Hella

“ They think that Hellas is dead!... And from every quarter of the compass black monks come swooping down, like ravens, on its marble body, and pick at it, joyously shrieking, 'Hellas is dead!' But they forget that Hellas cannot die, that Hellas is in our hearts! ”

“ In all this there seemed nothing final; from the serenity of the Grecian sky, and from the summer silence which inwrapt her statues and Pentelic colonnades, there was heralded the promise of a ceaseless aeon of splendor. Resting from one mighty effort, and, in the moment of rest, clothing herself in the majesty of beauty, Hellas yet seemed ready to burst forth out of this rest into an effort more gigantic, to be followed by a more memorable rest as the reflex of a destiny more nearly consummated. ”

“ Hellas
THE world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn;
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star;
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep. ”

“ I’ve never known such a birthday party as yesterday’s. It’s only possible in winter; you can never have anything like it on my birthday, July 30th, for the people one is fondest of are never all together at that time. Really no one ought to have a birthday in the holiday months, but always sometime between the end of September and June. I do wish I were 14, I simply can’t wait. Hella’s mother said to Hella, You are not a child any longer, but a grown-up; I do wish I were too!!!
February 16th. We have a new schoolfellow. All the girls and all the staff are delighted with her. ”

“ Hellas is the vision of a mind which touches fact through sense, but makes of sense the gate and avenue into an immortal world of thought. Past and present and future are fused in one glowing symphony. ”

“ Once more Apollo, the genius of Greece, appears, and declares that no longer can Hellas dwell in desecrated Athens, but that, even as his mother Latona, she must seek shelter in an Ægean isle, and there, after long years, give birth to a supreme race, who will revive the ancient glories of violet-crowned Athens. Leading her by the hand, the god then conducts the newly liberated Hellas up the steps of the temple. The great doors are flung open to the sound of trumpets! and lo! appears the Acropolis of Melnos in all its beauty. ”

“ Grecian art, like Grecian liberty, had lost its spirit and vitality, and the spoliation of public buildings and galleries, to adorn the porticos and temples of Rome, hastened its extinction.
We have now reached the close of the history of ancient Greece. But Hellas still lives in her thousand hallowed associations of historic interest, and in the numerous ruins of ancient art and splendor which cover her soil—recalling a glorious Past, upon which we love to dwell as upon the memory of departed friends or the scenes of a happy childhood—"sweet, but mournful to the soul." ”

“ All this by way of introduction to the thought that to visit Hellas is by no means a step aside, but rather one further step back along the highway traversed from east to west by the slow course of empire, and therefore a step natural and proper to be taken by every one who is interested in the history of civilized man, the better to understand the present by viewing it in the light of the past. ”

“ Wherever men of Hellas have planted themselves on barbarian soil, the soil has become Hellas through their presence. The man who goes forth from Athens to Milêtos still remains Greek and Ionian; the man who goes forth from Rhodes to Gela still remains Greek and Dorian. The tie of national brotherhood, the abiding feeling of the oneness of the folk, lives on through physical distance, through political separation, through political rivalry and wasting war. ”

“ The whole of Hellas puts to sea; the ocean is burdened with the weight of continents; a protracted war breaks out, and fierce battles are waged, and the plains are crowded with dead: the barbarian assails the fleet with outrage ”

“ From among the Helli of the mountains, who nowhere appear among the contingents of the Greek army, must have proceeded the migratory bands who gave to the Thessalian plain the name of Hellas. Their descendants fix themselves as settlers there. Beguiled into civilization, they become Hellenes; they spread, by their inborn elastic energies, towards the south, and carry with them, only a little in their rear, the very title of their Hellenic origin, as well as their own peculiar name. ”

“ His minor delight was gossip, euphuistically expressed by ‘hearing new things.’ Hellas soon learned that her forte lay in literature, poetry, oratory, and philosophy, in engineering, and in the fine arts. She excelled the world in the exquisite rules of proportion; in the breadth of idea, and in the clearness and perfection of the literary form: these arts she bequeathed as a heritage to mankind, who have nowhere and never surpassed her. ”

