected with many
words in English. Next, he might take a substantive and a verb, showing
roughly how their inflections arose and were developed, and how they
retain forms in Homer which do not occur in later Greek. There is no
reason why even this part of the lesson should be uninteresting. By this
time a pupil would know, more or less, where he was, what Greek is, and
what the Homeric poems are like. He might thus believe from the first
that there are good reasons for knowing Greek; that it is the key to many
worlds of life, of action, of beauty, of contemplation, of knowledge.
Then, after a few more exercises in Homer, the grammar being judiciously
worked in along with the literature of the epic, a teacher might discern
whether it was worth while for his pupils to continue in the study of
Greek. Homer would be their guide into the "realms of gold."
It is clear enough that Homer is the best guide. His is the oldest
extant Greek, his matter is the most various and delightful, and most
appeals to the young, who are wearied by scraps of Xenophon, and who
cannot be expected to understand the Tragedians. But Homer is a poet for
all ages, all races, and all moods. To the Greeks the epics were not
only the best of romances, the richest of poetry; not only their oldest
documents about their own history,--they were also their Bible, their
treasury of religious traditions and moral teaching. With the Bible and
Shakespeare, the Homeric poems are the best training for life. There is
no good quality that they lack: manliness, courage, reverence for old age
and for the hospitable hearth; justice, piety, pity, a brave attitude
towards life and death, are all conspicuous in Homer. He has to write of
battles; and he delights in the joy of battle, and in all the movement of
war. Yet he delights not less, but more, in peace: in prosperous cities,
hearths secure, in the tender beauty of children, in the love of wedded
wives, in the frank nobility of maidens, in the beauty of earth and sky
and sea, and seaward murmuring river, in sun and snow, frost and mist and
rain, in the whispered talk of boy and girl beneath oak and pine tree.
Living in an age where every man was a warrior, where every city might
know the worst of sack and fire, where the noblest ladies might be led
away for slaves, to light the fire and make the bed of a foreign master,
Homer inevitably regards life as a battle. To each man on earth comes
"the wicked day of destiny," as Malory unconsciously translates it, and
each man must face it as hardily as he may.
Homer encourages them by all the maxims of chivalry and honour. His
heart is with the brave of either side--with Glaucus and Sarpedon of
Lycia no less than with Achilles and Patroclus. "Ah, friend," cries
Sarpedon, "if once escaped from this battle we were for ever to be
ageless and immortal, neither would I myself fight now in the foremost
ranks, nor would I urge thee into the wars that give renown; but now--for
assuredly ten thousand fates of death on every side beset us, and these
may no man shun, nor none avoid--forward now let us go, whether we are to
give glory or to win it!" And forth they go, to give and take renown and
death, all the shields and helms of Lycia shining behind them, through
the dust of battle, the singing of the arrows, the hurtling of spears,
the rain of stones from the Locrian slings. And shields are smitten, and
chariot-horses run wild with no man to drive them, and Sarpedon drags
down a portion of the Achaean battlement, and Aias leaps into the trench
with his deadly spear, and the whole battle shifts and shines beneath the
sun. Yet he who sings of the war, and sees it with his sightless eyes,
sees also the Trojan women working at the loom, cheating their anxious
hearts with broidery work of gold and scarlet, or raising the song to
Athene, or heating the bath for Hector, who never again may pass within
the gates of Troy. He sees the poor weaving woman, weighing the wool,
that she may not defraud her employers, and yet may win bread for her
children. He sees the children, the golden head of Astyanax, his
shrinking from the splendour of the hero's helm. He sees the child
Odysseus, going with his father through the orchard, and choosing out
some apple trees "for his very own." It is in the mouth of the ruthless
Achilles, the fatal, the fated, the swift-footed hero with the hands of
death, that Homer places the tenderest of his similes. "Wherefore
weepest thou, Patroclus, like a fond little maid, that runs by her
mother's side, praying her mother to take her up, snatching at her gown,
and hindering her as she walks, and tearfully looking at her till her
mother takes her up?--like her, Patroclus, dost thou softly weep."
