ELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
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 B. L. GILDERSLEEVE
 
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 University of Virginia 
 Barbour-Page Foundation 
 
 HELLAS AND HESPERIA
 
 BALTIMORE, MD., U. S. A.
 
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 University of Virginia 
 Barbour-Page Foundation 
 
 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 OR 
 
 THE VITALITY OF GREEK STUDIES 
 IN AMERICA 
 
 THREE LECTURES 
 
 BY 
 
 BASIL LANNEAU GILDERSLEEVE 
 
 FRANCIS WHITE PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
 FORMERLY PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 1909 
 
 
 J J 3 J > ■»
 
 Copyright, 1909, 
 
 BY 
 
 THE RECTOR AND VISITORS OF THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA 
 
 • C « « « • 
 
 € f • • • 
 
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 3 
 
 THE BARBOUR-PAGE LECTURE 
 FOUNDATION 
 
 The University of Virginia is indebted for 
 the establishment of the Barbour-Page Foun- 
 dation to the wisdom and generosity of Mrs. 
 Thomas Nelson Page, of Washington, D. C. 
 In 1907, Mrs. Page donated to the University 
 the sum of $22,000, the annual income of 
 which is to be used in securing each session 
 the delivery before the University of a series 
 of not less than three lectures by some dis- 
 tinguished man of letters or of science. The 
 conditions of the Foundation require that the 
 Barbour-Page lectures for each session be not 
 less than three in number; that they be deliv- 
 ered by a specialist in some branch of litera- 
 ture, science, or art; that the lecturer present 
 in the series of lectures some fresh aspect or 
 aspects of the department of thought in which 
 he is a specialist; and that the entire series 
 delivered each session, taken together, shall 
 possess such unity that they may be published 
 S by the Foundation in book form. 
 
 
 
 L.«V
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 Prepared in vacation time, far from the 
 sober array of authorities, these lectures 
 have been drawn mainly from my memories 
 of life and books, the life my own, the books, 
 perhaps in undue measure, my own studies, 
 published and unpublished; and planned as 
 they were for a kindred audience, they take 
 for granted the personal sympathy, which they 
 were so fortunate as to find in my old home, 
 a sympathy which they can hardly be expected 
 to find elsewhere. At one time I thought to 
 recast them for the larger public, which, ac- 
 cording to the conditions of the Barbour-Page 
 Foundation, they were destined to reach, but 
 the time available for the process was scant, at 
 least for a busy teacher. Then, again, I under- 
 took at odd hours to add some notes of the 
 orthodox type, partly for the sake of the philo- 
 logical guild, partly to justify myself to myself 
 for my seeming trivialities. But I have been a 
 critic so long that I am inured to my own crit-
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 icisms of myself, of which I have not been 
 sparing in all these years. And so these lec- 
 tures are printed substantially as they were de- 
 livered, and I console myself for their short- 
 comings by the reflection that they belong to 
 my hearers as well as to me, and will serve 
 to recall the memories and traditions of my 
 twenty years of service in the University of 
 Virginia. At any rate they constitute a " hu- 
 man document," and under the domination 
 of an affected impersonality human documents 
 are becoming rare in the range of studies once 
 called " the humanities." 
 
 (Xa^W <=< . Y*^;^^Aa.^xjX<ui.*<2.
 
 
 
 
 
 ERRATA. 
 
 
 p. 
 
 65, 
 
 11. 
 
 8, ! 
 
 9, for Dj'auspitar 
 
 read Djauspitar. 
 
 p. 
 
 76, 
 
 11. 
 
 11, 
 
 16, for 'Phi//ips 
 
 ' read ' 
 
 Phi/ips'. 
 
 p. 
 
 122 
 
 , 1. 
 
 23, 
 
 , read ' remedy for 
 
 hiccup, 
 
 sneezing'.
 
 Lecture I 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 
 
 Honors that come late in life, as a rule, in- 
 volve little responsibility. Those who, be- 
 ing young, believe in youth, put a man's 
 floruit at forty, blissfully unaware, most of 
 them, that they are simply repeating an an- 
 cient formula. Recognition, they say, lags 
 behind achievement, and the honor paid to 
 an old man is really honor paid to the young 
 man that he has been. The veteran himself, 
 according to his mood, according to his tem- 
 perament, smiles sadly or grins ecstatically 
 when his draft on posterity — how seldom 
 honored — is endorsed by this academic body 
 or that. Your university, which was my uni- 
 versity until I had passed the acme of forty, 
 confers no honorary degrees, and the high 
 honor that has come to me from the represen- 
 tatives of the University of Virginia means 
 service; and, hardened as I am to public de-
 
 lo HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 liverance, I can honestly say that I never ap- 
 proached any function of my long life with 
 so much misgiving as this. My task has 
 haunted me for months. In the flush of my 
 youth I did not tremble to assume the work 
 of the Greek chair here; now after more 
 than fifty years I marvel at my audacity. 
 " Old men," Cobden is reported to have said 
 of Palmerston, " old men with unsatisfied am- 
 bitions are the worst of desperadoes." But 
 I have long since flung away ambition, and it 
 must have been in that strange return of 
 youth to which all ancients are exposed that 
 I have accepted, perhaps too lightly, an honor 
 which is weighted with a grave responsibility, 
 and, as I take up the burden of this initial 
 course of lectures on the Barbour-Page Foun- 
 dation, I am sadly reminded of an old friend 
 of mine who, towards the close of a useful 
 career, attempted to gather up what he had 
 learned and taught for so many years into a 
 compact body of doctrine. He was younger 
 then than I am to-day, but the effort shat- 
 tered him. Fortunately for me the present
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE ii 
 
 undertaking is not of such magnitude as was 
 his, but it is after all a serious matter to ini- 
 tiate a lecture course like this, and to try to 
 justify your indulgent estimate of the work 
 I did here during twenty years of faithful 
 effort, and of the work I have done since in 
 the spirit of this great school. For me it is 
 a manner of unification of my whole career, 
 it is a manner of reentrant curve; but, quite 
 apart from the importance of this service for 
 me personally, and for the possible influence 
 of my success or failure on those who are to 
 follow me in this office, no more significant 
 step has been taken at this university for many 
 years than this advance towards intellectual 
 and spiritual brotherhood with your fellow- 
 workers beyond these academic walls. In 
 my day, if you will pardon me for saying 
 so, we were all perhaps a little too conscious 
 of our conscientiousness, and there was a cer- 
 tain austerity in our bearing towards those 
 who were doing their best, their poor best, 
 to further the cause of sound learning else- 
 where. There has been a change of late years,
 
 la HELLAS AND HESPERLi 
 
 a change that was emphasized by one of your 
 own leaders. At the inauguration of Presi- 
 dent Alderman, Professor Francis H. Smith, 
 the only survivor of the faculty of 1856, 
 the faculty I first knew, said : " A new day 
 has arisen upon our land, and an American 
 university is no longer a local institution, but 
 an important factor in our national life. The 
 universities of our country belong to a real 
 union, though with an unwritten constitution. 
 What happens to one concerns all." Strong 
 personal ties, for instance, are forming be- 
 tween the Virginia school and the Baltimore 
 school, and if the Barbour-Page lectureship 
 brings no new light to this candle of the Lord, 
 it brings what is better than new light, pre- 
 cious as new light is, it brings fresh love. I 
 for one do not come to teach the few sur- 
 vivors of the golden age of my renowned 
 predecessor, Gessner Harrison. I do not come 
 to teach the men who have been privileged to 
 follow the lessons of a Price and a Wheeler, 
 the men who have been trained in the school of 
 the eminent Hellenist whose breadth and
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 13 
 
 depth of knowledge within and without his 
 chosen domain puts every specialist to shame. 
 I do not come to teach. I come to renew for 
 myself, and haply for others, the consecration 
 of earlier days; and those who are to come 
 after me will, I have no doubt, return to the 
 sphere of their labors quickened by contact 
 with your unique academic life. 
 
 According to the conditions of the Founda- 
 tion, the lecturer is to speak of that which lies 
 within the range of his special studies, and it 
 is a sad fact that most of those who know me 
 at all, know me, first, as the author of a Latin 
 Grammar, and next, as a professor of Greek 
 — Greek, which they tell me is doomed, and 
 grammar which is damned already. Some 
 years ago I had a new shudder, as Victor 
 Hugo calls it, when I found that in some 
 schools there are classes in Gildersleeve as 
 there are classes in Conic Sections. " Gram- 
 mar," says an eminent academic authority, 
 himself a Hellenist, " is to the average 
 healthy human being the driest and deathliest 
 of all the disciplines;" and grammarians have
 
 14 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 not been looked on with much favor in either 
 ancient or modern times, at best as a higher 
 type of hedge schoolmaster. Such a hedge 
 schoolmaster figures in the Greek Anthology. 
 His name has an aristocratic ring and recalls 
 the great Arcadian seeress who taught Socra- 
 tes the secret of true love. But Diotimus had 
 come down in the world, and the mocking 
 anthologist sings : 
 
 Aldtl,u) AioTifiov Of ev Trerpaici naOrfrai 
 Tapyapkuv natalv ^^ra kol aTicpa Myuv 
 
 or, if he had lived to-day, and been utterly 
 desperate, would perhaps have sung : 
 
 Diotimus, poor grammarian ! 
 