“ All the lowlands at their base are meantime covered, perhaps, with heavy mists, while lighter and more fleecy vapours hang here and there upon the mountain tops, augmenting their grandeur by allowing the imagination like a Titan to pile them up as high as it pleases towards heaven. The coasts of eastern Hellas, including those of Eubœa, along the whole line of Thessaly to the confines of Macedonia, are bold and rocky, frowning like the ramparts of freedom upon the slaves of the Asiatic plains. ”

“ The Balkan peninsula, indeed, and the islands of the Ægean—still called Hellas—were their principal home. But they had numerous settlements on the coast of Italy, Sicily, Thrace, and Asia Minor, and some in more distant parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. These all came to be included under the general name of Hellas, and the Hellenes, wherever they lived, recognised ties of blood, religion, and common principles of conduct.
A system of small states was a characteristic mark of this Hellenism. Each city, with a narrow territory attached, aimed at complete independence. ”

“ The point where the Eastern and Western seas most nearly touch is in truth the centre, the key-stone as the poet puts it, of the whole peninsular land south of Olympos. From the citadel of Corinth, if all Hellas does not itself lie within our sight, yet all Hellas lies within sight, as it were, by representation. Peloponnêsos and Attica, the land north and south of the gulf, the shores of the two great confederacies, the mountains of Arkadia and of Phôkis, and the snowy head of Aitolian Korax, stand there as if to speak of the lands north and south of them. ”

“ The blear-eyed mechanic, stifled in a hovel of our sombre Northern towns, canopied through all the year with smoke, deafened with wheels that never cease to creak, stiffened by toil in one cramped posture, oblivious of the sunlight and green fields, could scarcely be taught even to envy the pure, clear life of art made perfect in humanity, which was the pride of Hellas. ”

“ The immediate cradle of those Greek races, which possessed this primitive title and descent, was Thessaly; and of Thessaly Hellas was either a synonym, or a part.
4. The origin of the races thus ruling Hellas is to be sought among the Helli, who dwelt in the mountains around Dodona, apparently with those institutions which have ever been characteristic of mountaineers; and who represent, more faithfully than the inhabitants of lowlands, the earliest type of human society, cast at a time when its relationship to the family was still palpable and near. ”

“ Oh! could we but bestow this precious gift on our mother-country and her colonies! would the tribes of our native land but forget their Dorian, Ionian or AEolian descent, and, contenting themselves with the one name of Hellenes, live as the children of one family, as the sheep of one flock,—then indeed we should be strong against the whole world, and Hellas would be recognized by all nations as the Queen of the Earth! ”

“ Trusting to the guidance of these two inductions, and always conscious of the lacunae in our records, we may draw this important conclusion concerning the earliest religious history of Hellas: namely, that where we find the powerful cult of an isolated goddess, she belongs to the pre-Hellenic population. The axiom applies at once and most forcibly to Artemis and Athena; the one dominant in certain parts of Arcadia and Attica, the other the exclusive deity of the Attic Acropolis. ”

“ And now, as the sunset colours—gold, scarlet, violet, and purple—are glowing upon the immortal rock, over the marble ruins, I marvel at “tiny” Athens and her “vast” name.
Alas, for Hellas and modern Greece!
Had her own people been as faithful as Oxford to the traditions of ancient Greece, what would have been the Eastern Question to-day? And for some, no doubt, it is this very honouring of Hellas that has been responsible for our fatal pro-Greek enthusiasms. If we recognise the superiority of the modern Turk, loyalty to Plato, to Aristotle, and to Socrates must forbid speech ”

