The Legacy of Greece Part 17

The habit of keeping the eye on the subject, which is the essence of directness, discourages, and indeed excludes, conventionality, sentimentalism, fancifulness, which prevent a writer from seeing and recording life as it is. These failings are always with us, and as I have given one instance of their working in Ben Jonson's epigram and have discussed the matter elsewhere,[120] I shall pa.s.s to diseases which are more particularly modern, and with which directness is equally at war.

[120] _The Greek Genius and its Meaning to us_, pp. 74 ff.

The richness of the English language is in itself a danger. English, like Latin, lends itself superbly to ranting, a capacity discovered by the Elizabethans. Modern writers tend to more delicate excess, and have exploited the musical quality of English. This is clear from such a collection as the _Oxford Book of Victorian Verse_, which faithfully represents the output of the age, and contains some fine poetry, but also a very large percentage of what Horace called, _Versus inopes rerum nugaeque canorae_. There is an intolerable deal of sack to a very little bread among the imitators of Tennyson. To such rhetorical or musical trifles no better antidote can be found than Greek literature, for there is no rhetoric in it, and what melodious nothings it contained, were parodied in its own age and have scantily survived to ours. In general it avoided both by its directness. The rhetoric of Lucan or Byron, the predominance of sound over sense in some of Sh.e.l.ley and much of Swinburne arise because those poets shut their eyes to the real world and become lost in the music of words. The Greek, starting with facts, not with sounds or with feelings about facts, could not easily become the victim of words. The temptation did not arise for him, or if it did, his sin was easily detected. Herein he is a good model, especially for poets who are apt to lose sight of the earth and pa.s.s into an unearthly paradise of vague feelings. For the greatest poetry is the poetry of things, not of words, and to whatever regions the Muse may take her flight, she can only be safe if she starts from Earth, and keeps her communication with it open.

Directness is also a protection against that literature of egotism which is the excess into which subjective poetry easily falls. Legitimate when kept within bounds, the habit of putting oneself into what one writes can become an offence, and from this offence English literature is not free. No one can complain because Milton and Wordsworth are less detached than Shakespeare or Sophocles; but the subjectivity of Byron or Carlyle is very different. Their subject is continually darkened by the shadow of their personality; it suffers a partial, at times a total, eclipse. Childe Harold sees himself in all that he sees, projects himself into Belgium, Athens and Rome, and colours the bluest skies with the jaundiced hues of his temperament. This is almost equally true of Carlyle's pupils, Ruskin and Froude, and, among the moderns, of a swarm of minor poets and novelists, who display before the public the pageant of their indignant or bleeding hearts. Egotism is a fault of manners as much as of morals, and has its peculiar effect and its appropriate penalty. Its effect is to distract a man's attention from major to minor issues, from the large world to the small self; its penalty is that it wearies its audience, and the next generation, if not its own, dislikes the continual obtrusion of an element in which it has no interest. Hence oblivion, often unjust, is the punishment which the egotist suffers.

Even our age, interested as it is in personalities, has little time to spare for those of Byron or Carlyle; it is too busy with the characters of its own contemporaries to trouble about those of its predecessors.

But no Greek writer is forgotten for this cause. Whatever their other offences, the Greeks are free from literary egotism. Directness turned their eyes to the external world, and taught them to see even themselves from without.

Egotism is a minor defect in English literature. To some it may even seem to be a virtue. A more serious weakness, which our literature shares with other modern literatures, is one-sidedness or incompleteness of view, which reveals itself by a series of reactions, and in England has taken the form of an oscillation between sentimentalism and a rather cruel realism, the latter being dominant at the present time. These two schools represent excesses of temperament, the one of generosity and kindliness, the other of truth; and among our writers of genius d.i.c.kens and Hardy typify them well. The one school desire in fiction to reward their good characters and punish the bad, just as they would wish that life should do; and truth is not allowed to thwart their benevolence or their indignation. In defiance of all probability Micawber and Mr. Mell make a success of life in Australia, though truth cries out that they were born to be failures; while the foot of punishment moves more swiftly and visibly in the pages of d.i.c.kens than it does in fact. Then comes the veracious person, who, growing indignant at a travesty of life that misleads the reader and insults truth, gives us the opposite extreme in an imagined world where the shadows are deepened and the high lights carefully blocked out. Scott and d.i.c.kens picture a world in which at the end vice finds itself in the gutter while virtue marries the heroine. Later, Thomas Hardy has given us _Jude the Obscure_ and _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_.[121] Here is a protest, a redressing of the balance, by an advocate who rises to supply a side of the case which has been ignored. Yet once again Truth is violated, and by her sworn servant; for the world that Hardy portrays is not the world as it is.