 If my heart hath pitied e'er a one, 
 
 It is he. 
 Who, an almost centenarian, 
 Perched upon a " peak in Darien," 
 Teaches little Jack and Mary Ann 
 
 ABC. 
 
 In the same anthology, a grammarian of a 
 somewhat better class is ridiculed, a university 
 professor, who is supposed to say: 
 
 Xaiper' 'ApiarEidov rov p^ropng etrra fiadTjTai, 
 TEcaapei oi Tolxoi kuI rpia avrpiXta,
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 15 
 
 which is being interpreted: 
 
 I'm a success, sir, I'm a success, sir, 
 
 Seven steady students are at each lecture. 
 
 Count if you please, sir, four walls and three desks, sir. 
 
 Now if these things were done in the green 
 wood of antiquity, what is to be expected of 
 the dry wood of modern times ? All literature 
 is full of absurd grammarians, Dominie Samp- 
 sons, and Doctor Panglosses, and Doctor Syn- 
 taxes; and though I am a great stickler for the 
 honor of the guild to which I belong, still I 
 must say again that I should not like to have 
 my individuality merged in my Latin Gram- 
 mar, and this sensible warm motion to become 
 the kneaded clod of a crabbed text-book. To 
 be sure, in Browning's Grammarian's Funeral, 
 the poet has done something to redeem the 
 craft, and I welcome the vindication; for 
 whilst Browning and his commentators do not 
 fail to tell us that the technical grammarian 
 of the present day was not meant so much 
 as the grammarian of the Renascence — the 
 student of antique literature — still the man 
 who " properly based oun, dead from the
 
 i6 HELLAS AND HESPEmA 
 
 waist down," belongs to our guild. He be- 
 longs to the " corner-hummers " and " mono- 
 syllablers " of the old epigram. 
 
 But I am not grammarian enough to ha- 
 rangue an audience, not composed of special- 
 ists, on any of the monosyllabic themes that are 
 so fascinating to the initiated. Not that I am 
 ashamed of being a grammarian, and if I chose 
 I might enlarge on the historical importance of 
 grammar in general, and Greek grammar in 
 particular. It was a point of grammatical con- 
 cord that was at the bottom of the Civil War 
 — " United States are," said one, " United 
 States is," said another; and a whimsical 
 scholar of my acquaintance used to maintain 
 that the ignorance of Greek idiom that 
 brought about the mistranslation " Men and 
 brethren " (Acts ii, 29) is responsible for 
 the humanitarian cry, " Am I not a man and 
 a brother? " which made countless thousands 
 mourn. I myself have proved to my own sat- 
 isfaction that the personal accountability for 
 belief about which one hears so much nowa- 
 days is taught by a Greek negative, and that
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 17 
 
 Schopenhauer's system is implicit in the only 
 true doctrine of the Greek accusative. Do you 
 wonder then that I am panoplied against the 
 bird-bolts that are aimed at grammar? 
 But this is not the time for 
 
 the delighted spirit 
 To bathe in fiery baud's or to reside 
 In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ei's. 
 
 And fully aware of the unpopularity of gram- 
 mar and grammarians, I shall not hold forth 
 professedly on the Glory of the Imperfect, to 
 borrow the title of a famous discourse of Pro- 
 fessor Palmer of Harvard, and the Inexpres- 
 sibility of the Aorist, but my talk will be a 
 grammarian's talk for all that, and it will be 
 a Grecian's talk for all that, a talk impossible 
 for anyone but a grammarian, for anyone but 
 a Grecian. 
 
 But the subject? If I could only have 
 evaded the dire necessity of a subject ! Oh ! for 
 the bygone days of prolusions and diatribes. 
 But the world will not allow a man to do as 
 I would fain do. How I should love to diva- 
 gate over the field of my favorite study, and
 
 1 8 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 after fetching up at the end of my ramble, call 
 that end my goal ! But I promise you there 
 will be a certain unity in my diversities, a cer- 
 tain coherence in my incoherences, and if there 
 is not, you must blame your committee, to 
 whom I submitted a list of subjects, begging 
 them to select one which they thought most 
 suitable to the occasion and the audience. But 
 they declined to share the responsibility, and 
 perhaps after all it was as well. 
 
 Anatole France has said that when a man 
 undertakes to talk about literature, he is really 
 talking about himself, and that the critic ought 
 to preface his discourse by some such phrase 
 as: "Ladies and gentlemen, I am about to 
 speak of myself, apropos of Shakespeare or 
 Racine or Pascal or Goethe." And so, no mat- 
 ter what my subject may have been, it would 
 doubtless have been steeped in my personality, 
 just as Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio and Para- 
 diso were stages of his own life; and so 
 whatever the title may have been, whether 
 I had borrowed it from my youthful essay 
 on the Necessity of the Classics, published
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 19 
 
 fifty-four years ago, or from my latest out- 
 givings on the same subject, The Persist- 
 ence of the Greek Element in Modern Cul- 
 ture, the subject of one of my Richmond 
 lectures three years ago; whether I had asked 
 you to study with me Aristophanes in the 
 light of the twentieth century after Christ, 
 or the Greek pettifogger in the darkness 
 of the fourth century before Christ; whether 
 I had attempted to play the part of the fabled 
 tettix that supplied the lost chord of the 
 citharist's lyre, and had undertaken to des- 
 cant on the charm of Greek lyric poetry, all 
 subjects that I have treated in printed or 
 oral discourse, still the dominant theme would 
 have been the same, the life and the studies 
 of your lecturer, the studies which have been 
 the life of the old learner who has reached 
 the time when he must say with Petrarch: 
 Altro diletto che' mparar non provo, " Other 
 delight than learning have I none." There 
 is nothing that I can say about Greek that 
 does not recall some stage of study, some 
 experience of life, from the days when I
 
 20 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 Stood at my father's knee and spelt out the 
 Gospel according to St. John, little suspect- 
 ing the difficulty that haunts the very first 
 verse, and the somewhat later days when, a 
 lad of less than twelve, I translated the so- 
 called Anacreon Into English rhyme, un- 
 troubled by questions of higher criticism 
 and pagan morality, down to the present 
 hour, when my favorite diversion Is the 
 chemical analysis of Greek style. This, 
 then, Is the unity of which I spoke, an un- 
 blushing unity. I am taking for granted that 
 I am still alive, and that because I live, that 
 .which I work In lives also, a daring assump- 
 tion, of which I may fail to bring satisfactory 
 proof, so that my talks on the Vitality of 
 Greek Studies in America may only show that 
 said Greek studies have a name that they 
 live and are dead. 
 
 Now I am not going to follow the example 
 of an eloquent friend of mine who has been 
 making a plea for Greek. It would be hope- 
 less to attempt to vie with Professor Shorey 
 In richness of style and wealth of Illustration.
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 21 
 
 I have no plea to offer for Greek, and when 
 some years ago a French minister of instruc- 
 tion hailed the coming day when no one would 
 learn Greek except those who had to teach it, 
 I smiled, for it is twenty years since I had a 
 vision 
 
 which gave my spirit strength to sweep 
 Adown the stream of time, 
 
 and in the strength of that vision I evoked 
 in a public discourse the image of the last 
 old woman, trousered or untrousered, who 
 should occupy the chair of the Diotimus 
 mentioned at the beginning of this lecture. 
 I am not going to plead for Greek, even if it 
 were only for the Grecians in this audience; 
 for if there is one thing that a classical scholar 
 cares less to read than another, it is a plea 
 for classical scholarship; if there is one thing 
 that a Grecian would fain be excused from 
 hearing, it is an impassioned oration in behalf 
 of Greek studies. For every classical scholar 
 has himself had to plead for classical schol- 
 arship, and every Hellenist has lifted up his 
 voice in behalf of Hellenism. We are aweary
 
 23 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 of our own arguments, our own illustrations; 
 and only a short time since, being called on for 
 some confirmatory remarks on an orthodox 
 exposition of the value of the Greek language 
 and the Greek literature, I felt stirred to pro- 
 test against the whole thing. If the study is 
 doomed, I said, let it die. Living is the test of 
 vitality, for that is the sum and substance of 
 pragmatism, the latest phase of what I may 
 venture to call truistic philosophy — truistic 
 philosophy to match altruistic ethics, of which 
 one hears so much, which one practices so 
 little. If classical culture has outlived its use- 
 fulness; if its teachers are squeaking and gib- 
 bering ghosts and not real men, let in the 
 light, turn on the current and have done with 
 it. So I am not to make a speech pro domo, 
 for my house, which is my castle, my fortress. 
 Everybody knows every redoubt, every salient. 
 The gabions are all counted, and the fascines 
 all numbered, and the chevaux de frise all 
 roughshod, and the fosse all flooded with 
 ditchwater eloquence. This then is to be no 
 vindication of Greek as a study. Call it an ex-
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 23 
 
 emplification of Greek as a study and I will 
 not protest so strenuously, Invidious as It may 
 be to set one's self up as an example of any- 
 thing, especially when critics have proved 
 triumphantly that I have not profited by my 
 lifelong studies, and that the chaste reserve of 
 my classic models has not properly regulated 
 my style. Indeed, following Whistler's ex- 
 ample, I have made an acanthology of strict- 
 ures on my literary performances, and the 
 motto of the collection, with which I regale 
 myself In lonely hours, I have taken from Ben 
 Jonson's formidable list In the Preface to 
 Volpone, " Such impropriety of phrase, such 
 plenty of solecisms, such dearth of sense, so 
 bold prolepses, so racked metaphors." But 
 any style is better than a dead style, and the 
 style of some of my critics reminds me of 
 Badebec, wife of Gargantua, who was " the 
 most this and the most that," but she was 
 dead all the same. It cannot be emphasized 
 too much that this thing of classical re- 
 serve, this reiterated ne quid ntmis, may be 
 overdone. Many of the classics themselves
 
 24 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 lack classical reserve. The editors of Pin- 
 dar have most of them ceased to vindicate 
 Pindar's style. In the matter of meta- 
 phor, says Schroeder, he is still " crude and 
 unclarified." But what can be more " crude 
 and unclarified " than the following passage, 
 which I take from the writings of Mark 
 Pattison, the erudite biographer of Casau- 
 bon, a man steeped in every kind of lore, 
 classical and other? " Even at this day a 
 country squire or rector in landing with his 
 cuh under his wing in Oxford finds himself 
 very much at sea." Since reading this I have 
 given myself very little concern about Pindar's 
 mixed metaphors or mine. 
 
