AN APOSTLE OF GREEK.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1443, 18 May 1912, Page 9

AN APOSTLE OF GREEK.

Mr. Gilbert Murray, who conies from Oxford to teach Greek for a while at Amherst, and to lecture in various other places, must feel somewhat like a bisliop 'in partibus." Oxford may bo the homo of lost causes, Greek among them, but it lias a wonderful way of making lost things comfortable; whereas in this country Professor Murray will find any numper of people .ready to talk about reviving Greek, but in practice ho will see diminishing classes and despairing' teachers. Ho will find great States where only 0110 or two, if any, high schools teach (ho language at all; and even at Amherst, whose class of '85 has made so bold a stand for the classics, he will scarcely find the faculty flinging quotations from Aristophanes at 0110 another across tho table.

Mr. Murray is optimistic. lie reports in .England a great awakening, and expects to sen the same tiling here. At the Court Theatre of London liis own translations of Euripides liavo been .more popular than G. D. Shaw, the most modern of moderns. Still moro extraordinary i-: his report of the interest of tho Ilnglish working man in Gi'fek. This, according to Mr. Hurray's view, is duo to Die seriousness of the Socialistic movement". I'lato is sitting 011 tho same platform with Karl Marx; labourers are studying Greek at Oxford and Cambridge in the iong vacation, and are demanding instruction in that tongue for their children ill tho board schools.

These fire pretty- pictures, wliich we phould like to believe true. In part wo do. There is a 'craving in Hie human heart for tragedy, which even the best modern drama leaves unsatisfied. The old idea of Nemesis, of a je:\!au= goddess in nature looking out at the doings of men, and ironically punishing' them fnr extravagances into which she has herself allured them—that fear of the divine jealousy which strikes down insolent pros-

perity—still haunts us as a vaguo superstition or a glimpso of somo inexplicable truth. Goctho gave tho finest modern expression to the feeling in his famous stanzas to tho "hininiliciie Maclite," endiug with tho sombro paradox: Forth into life you bid us go. And into guilt you iet us fall. Then leavo us to endure the woe It brings unfailingly to all. That, wo take it, is tho very 6ubstanco of tragedy. Shakespeare knew it when he drew the picture ol : Macbeth lured by tho weird sisters into crime, and paying tho penalty with his own blood. But it has almost disappeared from modern literature, nud wo can well believo that many a playgoer will turn with relief from the artificial problems that now vex tho stage to a drama that deals with this fundamental question of human destiny. This may partly explain the extraordinary success of Sophocles and Euripides in Berlin and London.

.But that other story of the British workman giving laborious nights to the study of tho Greek language, and of tho "British Socialist calling Plato his master, seems a bit fantastic. We can imagine tho shock of tho working-man when his instructor strikes into one of thoso passages in which Plato dwells 011 the benumbing and degrading effect of manual labour 011 the soul, or in which ho portrays tho awful results to the stato of tho tinker in polities. We can imagine the cheerful submissiveiiess of a Socialistic gathering to which somo honest and tactful lecturer should expound Plato's ideal Republic with its division of the peoplo into three hard castes— thoso who do all the work, those who do the fighting and get the highest rewards, and the philosophers whose only business it is to talk logic and manage the Government. Such a gathering of Socialists would bo oven more doeply edified when they heard that this caste system was to bo maintained by keeping tho lower estate deliberately in a condition of ignoranco or illusion, in very much the same manner as was proposed by tho British Ilobbes, that father of all Tories. They would listen with keen relish to Plato's elaborate comparison of "the people" to a wild beast, or to his likening of democratic government to a ship at sea without a pilot.

As a matter of fact there has been a. deal of loose . talk about the democratic spirit of classical literature. > Liberty, to be sure, has been nobly extolled by the orators of Athens and Home, and the .history of those cities is full of examples of devotion to its cause.. It is easy to understand how tho patriots of Italy in the'time of the Eisorgimento could nourish their hatred of tyranny by reciting the deed of Harmcdius and Aristogiton, or face Austrian bullets with the words of somo Roman hero 011 their lips. But liberty is tho least thing desired hj l the democratic spirit of to-day. What it craves is equality, and of equality there is . precious little praise in tho philosophers and'poets of Greece. The truth of Hellenic civilisation has been finely expressed by Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson, who is at once a Socialist and a saddened lover of the far past:

Harmony between tho individual and his environment was perhaps moro nearly achieved by aud for tho aristocracy of ancient Grceco than by any society of any other age. But such a harmony, even at the best, is fleeting and precarious; and 110 perfection of life delivers from death.

And, in the second place, to secure even this imperfect realisation, it was necessary to restrict the universal application of the ideal. Excellence, in Greece, was made tho ond for some, not for all. But this limitation was felt, in the development of consciousness, to be self-contra-dictory; and the next great system of ethics that succeeded to that of Aristotle, postulated an end of action that should be at once independent of the aids of fortune and open alike to all classes of mankind. The ethics of a privileged class were thus expanded into the ethics of humanity; but this expansion was fatal to its essence, which had depended on the very limitations by which it was destroyed.

It is easy to see how a democratic lover of classic literature may for his own delight overlook these aspects of Greek life, but any propaganda based on such forBetfulness is sure _ to founder. Greek tragedy may bo' revived because it appeals to one of tho deonest emotions of the human heart, but the Socialistic democracy of to-day is not poinq- back to Plato for its ideas and inspiration. The value of' Greek literature depends rather on its corrective contrast with monv of our modem views.—New York "Xation."