Modern Greek

“ On this day, it is fitting that we reflect on the enormous contributions the Greek people have made to the modern world. The legacy of the ancient Greeks, in the fields of philosophy, literature, drama, sculpture, and architecture, continues to influence our beliefs, our values, and our concept of art. And, after more than 2,000 years, the ideology of Greece-as embodied in the concept of democracy-is still the ideal that guides us in charting our course for the future. ”

“ The foundation of this world seems to be the Myth; and as the world grew it developed in terms of Myth. The Greek mind had only one background. Athletics and Statuary, Epic and Drama, Religion and Art, Skepticism and Science expressed themselves through the same myths. In this lies the fascination of Greece for us. What a complete cosmos it is! And how different from any other civilization! Modern life, like modern language, is a monstrous amalgam, a conglomeration and mess of idioms from every age and every clime. The classic Greek hangs together like a wreath. ”

“ The very Greek texts themselves have been established through modern research, and the footnotes are the essence of modernity.
The rushing modern world passes like an express train; as it goes, it holds up a mirror to the classic world—a mirror ever changing and ever false. For upon the face of the mirror rests the lens of fleeting fashion. We can no more walk straight to the Greeks than we can walk straight to the moon. In America the natural road to the classics lies through the introductions of German and English scholarship. ”

“ If one can grapple with a scheme of education including an accurate knowledge of the Greek language without being compelled to omit lines of study more necessary to place him—where every modern man should be—at the modern standpoint, we should say by all means let him study Greek and have his sense of beauty quickened by living intercourse with its wonderful literature, and his logical and critical faculties strengthened by investigation of its linguistic elements and grammatical forms. ”

“ Better had it been, abandoning the notion that every one should learn Greek, to dwell upon the boundless pleasure which minds of imagination and literary taste derive from carrying in memory the gems of ancient wisdom which are more easily remembered because they are not in our own language, and the finest passages of ancient poetry. There are plenty of things—indeed there are far more things—in modern literature as noble and as beautiful as the best of the ancients can give us. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You can hardly find a well-written book which has not in it Greek names, and words, and proverbs; you cannot walk through a great town without passing Greek buildings; you cannot go into a well-furnished room without seeing Greek statues and ornaments, even Greek patterns of furniture and paper; so strangely have these old Greeks left their mark behind them upon this modern world in which we now live. ”

“ Even our present civilization delights in the masterpieces of the classical poets, historians, orators, and essayists, and seeks to rival them. Long before Christianity became a power the great literary artists of Greece had reached perfection in style and language, especially in Athens, to which city youths were sent to be educated, as to a sort of university town where the highest culture was known. Educated Romans were as familiar with the Greek classics as they were with those of their own country, and could talk Greek as the modern cultivated Germans talk French. ”

“ It is proposed to adopt modern Greek, which has several great advantages. The first is that the old education has familiarized us sufficiently with ancient Greek to take away the first sense of strangeness in the same language under its modern form. ”

“ The revival of Greek, which was also due to the humanists, added to the learning and to the literature of the cultured folk, but Greek, even more than Latin, was hardly understood or appreciated by the bulk of the people.
Then came the sixteenth century, with its artistic developments, its national rivalries, its far-away discoveries, its theological debates, and its social and religious unrest. The common people, especially the commercial middle class, clamored to understand: and the result was the appearance of national literatures on a large scale. ”

“ Some school historians and teachers decry the effort to mingle with the political history any study of Greek art. But to the writer’s mind that would be a robbery of the children. Our modern life is so saturated with things almost purely Greek in origin that our budding citizens, who may never get elsewhere a glimpse of the origins of so much that is beautiful, ought surely to get such glimpses now. ”

“ And to the second contention we can only answer that modern poetry is in no sense a substitute for Greek poetry. It has, it is true, much that Greek poetry has not; so has Greek poetry much, very much, that finds no echo nor counterpart in modern verse. Modern poetry, modern literature, is supplementary to that of the Greeks. And the liberal soul that covets earnestly the best gifts, and all the best gifts, will seek and study and cultivate them both, with equal assiduity and strong endeavor. ”

“ It is indeed difficult to overrate the amount and the variety of the many hidden threads that unite our modern culture to that of ancient Greece, not to speak of the conscious return of our own century to the golden age of Hellenic life as the only human epoch in art, literature, and eloquence which ever approached perfection. ”

“ They are an attempt to cover the whole field of Greek influence, not only in the various arts in which such influence is generally realised, but also in those departments of thinking in which moderns arrogate to themselves an unquestioned superiority. ”

“ The Greeks had more, for their activity, hampered by the narrow limits of their political sphere, broke out in every variety of intellectual effort, carried into every branch of science and art. In spite of the whole modern school of impressionists, æsthetes, and aphrodisiac poets, the most prominent features of Greek art are its intellectuality, its well-reasoned science, and its accurate conception of the ideal. ”

“ In the time of the renaissance, there was little great literature in modern languages; now there is a great deal. Much of the value of the Greek tradition can be conveyed to people who do not know Greek ”

“ If such a recovery of sound education takes place, it is impossible that Greek shall not resume its old importance. We now know far more of Hellenic work than did our fore-fathers. We can vindicate Greek studies in a manner wholly strange to them, had they ever thought a vindication called for. But, on the other hand, the teaching of Greek must be reformed. It must be made a human and lively study, taught like a modern language by dictation and recitation, as well as by written composition and reading of authors. ”