 A vindication of Greek, then, is not the thing 
 to be talked about, not for those who have 
 already made Greek their special line of work, 
 and most assuredly not for those who have 
 decided to give up that of the many things 
 that one must give up in this universe of pick- 
 ings and choosings, I am not here to convert 
 anybody. I come simply as an old student to 
 talk to younger students, who either love the
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 25 
 
 work that I love, or else have caught enough 
 of the university spirit to be tolerant of others' 
 work, if not to be in sympathy with it. Greek, 
 then, is a postulate not further to be disputed. 
 The problem is not whether Greek is worth 
 while, but Greek being given, what is the best 
 way of connecting it with the life of to-day? 
 For the teacher, for the learner, the problem 
 is how to teach, how to learn Greek so as to 
 make it a part, or, if you choose, recognize 
 it as a part of the moral and intellectual life 
 of our time. This is the form that almost 
 every problem takes nowadays. It is the sum 
 of our religious strivings how to transmute the 
 Way and the Truth into the Life, of our intel- 
 lectual endeavors how to transmute Method 
 and Fact into Force. The ornamental stage of 
 civilization is earlier than the utilitarian, and I 
 have no quarrel, mark you, with the ornamen- 
 tal stage. I believe in rhetoric, but it must be 
 rhetoric in the service of truth; not jingle, but 
 tocsin. The fair fagade must be the growth of 
 the living rooms. The classics are an accom- 
 plishment, but not a mere accomplishment. To 
 3
 
 26 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 be up in mythology, to make elegant classical 
 allusions, to be ready with apt quotations, to 
 have a fine stock of emblemata, of which one 
 reads so much in Cicero's Second Verrine, 
 movable figures that you can screw on to 
 heighten the effect of the plated ware of after- 
 dinner oratory, all that belongs to the older 
 period, just as to be up in theological subtle- 
 ties, to make happy or unhappy Scriptural 
 allusions, to be ready at any time with a proof 
 text or a Biblical parallel belongs to an older 
 type of religionism. Both have their advan- 
 tages, neither is to be lightly abandoned, and 
 yet neither, I venture to say, marks the full 
 current of this twentieth century. 
 
 Now this necessity of vitalizing classical 
 study is felt everywhere, and due praise must 
 be given to the honest efforts made in this 
 direction, though many of them are mere re- 
 vivals of abandoned experiments, so slow are 
 men to learn from history. To be sure, the 
 readiness with which a man can vitalize his 
 subject is something that varies with the indi- 
 viduality. Some men can pass from the morn-
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 27 
 
 ing newspaper or the midnight novel straight 
 to the lecture on Greek literature, or to the 
 investigation of grammatical phenomena, and 
 feel that the life is one; others have to put on 
 mental bands and gowns in order to present 
 the gospel of Hellenism, as Buffon is said 
 to have put on court dress before he paid his 
 respects to Nature ; others regard a Greek 
 joke as a sacred thing, not lightly to be 
 laughed at. In fact, there is no more pitiable 
 object than a man born to an honest slow- 
 ness of vision and expression, who is goaded 
 by the requirements of the age into being 
 lively; your Goodman Dull who will fain 
 be as nimble-witted as Moth. The students 
 soon see through this false liveliness, are irri- 
 tated, are repelled by it, and prefer in the long 
 run the honest, steady bore of a methodical 
 wimble to the tumultuous prodding of a 
 would-be live teacher. We are supposed to 
 be a race of humorists, and American jokes I 
 have found to be in great demand in the com- 
 mon rooms and combination rooms of Eng- 
 lish universities; and I am afraid that this rep-
 
 28 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 utation has had a bad effect on the style of 
 American lecturers, who seem to think that 
 no matter what the subject, they must vindi- 
 cate their right to a share in the national sense 
 of humor. They are not very Greek in this 
 unfailing funniness; there is no very good 
 Greek equivalent for " fun " ; indeed, it is hard, 
 it is almost impossible, to restore for the out- 
 sider the volatilized savor of Attic salt. One 
 has to create an atmosphere for the inhalation 
 of the delicate perfume. The mocking epi- 
 grams of the Greek Anthology, " some of 
 which," says Mr. Mackail, " have an Irish in- 
 consequence, some the grave and logical mon- 
 strosity of American humour," belong for the 
 most part to the age of the decline. One of the 
 most American of Greek writers, Lucian, was 
 not a Greek, and, as Karl Friedrich Hermann 
 said in one of his lectures, nothing in lit- 
 erature is sadder than the spectacle of the 
 poor old jester, the poor old rhetorician, scrap- 
 ing the dried colors out of the bottom of his 
 paintpot to make a daub withal. Still, no 
 matter what form the message takes, sober or
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 29 
 
 gay, it is unquestionably the demand of the 
 time that whatever study we engage in be 
 made a part of our life. In natural science 
 the laboratory, once sacred to the teacher, is 
 open to the pupil, nay, he is compelled to 
 come in. In my boyhood there was nothing 
 but a text-book with a few pictures, and a 
 posing demonstrator, who, when he succeeded, 
 had the air of an adroit conjurer, when he 
 failed, the attitude of a baffled rat-catcher. 
 The student now makes his own vacuum, if 
 he does not bring it with him, kills his own 
 small deer, finds himself wanting in his own 
 balance, handles and feels of the body of life 
 itself. And so in philology. The student 
 gathers his own material, works out his own 
 results, acquires the precious conviction that 
 he too is the master of a small domain, lord 
 of one lizard, as Juvenal has it. 
 
 Est aliquid, quocumque loco, quocumque recessu 
 Unius sese dominum fecisse lacertae. 
 
 To be sure, this method has its dangers, and 
 men have been unwise enough to apply it to 
 elementary instruction in language, to apply
 
 30 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 It before the proper stage is reached. So a 
 fashion has been started of making young 
 boys abstract the rules of grammar from ex- 
 amples already given in the textbook. It is 
 the so-called inductive method, a perfect jug- 
 gle, a transparent juggle, one would think, 
 for the examples have already been prepared 
 and the rule lies implicit in them. This is 
 botanizing in a hortus siccus, not even in a 
 hortus conclusus, much less in meadows trim 
 with daisies pied, but even this shows the im- 
 perative demand of life. Thoroughly vital 
 and healthful, on the other hand, is the ever 
 increasing demand that the written word be- 
 come the spoken word, and youths are 
 trained more and more in the immediate 
 understanding of the classic texts. Where 
 language is concerned, the eye can no longer 
 say to the ear and to the tongue, I have no 
 need of you. Nay, tongue and ear say to the 
 eye, We are first in the domain of language. 
 You are but the registrar of the figure, not 
 the revealer of the soul. 
 
 There are more ways than one of making
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 31 
 
 the life of Greece our own. I must limit my 
 view to three — three channels of life — to use 
 the somewhat affected language of my pro- 
 gramme. 
 
 The life of Greece and things Greek may 
 be considered as continuous. 
 
 It may be considered as a renewal, a moral, 
 intellectual, spiritual reproduction with which 
 our modern life, our American life, has to do, 
 both in contrast and coincidence, an inde- 
 feasible exemplar. 
 
 Or we may frankly seek in the life of 
 ancient Greece analogies to our own life, 
 national and human; not continuity, but one- 
 ness; not the passing of the torch, but the 
 unity of the central fire, of the central hearth. 
 And so we say with the poet who represents 
 the actuality of the present time as does 
 no other poet of the day, we say with Kipling: 
 
 The thranite and the thalamite are pressures low and high, 
 
 And where three hundred blades bit white, the twin pro- 
 pellers fly; 
 
 The god that hailed, the keel that sailed, are changed 
 beyond recall, 
 
 But the robust and brass-bound man, he is not changed 
 at all.
 
 32 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 The first way requires favoring circum- 
 stances, such as in the nature of things can be 
 the lot of few, although with increasing facil- 
 ities of travel, the vision of Greece is vouch- 
 safed to a large proportion of those who pro- 
 fess and call themselves Grecians. To him 
 who has eyes to see, that vision is a transcend- 
 ent delight; an indefinite increment of power 
 to him who has the secret of Greek life. 
 
 The second requires a breadth and a depth 
 of knowledge, a span of intellectual grasp, a 
 wing of poetic imagination such as we demand 
 of the ideal scholar. This ideal, this hope- 
 less ideal, if you choose to call it so, dom- 
 inated all the studies of my youth. To-day 
 the note is rather that of renunciation, and 
 one hears the piping of the bird in the East- 
 ern tale: " Seek not the unattainable." 
 