When d.i.c.kens makes Mr. Micawber the District Magistrate of Port Middlebay, he is not representing life, but saying what he and his audience would like to believe in order to feel comfortable when they close the book. As a protest therefore against him in the next generation comes Thomas Hardy, who after recording the miserable end of Tess, writes 'The President of the immortals had ended his sport with Tess'. In so writing he is no true recorder any more than was d.i.c.kens, but the self-appointed Judge of a universe which he conceives to be cruel.

[121] In these novels and in _The Dynasts_ Mr. Hardy allows his personal views to depress one side of the scales: in his lesser novels he has often shown that he can hold the balance even. This distinction should be borne in mind in all the criticisms of his work, which I have ventured to make.

Neither d.i.c.kens nor Hardy can be called unveracious writers; both give a picture of life that is true up to a point. Hardy, in particular, errs less by distortion than by omission; he sees one side of life, but at the expense of another side; he fails to hold the balance fairly, and lacks the large charity of the universe. Both writers are incomplete. No one could say of them, what is completely true of most Greek writers and largely true of all, that they see life steadily and see it whole. Still less can this be said of their followers, who, after the fas.h.i.+on of disciples, imitate and develop their defects, and oscillate between sentimental falsity, and the starkness and brutality which have been familiar in English literature during the last twenty years and in French literature for a much longer period. None of these writers, not even the best, is direct. Like d.i.c.kens, they consult their generous hearts, or, worse, ask: 'Can truth be told without making the public angry?' Or, like Hardy, they veil a didactic purpose under the name of realism, and register a bitter personal protest against the cruelty of life. In either case they narrow their view, and see the world through a mist of temperament.

This point may be ill.u.s.trated by examining a famous pa.s.sage from Homer, and then asking how a sentimental and a realistic writer might have treated it. Imagine the death of Hector in the hands of d.i.c.kens or Hardy. The first most probably would not have permitted it to occur, or, if he had, would have made Achilles the villain of the piece and emphasized and developed the tragedy in the manner of his death scenes, till he had wearied the reader with pathos. Confronted with such a tragedy he would have given the rein to emotion. Mr. Hardy, we may guess, would be impressed less by the pathos of the scene, than by the savagery of Achilles and the misgovernment of a universe in which such things were possible, and he would not have let these morals escape his readers. By small touches, by stressing suitable incidents, he would have made the tragedy more tragic, and the brutality more brutal. It is thus that he has treated the death of Jude. By so doing, both d.i.c.kens and Hardy in their different ways, would have been allowing their own personalities rather than the facts to speak, and, seeing only one side of the story, would have made it less complicated than life and less complete. But in the _Iliad_ we see nothing of Homer's personality and hear no voice but that of the facts. The story tells itself without the heightening of artifice. The two men are brought before our eyes--Hector, the last hope of Troy, with his wife and child waiting for him at home--Achilles, mad with the memory of his dead friend. There is no judgement and no comment, but only the thing as it was.

To those who would maintain that d.i.c.kens or Hardy give an accurate picture of the world, there are two answers. First, their world is not the world as Shakespeare or Meredith sees it; this for many persons will be a sufficient disproof of its reality. Second, the history of English and French literatures has been for the last 150 years a history of successive reactions. The cla.s.sical school was followed by the romantics, the romantics by the realists; each was a protest and a reaction against its predecessor. These swerving movements must have a cause. Now there are no reactions in literature unless there is some excess to provoke them. The existence of a reaction is a symptom of disease, and not only would it never take place apart from disease, but there is always a chance that it may go too far; for as in the body, so in the world of letters, a balance once disturbed is difficult to restore. But Greek literature, unlike our own and unlike French, at no stage developed by reaction. Its epic poets are followed by the lyrists and these by the tragedians: tragedy pa.s.ses into the New Comedy, which is followed by the learned and artistic poetry of Alexandria. In prose the unperiodic style of Herodotus is succeeded by the style of Thucydides; while Plato and the various orators develop different types of writing. None of these styles, however, and none of these writers, are in reaction against one another. Some traces of reaction against the Homeric outlook of Sophocles may perhaps be found in Euripides. But this contrast lies between two individual writers and not between two literary schools, and has no a.n.a.logy with the relation of the romantic to the cla.s.sical or to the realist movements. It is far less marked, for instance, than the contrast between Voltaire and Victor Hugo or that between Victor Hugo and Flaubert. There is no reaction in the development of Greek literature, because at no stage is there any excess to react from; and there is no excess, because the Greek writers are direct and objective, because they are mirrors that reflect life, not imperfect lenses that distort it each according to its own imperfection.

