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perceived, apparently, that the Poetics is an exposition of basic principles, the principles of poetry and of art in general; and that, in its justification of poetry as an imaginative embodiment of the universal (a view which Plato, for all his poetry, completely missed), and in its promulgation of the law of unity, it laid sure foundations for the criticism of all time, and established an unassailable canon of classic or ideal art. All this apart from the historical importance of the Poetics misunderstood-apart from the pseudo-classic of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, apart from the controversies about 'imitation,' catharsis, and the 'three unities.' Of this really fundamental book Professor Mahaffy says: 'I know of no poorer and more jejune exposition of a great subject'; and on the next page he cavalierly dismisses it upon the plea of lack of time. The same want of appreciation of the universal in Hellenism is responsible for some of the opinions here expressed upon the Greek in modern English poetry. Of the 'galaxy that illumined the early nineteenth century,' Wordsworth is considered to be 'the least Greek';" and this because of his failure to distinguish prose diction from poetical, and because of the inordinate length of the Excursion. Keats, however, had caught the Greek spirit, though at second or third hand; in Shelley, 'we have that perfect combination of romantic imagination with Greek culture' which makes him the greatest of this group; and Tennyson is 'the most classical of our modern lyric poets.

78

Read in view of the critic's Alexandrian bias and of the quotations which illustrate his criticism, these dicta become plain. Keats is Greek in being a master of isolated sensuous images, chaste or voluptuous-not in virtue of his delicacy in selection or his passion for beauty; certainly not in virtue of that architectonic which he never possessed. Shelley's 'clouds and sunsets' and spirits and flower-bells and pavilions-the imagery of romanticism-are at the service of his revolt and of his love of Greece and liberty. What matter that Shelley hardly touched human experience, hardly touched the general life of man? The case is still clearer when we come to Wordsworth and Tennyson. Of Wordsworth's purity and wisdom of his universality, and of his 'plain and noble' styleof all that makes him a true classic, a true Greek despite his re

4 Mahaffy, p. 62.

Ibid., pp. 56-57.

• Ibid., p. 46. 7 Ibid., p. 56. 8 Ibid., p. 59.

current prosiness-there is not a word; though, of course, the specific Platonism in Wordsworth's wonderful Ode is recognized. But what of Laodamia?—

for the gods approve

The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul.

What of Dion?

So were the hopeless troubles, that involved
The soul of Dion, instantly dissolved.

Him, only him, the shield of Jove defends,
Whose means are fair and spotless as his ends.

Or-to take Wordsworth not on classical ground, and in a vein not sententious-what can be more Greek than those autochthonous figures of the Leech-Gatherer, and of Michael at the unfinished sheepfold?—

"Tis believed by all

That many and many a day he thither went,
And never lifted up a single stone;

or this about Michael's wife?

Whose heart was in her house: two wheels she had
Of antique form, this large for spinning wool,
That small for flax; and if one wheel had rest,
It was because the other was at work;-

lines of which Homer would not need to be ashamed. One might as well say that Millet's Sower is not Greek, or that Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg is not Greek-Greek as Simonides! Finally, the Hellenism of Tennyson is here supposed to be shown by the Lotos-Eaters and the Theocritean 'Come down, O maid,' and that well-nigh intolerable piece of oxymoron and antithesis:

His honor rooted in dishonor stood,

And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.

So much of Tennyson's work is Greek in a very pure sense that it seems a pity to try to prove him Hellenic by what at best can prove him only Alexandrian. . . .

...

The Greeks, more than all other peoples before or since, believed

in the power of mind, and practised their belief. Applying mind to the raw material of sensation, they turned experience into wisdom, fact into truth, the Many into the One, chaos into law, the particular and provincial into the ideal and the universal. But they were not content to rest in this supersensible region: they re-embodied their ideals in noble sensuous and intellectual forms, which they chose from amid a welter of forms possible but ignoble or insignificant, and which therefore have appealed to mankind semper, ubique. So that, whether in the subtle curves of a building, or in the proportions of a statue, or in the shape of a vase, or in the notes of the musical scale, or in finding how the human mind, out of an infinite number of ways in which it can work, actually does work towards truth; whether in art, or letters, or logic, or science, or a hundred other departments of human activity, we still perceive that they have performed for mankind, once for all, the labor of selection. It is impossible to overestimate this accomplishment in the racial economy, just as it is impossible to overestimate the specific nobility and loftiness of the ideal heritage they have left to the race.