“ It is hard to conceive a more complete case made out for the unparalleled influence of Hellenic genius upon proud and dominant neighbours. I will merely remind you how a fresh wave of Greek influence, coming into Romanised Europe in the fifteenth century, caused such a revolution in literature and art as to be called a new birth (Renascence) . ”

“ The Gothic fane was no doubt the ideal gloom wherein to worship a relentless God and his tortured Christ; the Renaissance palace was a place of light and gladness, wherein men could read with amazement the epic of Homer, the tragedy of Æschylus, the comedy of Aristophanes, and learn from them what human culture had once attained.
And so Greek studies resumed their place as the noblest part of a liberal education. ”

“ We got to know and appreciate Greek letters deeply and thoroughly as no Roman had ever known them; we got to analyse and understand Greek logic and philosophy and what is still more subtle, the delicacies of Greek art. We began to add to the treasures unearthed for us by the Renaissance, by probing for buried temples in Greece, and searching the sands of Egypt for new texts. The culture of the nineteenth century may fairly be called a culture that owes its greatness largely to{21} a thorough appreciation of the unique excellence of classical Greek work. ”

“ An extreme simplicity in private manners balanced the continual publicity and political excitement of Greek life. The rich classes, moreover, had little inducement to make any display of their possessions. ”

“ THE GENIUS OF GREEK ART.
Separation between the Greeks and us.—Criticism.—Greek Sense of Beauty.—Greek Morality.—Greece, Rome, Renaissance, the Modern Spirit.
The [Pg 4] Greeks had no past, "no hungry generations trod them down;" whereas the multitudinous associations of immense antiquity envelop all our thoughts and feelings. [274] "O Solon, Solon," said the priest of Egypt, "you Greeks are always children!" The world has now grown old; we are gray from the cradle onwards, swathed with the husks of outworn creeds, and rocked upon the lap of immemorial mysteries. ”

“ You could tell, without knowing any tongue but English, that there are four supreme poems which have exercised a fascination over men that never grows old. They are the Iliad of Homer, the Agamemnon of Æschylus, the Inferno of Dante, the Faust of Goethe. Two of these are Greek; but note also that, while we could find in Greek several rivals [3] which are of hardly less importance and by various poets, there is neither in German nor in Italian any poem that can for one moment compare with the supreme pieces I have named. So pre-eminent are the Greeks in literature. ”

“ Hence, when it occurs to a modern reader that the main superiority of our education over the Greek is the early training in the Scriptures—a training, alas! decaying in earnestness every day—an old Athenian or Milesian or Cean would deny the fact, and say that they, too, had an inspired volume, written for their learning, in which all the moral virtues and all the necessaries of faith were contained. ”

“ HIGHER THINKING, PHILOSOPHY, SPECULATIVE AND PRACTICAL THEOLOGY IN my last lecture I spoke of the small effect, or want of effect, which a mere intellectual training in the liberal arts might have upon the average morals of a large society. To-day I propose to take you into a higher atmosphere, and consider what occupied the élite of Greek society in their advanced education, and in their speculations on the nature of things. You must not underrate the enormous advantages the well-born youth then possessed in training his mind, as compared with the youth of to-day. ”

“ We may add that in regard to Greek influence on modern life (which is our proper subject) , none has been greater and more permanent than that of art in this sense. Thousands of men have copied, or imagined they copied, Greek art, who were never able to read one word of Greek and who never cared one jot about Greek literature. I take to-day its more solid and larger expressions—architecture and sculp{99}ture, reserving for my next lecture the more subjective arts and those of mere ornament. ”

“ When we hear little modern men of science wondering how the Greeks could have got so far without modern instruments, we feel rather inclined to tell them we wonder the moderns have done so much with the help of these, for in ab{236}stract thinking lies the real basis of every great discovery.
So far, the course of Greek philosophy has led us to the side of science, to the constitution of the world, to the immensity of space, to the physical construction of animal and vegetable life, to the problem of the duration of the universe, to the dreams about its origin. ”

“ It follows from these considerations that Greek poetry was always developed in schools possessing fixed traditions, and following strict laws both in metre and in diction. If any man thought to break loose from these restrictions, and write in a manner wholly free and unchecked, he would get no hearing in Greece. ”

“ But if the direct influence of Greek on modern painting was baulked for want of models, the indirect effect of Greek art on the best of modern painters is very great. Consider for a moment the two most refined of modern English painters, the late Lord Leighton, and the still living and working Sir Edward Alma-Tadema.{132} The latter generally calls his subjects Roman, but anyone that knows what the elegances of Roman life owe to the Greeks, sees at once that the whole spirit of the artist, and of the subjects he delights in, is Greek. ”

“ Yet even here, the tendency in the Greek mind to submit everything to law and training, to turn every kind of human work into an art, was so strong, that no form of prose writing escaped this schooling, and all of it shows a strictness of rhetorical form which seems, at first study of it, artificial, until we come to learn that the highest products of human art are not spontaneous, but the result of careful reflection. ”

“ I note this in order to bring home to you the fact that late in Greek spiritual history the greatest men and their audiences remained satisfied with the shackles of metre, as conveying serious teaching in a more permanent and more popular form than prose. For of course at the beginning of{67} society, when there are no written records, men are wont to clothe their legends and tales in that form, as it is a great aid to the memory, and can be easily taught to children, who remember the sound long before they pay attention to the sense. ”