The literature of the Elizabethans here resembles Greek. It is indeed more wayward, more fanciful, more personal, more luxuriant than the Greek; but it is on the whole more disinterested, freer from any didactic bent, more inclined to contemplate life for its own sake than the literature of any succeeding epoch in England. Since the Puritans a didactic strain has continually appeared in our writers. We have had revolts and protests, and then, by reaction, more protests and revolts.

However admirable in morals, this Protestantism is injurious in literature, for, like all rebellions, it ends in excess and destroys the even-balanced temper which is essential to the creation of the greatest literature. This didactic temper, often disguised as realism, has never been stronger than in our own age, when many who might have found their profession in the Churches are diverted to other paths and seek in literature an outlet that in the past would have been found in the pulpit. Messrs. Wells, Shaw, Galsworthy--to mention no others--are parsons _manques_, who were designed by nature to write not plays or novels but sermons. Or rather they are dual personalities: clergyman and creative writer have been combined in them and the clergyman has corrupted the poet. The unsatisfied appet.i.te for preaching which a hundred years ago would have been quieted by writing an evangelical tract, to-day issues in a novel or a play. The moral differs, the form changes, the intention and temper are the same.

It is ungrateful to cavil at this moralizing and didactic temper, which animates a large part of the nation and is responsible for much of the British achievement. But its place is in the world of action not in that of letters, and it does not produce the greatest literature or the truest thought. The Greeks might have gained by a greater infusion of it: we, on the other hand, can learn something from their intellectual disinterestedness which in political and social controversies would make opposing views more intelligible and the path to truth easier and plainer, in literature would free us from excesses that are followed by reaction to a contrary excess, and in national life would guard us from the materialism which besets an industrial and commercial age. It is not confined to the Greeks; but by no people is the ideal of intellectual truth more clearly and universally exhibited than by those who first brought it into an indifferent world, and who built upon it their literature and art no less than their science and philosophy.

The last quality of Greek literature of which I wish to speak is not one which we should expect to find in combination with truthfulness; it is certainly very rare in modern realists. Yet the Greek instinct for beauty is beyond question. There is the evidence of Winckelmann, who, living in a world that had forgotten Greek, rediscovered it; or of Keats, who was not brought up to the familiarity with Greek that breeds obtuseness and indifference, but made acquaintance with it when he was of an age to judge. The impression made both on Keats and Winckelmann is that of a new and surpa.s.sing beauty. There is the evidence of 'the beautiful mythology of Greece',[122] the offspring of an untaught folk-imagination, and so far richer in the quality of beauty than the mythology of the North. Even in the sawdust of a mythological dictionary the stories of Atalanta, Narcissus, Pygmalion, Orpheus and Eurydice, Phaethon, Medusa keep their magic.

[122] Keats, _Preface to Endymion_.

The following extract from the hymn of Demeter may ill.u.s.trate this beauty, though it is not one of the greatest pa.s.sages of Greek literature and its writer is unknown. It is the story of the Earth Mother and her daughter Persephone:

?? ??d??e??

??pa?e?, d??e? de a???t?p?? e????pa ?e??, pa????sa? ?????s? s?? O?ea??? a?????p???

a??ea t' a???e???, ??da ?a? ?????? ?d' ?a ?a?a ?e???' a a?a??? ?a? a?a???da? ?d' ?a??????

?a???ss?? ?', ?? f?se d???? ?a????p?d? ?????

Ga?a ???? ????s? ?a????e?? ????de?t?, ?a?ast?? ?a????ta? sea? t? ?e pas?? ?des?a?

a?a?at??? te ?e??? ?de ???t??? a????p????

t?? ?a? ap? ????? ??at?? ?a?a e?epef??e?, ???' ?d?st' ?d?, pa? d' ???a??? e???? ?pe??e ?a?a te pa?' e?e?a.s.se ?a? ?????? ??da ?a?a.s.s??.

? d' a?a ?a?sa?' ??e?at? ?e?s?? ?' af?