 The third method appeals to the homely 
 experience of every day, and seeks to find an- 
 alogies on every hand, parallels more easily 
 discovered perhaps by those who know neither 
 line very well. It is this desire of life that 
 prompts transfusion rather than translation,
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 33 
 
 that endues the whiteness of antiquity with 
 modern coloring, that substitutes high relief 
 for low relief. As a craving for life it is 
 fairly defensible, if not wholly justifiable; 
 with our blunter senses we must exaggerate 
 in order to see, and if we cannot feel our life 
 in every limb, our hands may tingle and our 
 feet may quiver at the music of the olden time. 
 
 Now all these methods I have appropri- 
 ated in the measure of my opportunities, the 
 measure of my susceptibilities, and I propose 
 to say a few words about each of them. 
 
 The first method calls up a stage in my own 
 training, for the first real teacher of Greek I 
 ever had was a man thoroughly penetrated 
 with the sense of historic continuity, a man 
 who deplored the outcome of the Renascence 
 and the victory of Latin over Greek. He was 
 the tutor of the first King of Greece, and while 
 he yielded to the current of the time, so far 
 as to write in Latin and in German, his cry 
 was a return to the ancient language. He 
 wrote the life of Lysias In Greek, he called 
 himself Phrasikles Instead of the honest Ger-
 
 34 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 man Franz, and gave Greek names to all his 
 pupils, so that I figured for the winter semes- 
 ter of 1 850-1 85 I as Chrysobrachion. When 
 Ritschl went to Rome, he eagerly sought the 
 acquaintance of this remarkable scholar with 
 his unequalled virtuosity in speaking ancient 
 Greek, and Franz's Schola Graeca at the 
 University of Berlin was conducted in that 
 tongue. Not a brilliant success that Schola 
 Graeca, but it influenced my whole life and 
 my whole teaching. But the historical con- 
 tinuity that Franz tried to restore is an 
 impossibility. Modern Greek, he used to 
 say passionately, is a rag; it is not a fibre 
 out of which a new language can be made. 
 We must have the seamless garment of the 
 ancient time back again. But that is an 
 idle dream, and since Franz's day the quar- 
 rel between those who would maintain the 
 present state of things with its threefold layer 
 of language, the language of the press, the 
 language of higher society, the language of 
 the people, and those who urge and urge tem- 
 pestuously the claims of what is the real
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 35 
 
 speech of the Hellenes of to-day, one party 
 appealing to history, the other to the life of 
 the land — to the example of the Romance lan- 
 guages — this quarrel has burned of late years 
 with a blood-red flam.e, and I will not thrust 
 my hand into that seven times heated furnace 
 now. " The language generally spoken to- 
 day in the towns," says Professor Hatzidakis, 
 " differs less from the common language of 
 Polybios than the last differs from the lan- 
 guage of Homer." But Professor Hatzida- 
 kis is a champion of the archaizers, and he 
 goes too far. There is a great gulf fixed be- 
 tween any kind of ancient Greek and the mod- 
 ern Greek washing list. The semi-Byzantine 
 Greek of the newspaper which any Greek 
 scholar can read is not a spoken language, and 
 does not become a spoken language because a 
 few professors in academic halls undertake to 
 talk it, and a language that is not to be spoken 
 is a song that is not to be sung. Bikelas used 
 to maintain that the difference between the 
 stratifications in Shakespeare was as great as 
 that between the stratifications in Greek, but
 
 36 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 Bikelas held a brief for his own translation 
 of Shakespeare. To be sure, even in Greek 
 as it is spoken, not the sham newspaper, not 
 the sham academic lingo, there are many sur- 
 vivals. To hear ti pdtho from a modern 
 mouth is as if Aristophanes rose from the 
 dead. One misses from the modern Greek 
 vocabulary the ancient words for " wine " 
 and "water" and "bread," but "milk" 
 abides, and it was to me as the milk of Para- 
 dise when I was wakened one spring day in 
 Nauplia by the street cry of gala. Perhaps, 
 if it had been my privilege to be long resident 
 in Greece, I should have fallen under the spell, 
 and as it is, in spite of what I have just said 
 about the artificiality of the Greek that is the 
 medium of written communication throughout 
 the Levant, I do not believe that the crusade 
 against it, originated by a party among the 
 Greeks themselves, will be successful in any 
 time to which we may confidently look for- 
 ward, nor should I personally welcome the 
 success. As I said some years ago, " In the 
 perpetual struggle between the wide-awake
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 37 
 
 tongue of the people and the dormant lan- 
 guage of the books, the classical scholar is on 
 the side of the sleeping beauty — one does not 
 call it the dead language — and his heart is 
 touched when the patriotic archaizer apostro- 
 phizes the ancient speech in the language of 
 the disciple: To whom shall we go? Thou 
 hast the words of eternal life." 
 
 But in talks like these on the quickening 
 of Greek studies, it is not necessary to insist 
 on what is evident, that the way cannot lie 
 through modern Greek, and that a visit to 
 Greece can never become a regular com- 
 plement to the collegiate course, though it is 
 justly demanded more and more emphatically 
 for those who intend to make themselves pro- 
 fessors of Greek. True, we need not expect 
 mountains and marvels from these tourists. 
 Men always bring back what they took with 
 them. After all, the kingdom of Hellenism 
 is within the man, and there are those who 
 return from Greece not much more enlight- 
 ened than the valise that bears the label of 
 that admirable hotel, the Grande Bretagne 

 
 38 HELLAS AND HESPERL4 
 
 of Constitution Square. These are they who 
 have learned too well the favorite modern 
 Greek phrase, dhen pirazi, " It makes no dif- 
 ference." But it is a great opportunity, and 
 though I regret that my fleeting vision came 
 to me late In life, still more than twelve years 
 of remembrance have been accorded to me, 
 and my pulse quickens as I think of my sixty 
 short days in Greece. 
 
 Of course, the Hellenist who has lived 
 in the Greece of to-day has not only the 
 local sense of continuity, but there are many 
 survivals in the actual life of the people 
 that give vitality to the written page; and, 
 apart from this, there is one range of studies 
 in which we can speak of a continuous life. 
 Greek life is continuous in its monuments. 
 Archaeology comes not from palaios, which 
 refers to lapse of time, but from archaios, 
 which refers to point of origin, and the 
 science of archaeology lays one hand on the 
 past, the other on the present, and establishes 
 a current that thrills through every fibre. No 
 one can tell how much sensitive surface he has
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 39 
 
 until he comes Into contact with the survivals 
 of antique life on classic soil. Even In the 
 cemetery of a museum, dissociated from 
 the life of the land, there are Inscriptions that 
 speak to us, there are stones out of which 
 start the living children of Hellas and Rome, 
 and I am glad that I was reared In a school 
 that counted study of ancient art as a prime 
 condition of any just estimate of antiquity, 
 I am happy to have had, If but a glimpse, at 
 the end of my career, of the land about which 
 my thoughts had revolved for so many years. 
 Such vitality as I have has been fed by the 
 vision of Greek nature and Greek art. I have 
 actually tried to trace the correlation of liter- 
 ary art, of which I know something, and 
 plastic art, in which I must be content to be a 
 learner. There are hints enough in the ancient 
 rhetoricians themselves. The early artists in 
 prose are as the early artists In wood, in stone, 
 in bronze. In color. The composition of the 
 sentence follows the types of the ancient wall. 
 The epos is as the frieze — an old comparison, 
 the ode as the metope, the drama as a pedi-
 
 40 HELLAS AND HESPERL4 
 
 mental group. And as for the vision of 
 Greece itself, that abides for me as the il- 
 luminated background of every study of art 
 and life, and Greek poetry is steeped in the 
 amethystine hues of the garland of mountains 
 that encompasses Athens, the Athens that 
 still is. 
 
 I now pass from the consideration of the 
 first method, and if the continuity of Greek 
 life connects itself for me with the memory 
 of one teacher, the second method, which may 
 be called the idealistic method, connects itself 
 with another. As I am not ashamed of being 
 classed with the alphabetic grammarians, so 
 I do not underrate my own vocation as a 
 teacher. For the intellectual and spiritual 
 history of most men is to be found in the suc- 
 cession of their teachers, but it must be re- 
 membered that the function of the teacher is 
 mainly the introduction to the love or the 
 loves of one's life. The lessons are lost, the 
 love abides, and love is life. It is fairly safe 
 to say that there is no great genius of mod- 
 ern times whose career is so well known as
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 41 
 
 Goethe's, and the Eternal Feminine stands at 
 every sinuosity of his path. You cannot dis- 
 sociate Dante from Beatrice, and if Beatrice 
 was a personification, personifications are the 
 most potent form of the Eternal Feminine. 
 The ideal becomes the passion of one's life, 
 and one says to the Ideal, Tu ricca, tu con pace, 
 tu con senno. She brings wealth, not what 
 men call wealth, It Is true, she brings peace, 
 she brings " sense." As I look back, I see 
 more plainly than ever that the second source 
 of life, to which I have referred, became for 
 me the dominant motive of all my work. That 
 mistress of mine bore a lumbering name — 
 Altertumswissenschaft — Imperfectly rendered 
 by " Science of Antiquity." But then you can- 
 not translate " Gretchen," you can only love 
 her. The man who introduced me to her was 
 a quiet old Privy Councillor, not calculated, 
 one should say, to Inspire enthusiasm. He 
 was sixty-five years old, bent with what is 
 called the scholar's stoop — a most unneces- 
 sary thing at sixty-five — a man of shuffling 
 gait, of slow and deliberate utterance, who 
 4
 
