opment of the oddities and idiosyncrasies of the individual, but is rather the result of assimilating in one soul, so far as may be, the best part of the past and contemporary life of men, that is, the part which is most permanent and universal. It is according to such a principle that mythology possesses artistic value. The best and most permanent qualities of the Greek people are to be found there; and the artist who selects his material from it, and who treats it lovingly and with understanding, may be sure of a certain steadiness and universality in his art, while at the same time the material is of such a pliant nature that he may express with it much of the best that he has within himself. Take, for example, the passage which we have already discussed:

Morn,

Waked by the circling Hours, with rosy hand

Unbarred the gates of Light.

We have seen already the extent and importance of the classical element in this passage. The pure and beautiful imagery is wholly classical. It possesses Greek dignity and repose. It contains the elements of expectancy, action, progress, and climax, and these qualities are the essential and universal ones by which the beauty of the dawn appeals to men. But thoroughly mingled with the universal elements of these lines are some of the best personal qualities of Milton himself. They are not introduced in the form of a curious and outlandish conceit; by his selection of certain qualities from the Greek, and his emphasis of them, he reflects the same qualities in his own nature. Such are his delicacy, dignity, and repose. Then we feel also his purity of thought and emotion, and his high reserve, which is felt elsewhere, in nearly every line, as a distinguishing trait of the poet.

Milton lived in a time when the importance and development of individuality had become the importance and development of personal peculiarity. Much of the poetry of his time suffered from this fact, and as a result is full of conceits and curious figures, while generally it no longer appeals strongly to men, and is now read only at the promptings of an idle interest in its quaintness. Milton himself did not always escape this tendency to conceit and oddity. Whether he was aware of it or not, the fact remains that mythology often served in his case as a sort of safeguard against such mistakes, for while it suffered some modification under the influence of his individuality, it kept his poetry within the bounds of universal appeal.

XVI

THE GREEK GIFT TO CIVILIZATION 1

BY SAMUEL LEE WOLFF

The Greeks meant one thing to men of the early Renaissance, another thing to Pope and Addison, another thing to Germans of the nineteenth century. Every generation has taken its Greek in its own way. And the present generation, heir of all the ages, is taking its Greek in nearly every way-except one. It is not taking its Greek for granted. An expositor of Hellenism to-day is almost obliged to become an apologist. He must 'show us.' Even as seasoned a Grecian as Professor Mahaffy, who surely is entitled, if any one is, to be at his ease in Hellas, does not resist this compulsion. The quiet and still air of his delightful studies is stirred with argument, about Greek in the college curriculum, about the neglect of Aristotelian logic by American youth, about, on the one hand, Greek versus 'Science,' and, on the other hand, the truly 'scientific' temper of Greek thought. Throughout he seems to feel that the Greeks need to be vindicated; and their vindication, throughout, is that they are 'modern.'

This seems to mean that they are free from mysticism and obscurantism, those sins of the Middle Ages; and Professor Mahaffy is the more inclined to praise Greek clear-sightedness in virtue of his own long-standing feud with mediaevalism. There is a fine old-fashioned flavor, as of some clergyman in Thomas Love Peacock-a Ffolliott, a Portpipe, an Opimian-in the valiant noPopery flings of our author against the Church and against the theological prepossessions of mediaeval science and philosophy. The modern contentiousness about Greek here receives a temperamental reinforcement.

[1 This article, of which four-fifths are now reprinted, first appeared in the Nation (New York) for April 7, 1910, as a review of Mahaffy's What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilization? Section IV, dealing with the plan and scope of the particular book rather than the subject, has been omitted. The parts included are published with the consent of Dr. Wolff and the editor of the Nation.-EDITOR.]

All good things being Greek, and all bad things non-Greek, the Middle Ages were non-Greek; and the Renaissance, which put an end to them, was Greek. Such seems to be the latent reasoning at the bottom of Professor Mahaffy's view-and we admit it to be the popular view-that by means of a resurgence of Greek art, literature, and philosophy, the Renaissance superseded the Middle Ages, and that the Renaissance was in spirit and accomplishment truly Greek, truly classical. The naïve assumption of the humanists that they had emerged from a 'thick Gothic night,' Professor Mahaffy would modify by substituting 'Latin' for 'Gothic'; and, having thus given a bad name to the Scholastic Philosophy, to Romanesque and Gothic architecture, to the Dies Irae and to the chansons de geste, he would contentedly hang them all. Now, he believes, upon the thick Latin night up rose Greek, and up rose the sun: the classical Renaissance and the 'modern spirit' were a twin birth of the revival of Greek studies.2 This view seems to us erroneous; and, as the conceptions underlying it determine Professor Mahaffy's treatment of his subject, we shall examine it at some length. Waiving all questions of chronology, disregarding therefore all mediaeval anticipations of the Renaissance or of the 'modern spirit,' granting that the light did not dawn till Greek began to reappear, and then dawned decisively, we believe it would not be difficult to show that the Renaissance itself was not essentially Hellenic.