“ The titles of the hills of Hellas smite our ears with echoes of ancient music—Olympus and Cithæron, Taygetus, Othrys, Helicon, and Ida. The headlands of the mainland are mountains, and the islands are mountain summits of a submerged continent. Austerely beautiful, not wild with an Italian luxuriance, nor mournful with Sicilian monotony of outline, nor yet again overwhelming with the sublimity of Alps, they seem the proper home of a race which sought its ideal of beauty in distinction of shape and not in multiplicity of detail, in light and not in richness of colouring, in form and not in size. ”

“ But do not dream Hellas is conquered by striding over her land. Before you shall possess the land you must first possess the men. And I say to you, Athens is still left, and Sparta left, free and strong, with men whose hearts and hands can never fail. I doubted once. But now I doubt no more. And our gods will fight for us. Your Ahura-Mazda has still to prevail over Zeus the Thunderer and Athena of the Pure Heart. ”

“ What Hellene, what foreigner, is so dense, or so uninstructed, or so fierce in his hatred of our city, that if one were to put to him this question, and say, 'Tell me now; of all Hellas, as it now is—all this inhabited country—is there any part which would have been called by this name, or inhabited by the Hellenes who now possess it, unless those who fought at Marathon and Salamis, our forefathers, had displayed that high prowess on their behalf?' Why, I am certain that not one would answer 'Yes': they would say that all these regions must have been conquered by the barbarians. ”

“ The sea, the hills, the plains, the sunlight of the South, together with some ruins which have peopled Europe with phantoms of dead art, and the relics of Greek literature, are our guides in the endeavor to restore the past of Hellas. Among rocks golden with broom-flowers, murmurous with bees, burning with anemones in spring and oleanders in summer, and odorous through all the year with thyme, we first assimilate the spirit of the Greeks. ”

“ Having thus got Hellas as an aggregate with its main cementing forces, we march on to its subdivision into parts, through Æolus, Dôrus and Xuthus, the three sons of Hellen; [224] a distribution which is far from being exhaustive: nevertheless, the genealogists whom Apollodôrus follows recognize no more than three sons.
The genealogy is essentially post-Homeric; for Homer knows Hellas and the Hellênes only in connection with a portion of [p. 101] Achaia Phthiôtis. ”

“ Down at the Peiræus there are a few shipmasters, perhaps, who can talk Egyptian, Phœnecian, or Babylonish. They need the knowledge for their trade, but even they will disclaim any cultural value for their accomplishment. The euphonious, expressive, marvelously delicate tongue of Hellas sums up for the Athenian almost all that is valuable in the world’s intellectual and literary life. ”

“ And so the soldiers of Marathon and the sailors of Salamis became the schoolmasters of Hellas; the one teaching and habituating the Hellenes not to fear the barbarians at sea, and the others not to fear them by land. Third in order, for the number and valour of the combatants, and third in the salvation of Hellas, I place the battle of Plataea. And now the Lacedaemonians as well as the Athenians took part in the struggle; they were all united in this greatest and most terrible conflict of all; wherefore their virtues will be celebrated in times to come, as they are now celebrated by us. ”

“ Or, is any one haunted by the fear that we may find ourselves blockaded by land and sea?--let him consider that at present there is no Hellenic navy whatever on the seas, and if the barbarian attempts to clutch the empire of the sea, Hellas will not sit by and suffer it; so that, if only in self-defence, she must inevitably take your side. ”

“ A state that would be the active governor of Hellas must have lives to spare in abundance. We have none, unless we always do hereafter as we did at Plataea, raise an army of Helots—seven Helots to one Spartan. How long, if we did so, would the Helots obey us, and meanwhile how would our lands be cultivated? A State that would be the centre of Greece, must cultivate all that can charm and allure strangers. We banish strangers, and what charms and allures them would womanize us. ”

“ SOPHROSYNE
It needs imagination for the modern man to live into the atmosphere of ancient Greece. It ought not now to be so hard for us who have seen the lives and sanctities of free peoples crushed and stained. It should be easier for us to reoccupy the spiritual ground of Hellas, to feel a new thrill in her seemingly too simple formulas, a new value in her seemingly cold ideals. ”