Those who follow the Greek ways, and, without limiting themselves to old experience, fearlessly, and with confidence in the power of mind, push into the new data of modern life along the path that has proved possible-these are the pioneers; these are subduing chaos and bringing it province by province under the rule of spirit. Those who, refusing to profit by the Greek economy, try old failures again in ignorance or from choice, throw away their heritage. It is only by accident that they may happen upon some worthy thing. Their aberration, generally speaking, takes either or both of two forms, according as they fail to value one or another phase of the Greek accomplishment. Either they deny the validity of the results achieved by selection, and still fancy that 'the world is all before them where to choose'; or they deny the right of mind to work selectively at all upon the data of experience, insist that all things are of equal value except as weeded out by natural selection, and enslave themselves to the crude fact. The first error is the error of modern art, the second that of modern politics-at least, so far as both have been evolved under democratic institutions. The art of democracy is supposed to demand that no forms be rejected as ignoble. The politics of democracy, theoretically allowing free play to the conflicting wills of individuals, each striving for the ends indicated by his 'enlightened self-interest,' fails to provide for right leadership, for a chosen mind to control the welter,

and so falls into the gripe of wrong leadership-for a mind of some sort is sure to gain control, soon or late. Modern science has escaped the second error, by selecting from the method of Bacon that part which is Greek in spirit. The Baconian induction, just in so far as it enslaved itself to fact, and disallowed hypothesis, and denied the rights of mind-just in so far as it was un-Greek-was a failure; and just in so far as it 'married mind with matter'-to use Bacon's own similitude-was, and is, a success. We are not to be, says Bacon again, like the ant, which gathers and stores up her hoard untransformed by aught that she does; nor yet like the spider, which spins her subtle thread all from within; but rather like the bee, which both gathers from without and transforms from within that which she gathers. Only thus shall we get 'sweetness and light.'

The Hellenist still believes that, things being given, ideas shall prevail. And so, instead of fighting things out, or letting the stress of competing forces among things work out its wasteful end, as nature does, at dreadful expense of pain, at dire expense of spirit and of life, he endeavors to think things out. He may, by international arbitration, substitute the sanction of ideas for the sanction of arms. Or, upon a broad basis of facts, he may build a luminous hypothesis or rise to a law. He may be designing a subway or a city, and planning it so that the work will not have to be done over after the lapse of years. He may raise wages or share his profits, not under the compulsion of a strike, but again under the compulsion of an idea-his own idea of equitable distribution. In many ways his mind, dealing with fact, will draw wisdom out of life; in many ways he will re-embody that wisdom in chosen forms of beauty, and with whatever materials life gives him will make of himself a poet, and of life an art. We leave the subject with a question for those of an inquiring mind: Is our 'modern' way of life favorable to tempers of this kind? Do we believe in the supremacy of spirit? And would it have been a merit in the Greeks had they been like us?

XVII

OUR DEBT TO ANTIQUITY 1

BY THADDAEUS ZIELINSKI

The task before me is to interpret to my hearers, as far as the time at our disposal and my powers permit, the importance of the special department of knowledge of which I am the accredited representative at the St. Petersburg University-a department which I may briefly indicate by the title 'Antiquity.' Our end may be gained by three different ways, corresponding to the threefold aspect of the subject itself. Antiquity forms, in the first place, the subject-matter of that science which is commonly, though in some respects erroneously, called 'classical philology'; in the second place, it contributes an element to the intellectual and moral culture of modern European society; in the third place and here its significance especially touches you, my hearers-it forms one of the subjects taught in the 'privileged' secondary schools of Russia-the so-called Classical Gymnasia.

Each of these points of view reveals to us a new aspect of antiquity; each compels the trained scholar to range himself in direct opposition to the opinion prevalent to-day among the educated in every country, and particularly in Russia. Men, indeed, have made up their minds that what is called 'classical philology' is a science which, however zealously cultivated, yet affords no longer any interesting problems for our solution. Our expert, however, will tell you that never has it had such interest for us as to-day; that the entire work of previous generations was merely preparatory-in fact, was merely the foundation on which we are

[1 This selection consists of the first 29 pages of the first lecture (pp. 1-30) out of eight in Professor Zielinski's Our Debt to Antiquity, translated by H. A. Strong and Hugh Stewart. London, 1909. The lectures were delivered in the spring of the year 1903 to the highest classes in the secondary schools of Petrograd, and were immediately published. The translators made use of the second edition. The selection is here reprinted under an agreement with the publishers of the translation, Messrs. George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., London.-EDITOR.]

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