 42 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 read his lectures from a yellow " heft " to 
 which were attached supplementary strips of 
 paper, and yet his teaching made a passionate 
 classicist out of an amateurish student of liter- 
 ature. Boeckh was a great master, the great- 
 est living master of Hellenic studies, and if I 
 became after a fashion a Hellenist, it was due 
 not merely to the catalytic effect of his pres- 
 ence, but to the orbed completeness of the ideal 
 he evoked, and though the fifty odd years that 
 have elapsed since I sate in his lecture-rooms 
 have witnessed the elimination of many of 
 the results of his studies, the human results 
 abide. Alas ! for my poor old flame — Alter- 
 tumswissenschaft. Her fate reminds me of 
 a story of Callot Hoffmann's, which tells of 
 a man who fell in love with a fair form. The 
 man was mad, and the fair form was a lay- 
 figure. And so we have been told of late 
 years that there is no such thing as the science 
 of antiquity, that our goddess is merely a 
 jointed doll, each part of it valuable as so 
 much wood, and that is all. There is a cycle 
 of studies, no celestial orb. But if it was an
 
 / 
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 43 
 
 illusion, it was an illusion that stood me in 
 good stead, and if I have ever brought any 
 vital force for myself and others to the study 
 of the classics, it has been through the belief 
 cherished from early manhood in the correla- 
 tion of all the various departments of study. 
 Every manifestation of national life has its 
 answering manifestation in every other. This 
 is the bread of life and the water of life that 
 have sustained me as they have sustained oth- 
 ers through the aridities of a wilderness of 
 study, and if that on which my eyes have 
 gazed is not Plato's ocean of the beautiful, 
 but a mirage, I thank God for the mirage. 
 There is somewhere an ocean of the beautiful, 
 and he who believes that the spiritual resur- ■^ 
 rection of the classical past is the scholar's 
 ideal, will bring to his work a life that is de- 
 nied to him who has no faith in the scientific 
 value of the imagination. Let me repeat here 
 what I said long, long since of the great 
 scholar whose loss we are all mourning now, 
 Franz Buecheler: " Some years ago I at- 
 tended a lecture by a great master. The theme 
 
 V.
 
 44 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 was the vanishing of weak vowels in Latin. 
 Candor compels me to state that although I 
 pride m.yself on being interested in the m^ost 
 uninteresting things, I should have chosen 
 
 another subject for a specimen lecture 
 
 I was much struck with the tone in which he 
 announced his subject. It was the tone of a 
 man who had seen the elements melt with 
 fervent heat and the weak vowels vanish at 
 the sound of the last trump. The tone, in- 
 deed, seemed entirely too pathetic for the 
 occasion, but as he went on and marshalled 
 the facts and set in order the long lines that 
 connected the disappearance of the vowel 
 with the downfall of an empire, and great 
 linguistic, great moral, great historical laws 
 marched in stately procession before the vision 
 of the student, the airy vowels that had 
 flitted into the Nowhere seemed to be the lost 
 soul of Roman life; and the Latin language, 
 Roman literature and Roman history were 
 clothed with a new meaning." It is true that 
 the scholar of to-day, like the scientific man 
 of to-day, must be a specialist. A great
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 45 
 
 teacher, one to whose living presence I owe a 
 great deal, one whom I love to recall in his 
 flashing prime, has said: Enthusiasm abides 
 only in specialization. Rightly interpreted, 
 I believe in this also. A man who simply 
 raves about the glory that was Greece and 
 the grandeur that was Rome is one for whom 
 the real lover of antiquity has little respect. 
 A man who exhausts his English vocabulary 
 in extolling a Greek orator and mistranslates 
 the passages that he selects for especial com- 
 ment is worse than the infidel who does not be- 
 lieve in Greek. It is better to be a doorkeeper 
 in the house of philology than to dwell in the 
 tents of the rhetorician. For the true life is 
 due to the consciousness of service. Specializa- 
 tion may readily degenerate into what is the 
 worst characteristic of our guild, specialization 
 in the interest of personal vanity, specializa- 
 tion which points out the misplacement of a 
 decimal figure, specialization which caws 
 about the knob on the church spire, as Goethe 
 puts it in his homely way. No truth stands 
 alone, and the most effective work is done by
 
 46 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 those who see all in the one as well as one in 
 the all. 
 
 The scholar of this type has life in himself, 
 and has it so abundantly that he can com- 
 municate it to others. The principle may be 
 mysterious, it may be indefinable, but it is 
 not less potent for all that. 
 
 The third method lies in the identification 
 of the life of antiquity with the life of our 
 own day. This is not the continuity of life 
 of which I spoke a while ago, it is the re- 
 surgence of life. The study of mankind is 
 one of perennial interest. Witness the pas- 
 sionate pursuit of that folklore which has 
 forced the English word into the language of 
 every civilized nation in the world. The same 
 story recurs in the fables, the Marchen of the 
 most diverse nationalities. " The cat comes 
 back;" the Marquis de Carabas belongs to 
 yEsop's litter of kittens, and there is a keen 
 pleasure in tracing this narrative and that 
 in all its variants back to its early home in 
 Hindustan. But the study of anthropology 
 shows that in the wide circuit of the world
 
 THE CHANNELS OF LIFE 47 
 
 there are customs and myths of startling sim- 
 ilarity that can have no historical connection 
 whatever, and the interest in these, as ulti- 
 mately the Interest in the others, goes back to 
 the manifestation of the workings of a com- 
 mon humanity. So he who has lived his own 
 life most truly knows best the life of antiquity, 
 a much less complex life, it is said, than ours, 
 and therefore better suited for initial study, 
 as one begins the study of the human frame 
 with the skeleton. I am not so certain of that. 
 In fact I become less certain of that and of 
 every other axiomatic statement the longer I 
 live. But there is no denying the charm of the 
 recurrent situation, and the same method of 
 presentation that has made folklore so fas- 
 cinating a study can be made to lend life to 
 instruction In the classics. The ancients rec- 
 ognize these recurrences. Greek history is 
 equipped with markers from Homer, and the 
 period in which some of us lived most in- 
 tensely. In which we lived on the highest plane 
 on which mortal man can live, has its parallels 
 and its principles in Thucydldes' History of
 
 48 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 the War between the States. To be sure, I 
 am going further than that, and I shall try 
 to show that American conditions and Amer- 
 ican character qualify us for the maintenance 
 of special kinship with the Greek; and kinship 
 is a magic word still in this Old Dominion. 
 When I came as a boy to Virginia more than 
 sixty years ago, amazed at the ramifications 
 of the old Virginia families, I said: "This 
 is no commonwealth, this is a cousinwealth ; " 
 and I am sure that I shall be forgiven if I 
 attempt to trace our spiritual kindred with the 
 Eternal Youths of History, as the Greeks have 
 been called, with the sons of Javan, the 
 Juvenes of a fanciful etymology. This will 
 be the theme of my last lecture. In the next 
 I will undertake to present some aspects of 
 the Greek language and literature in their 
 relation to the time that now is and the land 
 in which we dwell.
 
 Lecture II 
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND 
 LITERATURE 
 
 Language, Literature, Life — these were 
 the triple lines to be traversed in three lec- 
 tures, but like so many of my educational 
 brethren who talk so much about methods 
 that they leave themselves no space to teach 
 anything else, I have lingered so long in sur- 
 veying the roads that I shall not have much 
 time in which to build them, and so I must 
 crowd what I have to say on both language 
 and literature into the present talk. A friend 
 of mine, one of the most eloquent advocates 
 of Greek studies, and one of the most admir- 
 able exemplars of the effect of Greek, Pro- 
 fessor Butcher — has written an important 
 essay entitled " What we owe to Greece," and 
 I might consider our American language and 
 our American literature from this point of 
 view. But I am not certain that this would
 
 50 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 be the most effective plea for Greek. The 
 sentiment " Base is the slave that pays " finds 
 an echo in many hearts, and it has been con- 
 tended by high authority that ingratitude, so 
 far from indicating a low order of character, 
 is the mark of a highstrung nature that re- 
 sents obligation. Aristotle explains why it is 
 that we are so much fonder of those whom 
 we benefit than of those by whom we are ben- 
 efited, and I have asked myself whether the 
 better sort of Greek teachers do not in their 
 hearts feel that the Greeks ought to be very 
 much obliged to them. Greek jests are very 
 limited in quantity and quality. The phonetic 
 purity of the language is fatal to the growth 
 of puns. It often takes two words to make 
 one pun in Greek, like the fabled trousers 
 that took two gentlemen to show the pattern, 
 and puns of this kind are paraded over and 
 over again by rhetorician after rhetorician. 
 The citizens of Hamburg made little clubs 
 of four to understand one joke of Rivarol, 
 and so a whole company of professors is some- 
 times needed to elucidate one Greek jest; and
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 51 
 
 your American teacher of Greek literature 
 sometimes groans at the necessity of labori- 
 ously expounding Greek facetiousness instead 
 of tossing off his own admirable witticisms to 
 his own greater glory and the greater delecta- 
 tion of his audience. And I know whereof 
 I affirm, because I have spent much oil and 
 toil on the Wit and Humor of Aristophanes. 
 But I am not going to dwell on Aristophanes' 
 obligations to me. I only wish to say a word 
 in defence of my objections to being under 
 obligations to anybody else. " Thy spirit, In- 
 dependence, let me share," and I am not going 
 to draw on other people's stores in these lec- 
 tures, for I quite approve of the attitude of 
 Wilamowitz, the foremost Hellenist of the 
 present day, who, in his impatience of author- 
 ities, has said substantially: " Egad, while I 
 am wasting my time in looking up authorities, 
 I could excogitate something much better than 
 I could possibly find elsewhere," And so I 
 am going to take my own way in talking of 
 the Greek language. Doubtless there will be 
 coincidences with previous discourses on the
 