?a??? a???a ?ae??? ?a?e de ???? e???a???a ??s??? a ped???, t? ????se? a?a? ????de???

?pp??? a?a?at??s?[123]

{hen Aidoneus herpaxen, doken de baryktypos euryopa Zeus, paizousan kouresi syn okeanou bathykolpois anthea t' ainymenen, rhoda kai krokon ed' ia kala leimon' am malakon kai agallidas ed' hyakinthon narkisson th', hon physe dolon kalukopidi koure Gaia Dios boulesi charizomene Polydekte, thaumaston ganoonta; sebas to ge pasin idesthai athanatois te theois ede thnetois anthropois; tou kai apo rhizes hekaton kara exepephykei, koz' hedist' odme, pas d' ouranos eurys hyperthe gaia te pas' egela.s.se kai halmyron oidma thala.s.ses.

he d' ara thambesas' orexato chersin ham' ampho kalon athyrma labein; chane de chthon euryagyia Nysion am pedion, te orousen anax Polydegmon hippois athanatoisi}.

[123] _Hymn to Demeter_, l. 2 ff. The translation is mainly from Pater, _Greek Studies_. 'Whom, by the consent of far-seeing, deep-thundering Zeus, Aidoneus carried away, as she played with the deep-bosomed daughters of Ocean, gathering flowers in a meadow of soft gra.s.s and roses and crocus and fair violets and iris and hyacinths and the strange glory of the narcissus which the Earth, favouring the desire of Aidoneus, brought forth to snare the flower-like girl. A wonder it was to all, immortal G.o.ds and mortal men. A hundred blossoms grew up from the roots of it, and very sweet was its scent, and the broad sky above, and all the earth and the salt wave of the sea laughed to see it. She in wonder stretched out her two hands to take the lovely plaything: thereupon the wide-wayed earth opened in the Nysian plain and the king of the great nation of the dead sprang out with his immortal horses.'

Turn from this to some parallel poem in English literature, such as _Oenone_ or _t.i.thonus_. Beautiful as Tennyson is, the Greek has a better beauty, a beauty not of words or metaphors or highly-wrought art, but simpler, more spontaneous and more instinctive, as though not man but nature herself was speaking. Two writers, who are qualified to judge by being themselves among the great poets of the world, and who knew and appreciated other literatures, but speak in this way about Greek alone, have testified to the uniqueness of this beauty. Goethe says stiffly but precisely: 'in the presence of antiquity the mind feels itself placed in the most ideal state of nature; and even to this day the Homeric hymns have the power of freeing us, at any rate, for moments, from the terrible burden which the tradition of many hundreds of years has rolled upon us.' In these words Goethe has touched on the simplicity and the naturalness of Greek beauty, in contrast to the more exotic and elaborate beauty of which mediaeval and modern art and literature are full. Keats writing about the Grecian urn also had in his mind the liberating power of Greek beauty:

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity; Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

These words point to another trait of Greek beauty, which any one who has seen Greek statues must have felt: it does not provoke speculation just as it does not excite desire, because no elements are mingled with it that might stir such feelings. It has no admixture, but is mere beauty, sought for itself.

Not only is Greek beauty different in quality from our own, but it is more abundant. This surely would be the verdict of an impartial critic who compared Homer, the lyrists, the tragedians, Plato, Theocritus, the epigrammatists, with the corresponding names in modern literatures. It amounts to a different way of viewing the world; the Greeks were more sensitive to beauty than we are, just as some people are more sensitive than others to colours or sounds, to moral or intellectual issues. This is curiously ill.u.s.trated in their treatment of tragic themes. There is no want of tragedy in Homer or the dramatists--their view of life is probably darker than our own--and they have been praised for a pessimism that faced and admitted the black truth. Yet the cloud of evil is continually broken by rays of beauty. Thus Homer lights up the tragic parting of Hector and Andromache by the story of the child and the nodding plumes, yet does not use the incident, as many writers would have used it, to heighten the tragedy, which indeed it neither emphasizes nor diminishes: it is merely a gratuitous touch of delight in children, as accidental and natural as the brighter moments which, in life if not in realistic novels, diversify the darkest hours. Thus too Aeschylus preludes the b.l.o.o.d.y slaughter of Salamis with the white horses of the dawn, the echoes in the cliffs, the foam whitening beneath the oars, and when he speaks of the island where the Persians are butchered, does not forget the dances in which Pan rejoiced there of old. Thus, again, one of the most tragic moments in the _Hippolytus_ is followed by the song,

Could I take me to some cavern for mine hiding, In the hill-tops where the Sun scarce hath trod; Or a cloud make the home of mine abiding, As a bird among the bird-droves of G.o.d!