This is what Chesterfield calls "the porter-like language of Homer's
heroes." Such are the moods of Homer, so full of love of life and all
things living, so rich in all human sympathies, so readily moved when the
great hound Argus welcomes his master, whom none knew after twenty years,
but the hound knew him, and died in that welcome. With all this love of
the real, which makes him dwell so fondly on every detail of armour, of
implement, of art; on the divers-coloured gold-work of the shield, on the
making of tires for chariot-wheels, on the forging of iron, on the rose-
tinted ivory of the Sidonians, on cooking and eating and sacrificing, on
pet dogs, on wasps and their ways, on fishing, on the boar hunt, on
scenes in baths where fair maidens lave water over the heroes, on
undiscovered isles with good harbours and rich land, on ploughing,
mowing, and sowing, on the furniture of houses, on the golden vases
wherein the white dust of the dead is laid,--with all this delight in the
real, Homer is the most romantic of poets. He walks with the surest foot
in the darkling realm of dread Persephone, beneath the poplars on the
solemn last beach of Ocean. He has heard the Siren's music, and the song
of Circe, chanting as she walks to and fro, casting the golden shuttle
through the loom of gold. He enters the cave of the Man Eater; he knows
the unsunned land of the Cimmerians; in the summer of the North he has
looked, from the fiord of the Laestrygons, on the Midnight Sun. He has
dwelt on the floating isle of AEolus, with its wall of bronze unbroken,
and has sailed on those Phaeacian barks that need no help of helm or oar,
that fear no stress either of wind or tide, that come and go and return
obedient to a thought and silent as a dream. He has seen the four
maidens of Circe, daughters of wells and woods, and of sacred streams. He
is the second-sighted man, and beholds the shroud that wraps the living
who are doomed, and the mystic dripping from the walls of blood yet
unshed. He has walked in the garden closes of Phaeacia, and looked on
the face of gods who fare thither, and watch the weaving of the dance. He
has eaten the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus, and from the hand of Helen
he brings us that Egyptian nepenthe which puts all sorrow out of mind.
His real world is as real as that in _Henry V._, his enchanted isles are
charmed with the magic of the _Tempest_. His young wooers are as
insolent as Claudio, as flushed with youth; his beggar-men are brethren
of Edie Ochiltree; his Nausicaa is sister to Rosalind, with a different
charm of stately purity in love. His enchantresses hold us yet with
their sorceries; his Helen is very Beauty: she has all the sweetness of
ideal womanhood, and her repentance is without remorse. His Achilles is
youth itself, glorious, cruel, pitiful, splendid, and sad, ardent and
loving, and conscious of its doom. Homer, in truth, is to be matched
only with Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare he has not the occasional
wilfulness, freakishness, and modish obscurity. He is a poet all of
gold, universal as humanity, simple as childhood, musical now as the flow
of his own rivers, now as the heavy plunging wave of his own Ocean.
Such, then, as far as weak words can speak of him, is the first and
greatest of poets. This is he whom English boys are to be ignorant of,
if Greek be ousted from our schools, or are to know only in the
distorting mirror of a versified, or in the pale shadow of a prose
translation. Translations are good only as teachers to bring men to
Homer. English verse has no measure which even remotely suggests the
various flow of the hexameter. Translators who employ verse give us a
feeble Homer, dashed with their own conceits, and moulded to their own
style. Translators who employ prose "tell the story without the song,"
but, at least, they add no twopenny "beauties" and cheap conceits of
their own.
I venture to offer a few examples of original translation, in which the
mannerisms of poets who have, or have not, translated Homer, are
parodied, and, of course (except in the case of Pope), exaggerated. The
passage is the speech of the Second-sighted Man, before the slaying of
the wooers in the hall:--
"Ah! wretched men, what ill is this ye suffer? In night are swathed
your heads, your faces, your knees; and the voice of wailing is
kindled, and cheeks are wet with tears, and with blood drip the walls,
and the fair main beams of the roof, and the porch is full of shadows,
and full is the courtyard, of ghosts that hasten hellward below the
darkness, and the sun has perished out of heaven, and an evil mist
sweeps up over all."
So much for Homer. The first attempt at metric translation here given is
meant to be in the manner of Pope:
"Caitiffs!" he cried, "what heaven-directed blight
Involves each countenance with clouds of night!
What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!
Why do the walls with gouts ensanguined ooze?
The court is thronged with ghosts that 'neath the gloom
Seek Pluto's realm, and Dis's awful doom;
In ebon curtains Phoebus hides his head,
And sable mist creeps upward from the dead."
This appears pretty bad, and nearly as un-Homeric as a translation could
possibly be. But Pope, aided by Broome and Fenton, managed to be much
less Homeric, much more absurd, and infinitely more "classical" in the
sense in which Pope is classical:
"O race to death devote! with Stygian shade
Each destined peer impending fates invade;
With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned;
With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round:
Thick swarms the spacious hall with howling ghosts,
To people Orcus and the burning coasts!
Nor gives the sun his golden orb to roll,
But universal night usurps the pole."
Who could have conjectured that even Pope would wander away so far from
his matchless original? "Wretches!" cries Theoclymenus, the seer; and
that becomes, "O race to death devote!" "Your heads are swathed in
night," turns into "With Stygian shade each destined peer" (peer is
good!) "impending fates invade," where Homer says nothing about Styx nor
peers. The Latin Orcus takes the place of Erebus, and "the burning
coasts" are derived from modern popular theology. The very grammar
detains or defies the reader; is it the sun that does not give his golden
orb to roll, or who, or what?
The only place where the latter-day Broome or Fenton can flatter himself
that he rivals Pope at his own game is--
"What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!"