The literature of the Renaissance, both in and out of Italy, is four-fifths of it Latinistic-Virgilian, Ciceronian, Senecan, occasionally Horatian, very heavily Ovidian. It springs not immediately, often not mediately, from Homer, Demosthenes, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, or even Euripides. The other fifth, which does draw nourishment from Greek literature, draws it from the Greek literature, not of the golden, but of the silver and the pinchbeck ages. Boccaccio, Professor Mahaffy points out, is indebted to Greek prose fiction; but what he does not point out is that Boccaccio's debt runs mostly to very late Byzantine romances now lost. Lyly draws from Plutarch On Education. Sannazaro breaks from the Virgilian pastoral tradition to return to Theocritus. Tasso's Aminta, as is well known, gets what is probably its most famous passage from the late prose romance of Achilles Tatius. As is not so well known, the Jerusalem Delivered, too, professedly

a restoration of the classical-that is, the Virgilian-epic, in reprobation of the composite romance-epic of Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto, is itself full of the conceits of late Greek rhetoric. The Pastor Fido is based upon a story in Pausanias. It seems well within the truth to say that where Renaissance literature is Greek at all, it is almost certain to be in the Alexandrianized, Romanized, Byzantinized, and Orientalized vein that we call Greek only because we have no better name for it.

The art and the philosophy of the Renaissance, like its literature, do not draw from pure Hellenic fountains. Botticelli, Raphael, and Titian are not inspired by Greek statuary of the best period, very little of which had been unearthed; Greek painting was probably unknown to them, and, at any rate, Greek painting, as far as it has survived at all, is of the Campanian, the Alexandrian style distinctly post-classical. The putti of the Renaissance may, indeed, it is thought, be traced to the 'Egyptian plague of Loves'-those Cupids, which, whether attendant upon the amorous adventures of the gods, or nesting in trees, or wreathing garlands, or exposed in cages for sale, 'flutter through the Pompeian pictures.' And where the great painters of the Renaissance thought of themselves as illustrators of 'literary' themes (we are just rediscovering how decidedly they did so think of themselves-to the confusion of 'art for art's sake'), they looked for their themes, not in Homer, or the tragedians, or the myths of Plato, but in Ovid, or Apuleius, or Philostratus, or Lucian. Raphael's frescoes in the Farnesina got their Olympians, not from Hesiod, but from Apuleius. Botticelli's Calunnia, as Professor Mahaffy mentions elsewhere, is derived from Lucian's description of the Diabolé of Apelles. Mantegna, Titian, Raphael, Giulio Romano, and others deliberately retranslated into color and visual form the verbal descriptions by Philostratus of paintings in a supposed picture-gallery.

As for the Platonism of the Renaissance, that too was composite, with its leaning toward pseudo-Dionysian hierarchies and toward elaborate theories of love. It was the Platonism of Plotinus, rather, after the school of Alexandria; for, in spite of Ficino's translation, the Platonism of Athens was to them unknown-or, when known, too purely Attic to be assimilated. There was, indeed, an echo of pre-Socratic Greek thought in the animistic philosophies of Southern Italy; but these Professor Mahaffy does not mention, despite their influence upon Bacon by way of Telesio and Campanella.

In general, Renaissance taste is distinctly unclassical. It runs to digression and irrelevancy; to inserted descriptions and episodes;

to huge verbosity. It revels in the 'word-paintings' (κppáσas) which were a specialty of the late sophists and rhetoricians; it never tires of their speechmaking. It favors whole bookfuls of orations invented as patterns of the kind of thing that might be said upon a given occasion by persons imaginary, mythological, or historical. These oroiciai and μeλérai bulk large in the Anthology, and reappear in collections like 'Silvayn's' Orator-to mention, perhaps, the most familiar name among many. The prose of the Renaissance, again, like late Greek prose, tends, without resistance, to the most exaggerated conceits and antitheses, each country in Europe developing its own particular brands of bad taste-Euphuism, Gongorism, Marinism, and the rest-upon a common basis of Ciceronian and late Greek rhetoric. In imitation, too, of the tours de force of degenerate Greek and Roman rhetoricians, the versifiers of the Renaissance often chose the most trivial themes, and embellished them with all the graces of double entendre. To match the antique disquisitions 'Of Long Hair,' and 'In Praise of Baldness,' we have the capitoli of Berni and his school on 'Figs,' 'Beans,' 'Sausages,' 'Bakers' Ovens,' 'Hard-Boiled Eggs,' 'Chestnuts,' 'Paint-Brushes,' 'Bells,' 'Needles,' 'Going without Hats,' and 'Lying late Abed.' It is a far cry from this sort of thing to Homer or to the Periclean age. Indeed, if by Greek we mean 'classic,' the Renaissance was not Greek. Not until the late eighteenth century, after the way had been cleared by those 'pedants,' German and other, to whom this work alludes so slightingly, was the true Renaissance of classic Greek accomplished; only then may the modern world be said to have entered fully upon its Greek heritage. What the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries achieved was rather a panLatinistic revival, which attended especially to the process of recasting and enriching the vernacular tongues, mostly by means of Latin or post-classical Greek models, into vehicles of a modern eloquentia that might rival the antique. Its degenerate models, together with its own taste in choosing them, made it, not pure, reposeful, imaginative, but composite, unquiet, fantastic, rhetorical, loquacious-all that is suggested when we say ‘Alexandrian.'

One cannot help feeling that Professor Mahaffy's taste in these matters has been 'subdued to what it works in' by his extensive studies of post-classical Greek. This bias appears in the estimate of Aristotle's Poetics and the dicta about Wordsworth, Tennyson, and others. The Poetics is treated as if it were merely a collection of judgments upon individual works in Greek literature: if these judgments are erroneous, the work is a failure, of course. It is not