 52 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 subject. No lover can avoid the catalogue of 
 the charms of his mistress. Petrarch is elo- 
 quent in sonnet and canzone on the subject 
 of Laura's eyes. Shall our mistress lack eyes? 
 Again, your true lover is sublimely indifferent 
 to the fact that the audience is utterly unac- 
 quainted with the object of his adoration, and 
 so even after many years of close communion 
 with Greek, I was capable in 1869 of holding 
 forth ecstatically on its physical charms, for 
 I am enough of a heathen to recognize in 
 physical beauty the only true incentive of love. 
 It is the physical beauty of Greek that consti- 
 tutes its intimate attraction, that redeems, for 
 instance, the tedious obviousnesses of the old 
 man eloquent, and I could still rhapsodize, as 
 I did forty years ago, on the sequences of vow- 
 els and the combinations of consonants, the 
 concert of mute and liquid, the clear-cut out- 
 line of every word in Greek, clear and sharp 
 as the sky-line of the mountains of Greece, as 
 the effigies on Greek coins. I could still wax 
 lyrical about the paradigm of the Greek 
 verb. The Greek verb is, indeed, a marvel.
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 53 
 
 " Flexible and exact, simple in its means, 
 abundant in its applications, with varying 
 tones for colorless statement, for eager wish, 
 for purpose, for command, now despatching 
 the past with impatient haste, now unrolling 
 it in panoramic procession, but bringing forth 
 its treasure of vowels and diphthongs to mark 
 the striving of the will, the thought, the 
 desire, toward the future," and so on and 
 so on. Perhaps discourse like this might 
 rouse the curiosity of the student and win 
 here and there a friend for Greek. The 
 teacher can never know whether shall pros- 
 per either this or that. I remember to 
 have read in Gogol's " Dead Souls " a 
 eulogy of Russian that would have Inspired 
 me, if I had been endowed with ample leisure, 
 to attempt the acquisition of that difficult 
 idiom. But I am not quite sure that this 
 unverifiable laudation Is the right way to lend 
 vitality to the study. " The king's daughter 
 is all glorious within." But he that Is with- 
 out remains cold as a rule. The love of 
 a language from this point of view Is a
 
 54 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 matter of individual experience, a business to 
 be transacted under four eyes only, and as 
 much of the physical beauty of a language 
 depends on the pronunciation, it may be well 
 to relegate the whole thing to the realm of 
 " fancy," that admirable old word for love. 
 I will, therefore, waive the whole subject of 
 the perfection of the Greek language, both in 
 Its form and Its function, the wealth of its 
 vocabulary, and the flexibility of its syntax, 
 and limit myself to a few remarks on the 
 relation of Greek to our daily life. 
 
 That Greek belongs to the same family of 
 languages as our native tongue matters very 
 little. The ultimate affinity of Greek and 
 Latin, for we cannot keep Latin out of this 
 consideration, does not enter into our con- 
 sciousness at all. Any healthy language appro- 
 priates foreign vocables and naturalizes them, 
 so to speak. Etymology is naught. We do 
 not think of the original five ingredients of 
 the dangerous brew we call " punch." 
 " Punch " may be a dead word, but it Is a 
 very live thing, and stingeth like an adder or
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 55 
 
 any of the other snakes it is apt to generate. 
 Punch, the brew, isn't two hundred years old, 
 and yet is as fine an Enghsh word as the 
 other " Punch " that comes from the Italian, 
 and haply through the Italian from the 
 Greek, or that other " punch " that comes 
 from the Latin. We have strings of mono- 
 syllables that are made over into honest 
 Anglo-Saxon words, and the most emphatic 
 word in the English language — the one by 
 which the English-speaking man is known the 
 world over — is as good an Anglo-Saxon word 
 as any that came riding into the tight little 
 island of our forefathers with Hengist and 
 Horsa, and yet it is Latin. " Box," " socks," 
 *' rocks," are as good Anglo-Saxon as " ox " 
 and " fox," and so we go on annexing and 
 restamping the vocables of every language 
 under the sun. The word " punch " reminds 
 me that the great Oxford dictionary is even 
 now struggling with the letter P. There is 
 but a handful of real English words begin- 
 ning with that letter, and yet the monosyllabic 
 " P's " are all pungently English. At the
 
 56 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 same time so subtle a thing is language that 
 a large proportion of the P-words show the 
 stateliness of their Greco-Latin origin, and in 
 his curious analysis of English style, Robert 
 Louis Stevenson emphasizes the fact that mul- 
 tiplication of P's lends Greco-Latin " pomp " 
 to English utterance. Language as written, 
 as spoken, is an art and not a science. The 
 study of origins, of etymology, has very little, 
 if anything, to do with the practice of speak- 
 ing and writing. The affinity of English with 
 Greek and Latin is a matter that does not en- 
 ter into the artistic consciousness of the masses 
 that own the language. The study of ety- 
 mology may help a scholar here and there to 
 a happier use of language, but over-conscious- 
 ness is fatal to supreme excellence in com- 
 position, and the best etymologists, the best 
 grammarians, are not the best stylists. In- 
 deed, among the worst stylists I know are men 
 learned in all the mysteries of the origin of 
 English. Cobbett's indictment of the fruits 
 of classical scholarship is itself an English 
 classic. One goes to the tinker, John Bun-
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 57 
 
 yan, and to the cotton-spinner, John Bright, 
 who knew no Latin or Greek, for specimens 
 of EngHsh at its best, and not to HaUiwell- 
 Phillipps or to our late atrabilarious country- 
 man Fitzedward Hall, Bright, it is true, 
 was nurtured by the study of those who had 
 fed on the honeydew of the classics, but 
 Bunyan — that is a serious problem for the 
 student of English style. I am not casting 
 any aspersion on the character of that rather 
 uncertain maid Etymology, but our present 
 meditation does not deal with Etymology; we 
 have to deal not with the roots but with the 
 foliage of language, and that foliage, that 
 vocabulary, is largely made up of Greek and 
 Latin words. When we learn Greek and 
 Latin, we meet with hosts of old familiars, 
 so that it has actually been proposed to learn 
 Latin and Greek by supplementing the Eng- 
 lish vocabulary, and Professor Goodell, of 
 Yale, prepared in his hopeful days a little 
 volume called The Greek in English, with a 
 view to facilitating the acquisition of Greek. 
 Similar experiments have been made with 
 
 5
 
 58 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 Other languages. I recall a textbook which 
 undertook to teach German by gathering up 
 first all the words that were common to Ger- 
 man and English, and then proceeding to 
 those that had a clear etymological connection, 
 and so on to the more remote congeners. Six 
 weeks in a German family, in German sur- 
 roundings, would have been worth all that 
 parade of etymology, and after all someone 
 has been bold enough to say that the struc- 
 ture of the sentence in modern English takes 
 it out of the Teutonic group. In this respect 
 we are nearer French than we are to German, 
 and you remember Matthew Arnold's famous 
 essay in which he congratulated the English- 
 speaking world that they are not bound by 
 the Germanic rules, of which Mark Twain 
 has made immortal fun. But infinite as our 
 obligations are to French, obligations set forth 
 with staggering volubility by Churton Collins 
 just before his death, the heart of our lan- 
 guage is Anglo-Saxon, that is, Germanic, and 
 the contrast between the sphere of the Anglo- 
 Saxon and the sphere of the French element
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 59 
 
 is a familiar story. But the kinship of Eng- 
 Hsh and German shows itself in an artistic 
 way, and that is in the instinctive repugnance 
 we feel against the incorporation of German 
 words into our language. Scholars are prone 
 to import the German technical terms of lin- 
 guistic science into English, but they are all 
 repellent; the very kinship makes them dis- 
 agreeable. They are so much like English 
 that they ought to be Anglicized, and submit 
 to the assimilative processes through which 
 the Latin and Greek elements of our language 
 have passed, to the strangle of the mailed fist 
 with which we have seized the wealth of other 
 idioms and compressed the leaf into the lump, 
 the polysyllable into the monosyllable. To 
 this monosyllabic character foreigners object. 
 True, they admire this pemmican of language, 
 as English has been called, but the German 
 poet Platen reproaches us with the inharmo- 
 niousness of our monosyllabic speech. Let 
 Tennyson make answer in his In Memoriam 
 from the artistic point of view, and Sweet 
 from the scientific point of view. The verte-
 