Could I wing me to my rest amid the roar Of the deep Adriatic on the sh.o.r.e, Where the water of Erida.n.u.s is clear, And Phaethon's sad sisters by his grave Weep into the river, and each tear Gleams, a drop of amber, in the wave.[124]

[124] ll. 732 f. (tr. Murray).

The union of beauty and tragedy may be a paradox, but no reader can miss its power. The mere story of Hector's death as told by Homer is poignant, even when read in an English translation: the magic of the original language and metre doubles the effect. The combination of these two apparently inconsistent things, which is one of the marks of Greek poetry, is, of course, found in other literatures; the description of Ophelia's death in _Hamlet_ is an instance of it. But no drama except Greek has that regular interweaving of tragedy with exquisite lyrics by which some of its most powerful effects are secured.

Effect is the wrong word to use, for we have here no literary trick, but a view of life, which is naturally complete and clearsighted, which is sensitive to the beauty that no evil can destroy, which sees the splendour in tragedy itself, and remembers that though the days of darkness are many it is a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold the sun.

This philosophy, implied throughout Greek literature, commends it to many people. Those who disagree with the philosophy will not quarrel with the beauty itself. h.e.l.lenism is one of the forces which are continually being buried and re-found, and which, like talismans, have a disturbing power when they fall afresh into human hands. Those who read the literature of the age which rediscovered Greek will see that it brought above all a sense of liberation and expansion. At the Renaissance as in the eighteenth century, Greece found the world in chains, and broke them and threw down the prison walls. The fetters of the two epochs were different, but freedom was brought, at the Renaissance partly, and in the age of Winckelmann entirely, by the vision of beauty which Greece exhibited. Our own age has many chains and knows well the burden of which Goethe spoke. It has multiplied ugliness far faster than beauty, and its writers, prolific, interesting, and thoughtful as they are, do not help it here. It may well find, as other ages have found, in this quality of Greek literature a healing and liberating power.

English literature is surpa.s.sed by none, but its defects or dangers are at points where Greek is strong. Greek simplicity recalls us to the central interests of the human heart. Greek truthfulness is a challenge to see the world as it is and shun the emptiness of mere music, the falsities of rhetoric or sentiment, the incompleteness of writers who, instead of seeing life as a whole, ignore or emphasize a part of it as their own sympathies dictate. Greek beauty is a memorial of an aspect of the universe to which ages of thought are often blind. Greek technique is a lesson in 'form' and a reminder of its place in literature.

Nor is the study of Greek a danger to our national genius. Contact with highly developed foreign models may warp or cramp a literature in its infancy, but cannot harm it when full grown and robust. The native character is then too firmly established to be corrupted, and it is pure gain to have another standard for comparison, for detection of weaknesses and their cure. A reference to English literature will support this view and show that though the influence of Greek there has often been great, it has not been distorting. Consider the English poets who owe most to Greece--Milton, Gray, Sh.e.l.ley, Keats, Landor, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, Bridges. It would puzzle any critic to find a common denominator between these men, or to trace back to Greece any universal feature in their poetry, except perhaps perfection of form.

Technical perfection is not so serious or frequent a vice in English writers, that it can be complained of, and even this common element vanishes, if we add to the poets already quoted the Brownings, who prized and understood Greek and the Greek spirit as well as any of them.

At first sight it may seem strange that Sh.e.l.ley and Keats, Arnold and Swinburne, who were not merely pa.s.sionate admirers of Greece but drew their chief inspiration from her, should be so different in style and matter. The explanation is simple. Some influences are tyrannous; they impose themselves, they dominate, they enslave. But there is a better and rarer type of influence, which stimulates and inspires yet leaves the poet free to develop his own genius with enlarged horizons and quickened sensibilities. Greek influence on our writers has been of this kind; perhaps because its literature is singularly free from the artifice and mannerism which lend themselves to mimicry and seems like Nature with her many voices speaking.

