GREEK FEAR OF LIFE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4779, 21 November 1924, Page 4

GREEK FEAR OF LIFE.

«, CHRISTIANITY V. ROMANTICISM. HARDNESS IN THE CLASSICS. “1 have been struck when returning to classical books which 1 have not read lor many years by the extiemc hardness of the Greek view of life as shown, especially in the great tragedians," writes Dean Inge in the Morning Post. “There is an article in one of the recent Quarterlies on the Greek Fear of Lite. The Greeks were not pessimists, but they were nearer to the dangers of primitive civilisation than we are. They could not forget famine, or peistil ( ence, or the duiigei of being made prisoner and sold into slavery. They were afraid of provoking the envyo f the gods. Man muse know his place; wisdom consisted largely in avoiding the falsehood of extreme. To give way to deep passions was undignified, womanish, and foolish ‘Nothing great,’ says a chorus in the Antigone, ’enters the life of mortals without a cunse.’ Violent ■ove was a humiliating disease. Hope also played a small part in Grcmt thought. The thing that has been is Hie tiling that shall be. History moves m vast cycles, which repeat the same revolutions. Periods of progress are followed by periods of decadence, an.l decadence by progress again. They themselves, they weie inclined to think, were on the down grade. Here we certainly have a typically utnromantic view of human life. The only question is whether it is not truer than the romantic —unless, indeed, we are compelled to identify Christianity with Romanticism.

However ihat may be, what was besr ;r. the Middle Ages was the Romanticism introduced by Catholic Christianity. Their romance was the romance of Christ, ivven the heroic jo.ii}' or' the Crusades was Chiistian iMiigln-crrantry, though mixed with

inucr. baser moral. Their art, of whic.il tne Sienese School <>l pai'niing .is a type, was romantic to the core, i'iie great churches, built when the people lived m squalid huts, testihed to much more than the overweening power of the Church. Their legends, winch clustered round the beautiful story of the Holy Grail, express the same brooding and visionary devotion in another medium. Sir Thomas Mallory s ‘Morte d’Arthur’ is perhaps the supreme classic of liomaiy-icism. Many even of Tennyson’is greatest admirers think that he would have been wiser to leave the Arthurian legend where he found it. The story of the guilty love of Lancelot and Guinevere, and of their repentance, too late to save their own souls, is in Mallory's version one of the most exquisite things in all literature. When we observe the reverence whicn he pays to a deep emotion, even when wrongly directed, as an error which brings loss and misery, but which can be fully atoned for by deep penitence, we Eeel that he is not only more romantic than Tennyson, but more profoundly Christian. When the hermit has a vision of Sir Lancelot being borne up to Heaven ‘by more angels than I ever saw men in one day,’ we feel that Lancelot the sinner has deserved the honour.”