 6o HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 brse play Into each other with all the perfec- 
 tion of a continuous surface, so that the music 
 resides in the sentence, not in the words. Now 
 I have claimed all monosyllables with Anglo- 
 Saxon coloring as our own, and so we have 
 to look to the polysyllabic constituents of our 
 speech for the Latin and Greek contributions 
 to our thesaurus, and as the language does not 
 belong to the scholar, but to the people, it 
 would be a curious question how far the peo- 
 ple feel these foreign elements of our com- 
 posite speech. The man, for instance, who 
 knows no Latin falls instinctively into the 
 Latin strain of English when he essays the 
 grand style. Johnsonese, as it is called, is by 
 no means an extinct lingo, and the example of 
 one of the most robust statesmen our times 
 have known has left on record astounding 
 proof of the fact that the pomp of our Eng- 
 lish Latin is not inconsistent with vigor. We 
 choose the tallest man for a drum major, and 
 the strongest man is chosen to flaunt the ban- 
 ner in the procession. From one of Mr. 
 Cleveland's latest compositions I cull the fol-
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 6i 
 
 lowing delightful phrases — actuarial mystery, 
 managerial calculation, senseless resentment, 
 predatory acquisitiveness, demagogic appeal. 
 We may smile, but there is a man behind these 
 words, and those who want honest Anglo- 
 Saxon would be puzzled to find an Anglo- 
 Saxon substitute for " innocuous desuetude." 
 I am deviating into Latin, it is true, but 
 the Greek words that are imbedded in our 
 language come largely through the Latin, 
 and in technical language, in which Greek 
 makes itself chiefly felt, Latin and Greek have 
 a common cause, and alike roused rebellion 
 on the part of Anglo-Saxon purists, who some 
 decennia ago talked of the " unthoroughfare- 
 someness of stuff," instead of " impermeabil- 
 ity of matter," and when " stuff " turned out 
 to be French, substituted for stuff " anwork," 
 or " antimber." These are they who would 
 revive " Againbite of Inwit " for *' remorse 
 of conscience." In a book published thirty 
 years ago. The Past, Present and Future of 
 England's Language, Mr. William Marshall 
 proposed " farwrit " for " telegram," " lig-
 
 63 HELLAS AND HESPERL4 
 
 writ " for " photograph," "outstandingness " 
 for " person," and a lot of " wan's " besides 
 the obsolete " wanhope," which is pretty 
 enough. In Germany the rebellion against 
 Greek and Latin and other foreign vocables 
 has led to some absurd results. The German 
 purists of my boyhood were often forced to 
 write the " foreign " word in brackets after 
 the " native " word to explain what the native 
 word meant; and the war against French 
 has been renewed of late years to the con- 
 fusion of those who learned German half a 
 century ago. The technical Greek terms 
 that have been incorporated into German 
 have to be used in order to explain the new- 
 fangled German terms, and though in modern 
 English the linguistic conscience is often of- 
 fended by the dreadful compounds that are 
 manufactured after German patterns, when it 
 comes to technical terms, we surrender to the 
 Greek, and one of the side-functions of the 
 Greek professor is to lick into shape the cubs 
 of scientific vocabulary. The old cockney joke 
 of the manufacturer of blacking, " We keeps
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 63 
 
 a poet," has its modern parallel in " We keeps 
 a Grecian." 
 
 So long then as our divine English must 
 summon Greek as the scientific Adam to 
 name all the new creations of our mechan- 
 ical genius, there is no danger that Greek will 
 be utterly forgotten. " Windjammer " is a 
 fine word, I grant, and so is every Anglo- 
 Saxon compound that grows and is not made, 
 but these are very few. Indeed it is said that 
 the only good compound evolved during the 
 Civil War is " gripsack." The period of such 
 spontaneous growths seems to have passed 
 with the Shakespearean times. Beddoes, un- 
 der German influences, tried to bring back 
 the day of Anglo-Saxon " kennings," but we 
 shall always say " telephone " and " tele- 
 graph " instead of " far-speaker " and " far- 
 writer " with " phone " and " wire " in time 
 of need. I am personally responsible for 
 " bolometer," which I created at the request 
 of the late Professor Langley. " Aerodrome " 
 comes straight from Lucian, and it was at my 
 earnest request that Professor Langley for-
 
 64 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 bore to prefix " tachy " In order to indicate 
 its speed. V/hy multiply syllables? I said. Ten 
 years hence it will be " drome." In less than 
 ten years we have " aeroplane," " the wan- 
 derer through the air," which is doubtless 
 destined to become plain " plane." It is impos- 
 sible to get rid of Greek. With all this wealth 
 of Greek technical terms, there is no possi- 
 bility of the bodily passing of Greek. It is 
 an integral part of our daily linguistic life, 
 and the subconsciousness of it is always some- 
 thing to be counted with. 
 
 About the persistence of Greek literature 
 and Greek literary tradition in our literature, 
 there can be no question, unless we make an 
 unparalleled break with our past, unless we 
 do in literature and art what some are aiming 
 to do in politics. For English literature one 
 needs a classical dictionary from our morning- 
 star Chaucer down to the smelly kerosene 
 lamp of the magazine writer. 
 
 Whatever our degree of kinship to the 
 early representatives of the Aryan race, they 
 are naught to us in comparison with the
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 65 
 
 Greeks, whether native Greeks or Romanized 
 Greeks. Comparative grammar has done its 
 best to bring us into conscious connection with 
 our Aryan past; I need only refer to Max 
 Miiller's popular essays, and for more recent 
 times to Professor Bloomfield's brilliant lec- 
 tures on the Religion of the Veda. We do 
 not worship Dyauspitar as we worship Jupiter 
 and Zeus. Dyauspitar will not fit into Pope's 
 " Jehovah, Jove or Lord "; Varuna does not 
 speak to us as does Uranus, far off as Uranus 
 is, nor Sarameyas as Hermes, nor do the Har- 
 itas, horses of the sun, appeal to us as do the 
 Charites, the Gratiae decentes of Greece and 
 Rome. All modern European literature is 
 alive to us by reason of this community; all 
 else is a mere curiosity; at most, a bit of an- 
 thropology. Some time ago a volume of 
 translations from the Tamil fell into my 
 hands. Tamil literature, it seems, is impreg- 
 nated with Sanskrit literature, and I make no 
 doubt that the Sanskrit scholar would feel 
 many a kindred touch in these Tamil quat- 
 rains, but somehow they do not appeal to me,
 
 66 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 and I tried in vain to do for them in my 
 measure what Fitzgerald did for Omar Khay- 
 yam in his. Here is one : 
 
 Lord of the hilly land where the immature little monkey, 
 with its finger like a bean-pod, will flip its father when it 
 meets him, and poke him and snatch fruit from him. Af- 
 flictive indeed is friendship with the uncongenial. 
 
 The immature little monkey with its fin- 
 ger like a bean-pod is good, but you can't 
 get the figures of the sons of Eli, of the 
 sons of CEdipus, out of the immature little 
 monkey with its finger like a bean-pod. He 
 is an exotic; he belongs to the zoological gar- 
 den, where he is caged, to the top of a hand- 
 organ, where he is tethered. 
 
 It is, I repeat, a matter of tradition and not 
 of blood; bone of our bone and flesh of our 
 flesh as much as you please. True, Odin and 
 Thor and Freya plant themselves square on 
 our Christian week. A Northern goddess 
 gives her name to a Christian festival. But 
 Balder is dead and Apollo lives, and if a man 
 like Sophus Bugge arises and propounds the 
 false doctrine, heresy and schism that all the
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 67 
 
 figures of Norse mythology are mere transfers 
 from the classics, we have no sense of blas- 
 phemy. " And they called Barnabas Jupiter, 
 and Paul Mercurius," and all our deities bear 
 pagan, bear classic names. One is sick of the 
 old quotation often misquoted, old as it is, 
 about Shakespeare's small Latin and less 
 Greek. Read Stapfer's book on Shakespeare 
 and Antiquity, read Shakespeare himself, not 
 his dramas taken from Plutarch, but his other 
 plays, and see what a stock of classical allu- 
 sions he has. Ben Jonson is full of classic 
 reminiscences; his learned sock is full of the 
 dust of the Appian Way. Read Sir Philip 
 Sidney's Defence of Poesie. It is a little thing 
 but scholars have not yet answered all the 
 questions that it suggests. It is a most im- 
 portant monument of English prose, and Eng- 
 lish prose that comes straight from the close 
 embrace of the classics. Milton's text has 
 not yet been exhausted by the student of antiq- 
 uity. I do not think that I should care to give 
 my days and nights to Lycophron in order to 
 understand Milton better, but think of the
 
 68 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 enormous influence Milton has exerted. The 
 classicism of the eighteenth century is not 
 what we should call a vital classicism. Chap- 
 man's Homer has more real life than Pope's 
 Homer. Few are the authors of the period 
 on whom Greek had a true hold, but Virgil's 
 magic wand still ruled the century, and to 
 know Greek is the price of knowing Virgil. 
 Out of the Georgics, the masterpiece of the 
 great Mantuan, out of the elegiac poets of 
 Roman antiquity, true poetry has been born 
 again. All European science was kindled 
 from the spark kept alive in astrology; all 
 the new growth of the poetry of nature may 
 be traced to the phosphate of didactic poetry. 
 Gray, I need not say, was a classicist in every 
 fibre, and in the closer study of style, in the 
 study of phonetic effects, he has few rivals. 
 His work is imperishable, but who would sus- 
 pect in the author of the Elegy the patient 
 annotator of Strabo? Cowper, in whom we 
 see the dawn of a new day, owes much to the 
 antique. The upheaval of the French revo- 
 lution was a return to the republican life of
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 69 
 
 the classic world. Byron, rhetorician though 
 he is, and far more Roman than Greek, died 
 for Greece. Shelley is an exhalation from a 
 Greek censer, and Keats' sensitive harp vi- 
 brated to the divine air that blew through 
 the hedge of translation. The great Victo- 
 rian poets are steeped in Greek study. Never 
 was Greek nearer to us than it is now. Ten- 
 nyson, Browning, Swinburne, Morris, sug- 
 gest classic themes. One of my former pu- 
 pils, Professor Mustard, has written a whole 
 volume on classical echoes in Tennyson, and 
 classic themes are nearer to us, more real to 
 us — not to me, but to you — than Knights of 
 the Round Table and the parties to an Italian 
 lawsuit. 
 