R. W. LIVINGSTONE.

HISTORY

I

_The Relations.h.i.+p between Ancient Greek and Modern Western Civilization_

Ancient Greek society perished at least as long ago as the seventh century A. D. Many historians would date its death a good many centuries earlier, and all would agree that even if there are symptoms that life still lingered in the body down to this time, its mental and physical energies had long failed, and that the change from lethargy to death was hardly perceptible when it came. Thus even on the most cautious reckoning, there is an interval of thirteen centuries between the close of Greek history and our own times, and the great age of Greek history--the time when Ancient Greek society was in its prime, when it was shaping its own destiny and deflecting the destiny of its neighbours--is separated from our generation by more than two thousand years. What legacy has come down, through these great periods of time, from Ancient Greek society to the contemporary world? Before trying to answer this big question, let us consider a smaller one: What is the legacy of Ancient Greek History to our own society? That portion of contemporary humanity which inhabits Western Europe and America const.i.tutes a specific society, for which the most convenient name is 'Western Civilization', and this society has a relations.h.i.+p with Ancient Greek society which other contemporary societies--for instance, those of Islam, India, and China--have not. It is its child.

This description of the relations.h.i.+p between Ancient Greece and the modern Western world may be something more than a metaphor, for societies like individuals are living creatures, and may therefore be expected to exhibit the same phenomena. At any rate the metaphor ill.u.s.trates the facts. To begin with, the histories of the two societies overlap. The origins of modern Western society may be traced back a century or two before the Christian era, when the lands and races of Western Europe came into contact with the Levant, where Greek society had grown up and was then in its maturity. The germ of Western society first developed in the body of Greek society, like a child in the womb.

The Roman Empire was the period of pregnancy during which the new life was sheltered and nurtured by the old. The 'Dark Age' was the crisis of birth, in which the child broke away from its parent and emerged as a separate, though naked and helpless, individual. The Middle Ages were the period of childhood, in which the new creature, though immature, found itself able to live and grow independently. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with their marked characteristics of transition, may stand for p.u.b.erty, and the centuries since the year 1500 for our prime. The metaphor works out sufficiently well to throw light on our particular problem: the legacy bequeathed to the Modern West by Ancient Greece.

Children 'inherit' from their parents in several senses of the word.

There are features and instincts physically transmitted from the one to the other. There are imitations in early childhood of the parent's speech and gesture which are not perhaps strictly predetermined by the relations.h.i.+p, but which are yet performed subconsciously and are in fact so inevitable that the child is never aware that it is exercising choice in the matter. And there is deliberate and conscious imitation at a later stage when the child is sufficiently mature to appreciate its parent's character. These several forms of 'legacy' from parent to child differ primarily in the extent to which the acceptance and use of them depends upon the child's own will, and it will probably be admitted that the legacies which are the less certain to be transmitted are also the more important if the transmission happens to take place. For example, a child's life and character are more affected by deliberate imitation of its parent at a relatively advanced age than by the unchosen inheritance of some particular colour of hair and eye or shape of chin or pitch of temperament. On the other hand, while the inheritance of these latter characteristics from one among a limited number of ancestral strains is inevitable, the voluntary legacy may never be transmitted at all. The child will not claim it unless he knows his parent and admires or respects him. The parent's premature death or removal or the lack of sufficient sympathy between the parent and the child can in this case inhibit the transmission, and the potential legacy, with its momentous possibilities of influence upon the child's career, will never in fact be bequeathed.

These considerations may guide us in an a.n.a.lysis of the legacy which we have received from our parent society--the civilization of Ancient Greece. First, has Ancient Greece transmitted to us anything comparable to the physical and psychological legacy of an individual human parent to her child? This is a difficult question for us to answer, just as it is difficult for members of the same family to appreciate the 'family likeness' between them. A Moslem or Hindu or Chinaman could judge better than we. But it is certainly possible that the comparative similarity of climatic conditions and the comparative unity of racial stock has created a closer relations.h.i.+p between these two societies than between either one of them and any other. The poetry and philosophy and social life and political inst.i.tutions of Ancient Greece and the Modern West may conceivably const.i.tute a single species when contrasted with the inst.i.tutions of other civilizations. A modern West European or American may have a greater innate appreciation for Homer than for the Old Testament or for Sokrates than for Buddha or Confucius. The parallel which historians so often draw, or imply, between the conflict of Ancient Greece with the Ancient East and that of the Modern West with the Modern East may rest on a real kins.h.i.+p between the two Occidental civilizations as contrasted with their respective Oriental neighbours.

But this is uncertain and on the whole unprofitable ground. When we come to the 'subconsciously chosen' type of legacy, the a.n.a.logy with the relations.h.i.+p between parent and child becomes more evident.