 Another point on which it might be profit- 
 able to dwell, especially as it is less worn 
 than the one on which I have been pirouet- 
 ting, is the persistence of classic culture in 
 authors that have had no classical training, 
 no classical drill. Take Bunyan for the old 
 time; take Kipling for the time that now 
 is. At least I did take Kipling for the time
 
 70 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 that now Is, but in order to make sure, I 
 requested a friend of mine, who knew him 
 personally, to ask Kipling whether he had 
 ever studied the ancient classics. His answer 
 was: I know only the dry bones (Bohns) of 
 classical literature. They are, as some of 
 those who are present know, the dry bones 
 of a well-known species of pony. Since then 
 I have had reason to doubt the truth of the 
 statement, but why surrender an illustration 
 at the bidding of fact? And some of you may 
 remember the Horatian passage in the Native- 
 born, one of the Songs of the Seven Seas: 
 
 They change their skies above them 
 
 But not their hearts that roam ; 
 We learned from our wistful mothers 
 
 To call Old England " home." 
 
 The thranite and the thalamite of the verses 
 quoted in my first lecture require a Greek 
 lexicon, if they are not to be as meaningless 
 to the average reader as Hivite and Periz- 
 zite, and the " god that hailed " is the classic 
 form of the Prince of the Power of the Air. 
 I too would plead for an honest American
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 71 
 
 literature, a literature of the soil, but the 
 classics are in a measure our home, and Kip- 
 ling quotes Horace as the burial service quotes 
 a verse from a Greek comic poet. It is not 
 a matter of blood, it is a matter of tradition. 
 I have had something to say, one can say 
 little in view of the wealth of material, about 
 Greek as a tradition, as an incorporation. I 
 might say as much, if not more, about Greek 
 as a standard, as something to which we are 
 bound to recur, and which we must try to un- 
 derstand. This insistence on the standard is 
 very Greek. The Greeks themselves were 
 very much given to canons, which they incor- 
 porated in works of art. The matter is noto- 
 rious in architecture, in sculpture. Oddly 
 enough in the art of speech, in rhetoric, the 
 Greek standards have been more and more 
 neglected. Even the French who have owed 
 so much to formal rhetoric have begun to 
 break away from the tradition, and as for the 
 English, what else is to be expected? The 
 foremost English editor of Aristotle's Rhet- 
 oric sneers at the later Greek rhetoricians, as
 
 72 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 if the later Greek rhetoricians had not kept 
 alive the traditions of a better time, and for 
 lack of rhetorical training some of our lead- 
 ing literary men have been left to rediscover 
 in their practice the elementary law of the sen- 
 tence, to wit, that the sentence is to be meas- 
 ured by the breath of the utterance, that it 
 has a pneumonic gauge. The carpenter who 
 tests the squareness of his joints by 8, 6 and 
 lo is doing a bit of Greek mathematics, and 
 follows an exact method which is far better 
 than the rule of thumb by which nearly every- 
 body writes. And those Greek rules are 
 things of life, of poetry. The period must 
 not exceed what can be carried on one breath; 
 must not exceed four trimeters, four hex- 
 ameters. The measure of the sentence is 
 the breath. That is life. The measure of 
 the breath is the verse. That is poetry. And 
 it is not uninteresting to note that as poetry 
 regulated prose speech, so the soaring verse 
 of Homer furnished the measure of the scriv- 
 ener's task, and the scribe was practically paid 
 by the hexametrical line.
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 73 
 
 But it is more in consonance with the object 
 of these lectures to give prominence to Greek 
 for its suggestiveness rather than for its nor- 
 mality, which so many people consider as sup- 
 pressive of life, whereas true life, like true lib- 
 erty, demands nothing more imperatively than 
 bounds. And the reference I have made to the 
 canons of Greek sculpture reminds me of the 
 charge of coldness and statuesqueness which 
 perfervid Romanticists used to bring against 
 classical literature, classical literature which 
 really palpitates with life. How readily mod- 
 ern thought finds its embodiment in the plastic 
 forms of Greek mythology, I need not tell 
 you who are familiar with the poetry of our 
 own age, and those cold, statuesque forms 
 are ready to spring into life again, perhaps 
 a higher life, if touched by genius. Form is 
 antique, they say, but color is modern. How 
 antiquity has been misjudged, and misjudged 
 for centuries, is patent enough now. I am old 
 enough to remember the hot controversy 
 about the use of color in Greek architecture 
 and Greek sculpture. There is no such quar- 
 6
 
 74 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 rel now, and as I have always worked on the 
 abandoned formula of a great central pur- 
 pose in history, as it has always seemed to 
 me, to use the figure of Jean Paul, that the 
 same sun that regulates the movement of the 
 planets, regulates the unfolding of the flower- 
 clock of art and literature, so I have often 
 thought that the perfect revelation of the past 
 is reserved for those who have been trained to 
 appreciate the fulness of the times, and that 
 the microscopic studies of our own day are 
 to be made subservient to a truer appreciation 
 of the beautiful in antique art, literary as well 
 as plastic. At least such has been the aim of 
 my own life, and my chief hope that I have 
 not lived in vain. 
 
 On the one hand, then, we of this day 
 are really better able to appreciate the life 
 of antiquity by our systematic studies than 
 those who have gone before us, and this 
 shows that these studies are vital, or they 
 would not grow; and on the other hand, 
 new material has been furnished to round our 
 conception of the oneness of the old life with
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 75 
 
 the new. Of this new material I shall have a 
 word or two to say, but I must now turn to 
 the great stock of Greek literature before the 
 recent additions which Egypt has yielded to 
 the stores of the eager scholar. There is no 
 lack of palpitating life in Greek literature, no 
 lack of freshness and dewiness in the field of 
 the Charites, no lack of real flowers, no lack 
 of swaying, wooing blossoms. Flowers, oh 
 yes! there are flowers in Greek literature. 
 Have we not the Anthology, hasn't Mr. Mac- 
 kail's translation with his delightful introduc- 
 tion reached a second edition? But there are 
 flowers and flowers, flowers of rhetoric and 
 flowers of sulphur, and I venture to say that 
 the Greek Anthology is full of subtle prob- 
 lems of taste, I had almost said smell, for the 
 Greeks valued flowers, grew flowers largely 
 for their smell, just as in English the native 
 word is " nosegay," not " bouquet," and the 
 sense of smell, one of the lowest senses as it 
 is called, is one of the most subtle, more subtle 
 than the most searching chemical analysis. 
 And this intimate perfume is to be sought and
 
 76 HELLAS AND HESPERL4 
 
 found in the least trodden recesses of Greek 
 literature, and it is a matter of joy to me that 
 the study of Greek lyric, so long neglected, 
 has been brought to the front. He who knows 
 the real Anacreon will not be imposed by the 
 sham Anacreon, and will learn to distinguish 
 between tonqua bean and vanilla. In the 
 intimate appreciation of such things there has 
 been an immeasurable advance in our time. 
 Think of what Sappho was to Namby Pamby 
 Phillips, what she is to Swinburne, in whose 
 Anactoria she lives again and burns again. 
 It is almost incredible that the original of 
 Catullus' Ille mi par esse deo videtur should 
 appear in a history of Greek literature in 
 Phillips's rendering, when so many better, 
 though still inadequate, versions are to 
 be found in Mr. Wharton's Sappho. And 
 then this deeper study, this truer appreciation, 
 has had its reward in these latter days — let 
 us hope — will continue to have its reward, and 
 the old-fashioned Providence to which I did 
 homage a few minutes ago has held back some 
 of the most coveted treasures of antiquity, un-
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 77 
 
 til we were ready for them, just as some of 
 the greatest achievements of the plastic art 
 of antiquity have come forth from their 
 hiding places to rejoice the eyes of the 
 men of our day. To one who takes large 
 views of history there is a certain conso- 
 lation in the loss of so much of antique lit- 
 erature. Whole departments of literature 
 have been swept away, and we sigh for this 
 author and that author in the ranges that are 
 left. But, as I have maintained, the most 
 characteristic monuments have survived, those 
 which no conceivable combination could ever 
 reproduce, and now when the love of the 
 antique is waxing cold, our curiosity is quick- 
 ened by the discovery not only of works that 
 were supposed to be lost forever, but works 
 that reveal kinship where kinship was not 
 suspected. Greek is an almost inevitable ac- 
 complishment, if one would keep up with the 
 times. Aristotle's Constitution of Athens 
 roused more excitement than the newest novel. 
 It was the book of the month ; it was as if the 
 other side of the moon had been turned round
 
 78 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 to our vision, and a catalogue of all the re- 
 sults of Egyptian exploration, not to say a 
 characteristic of them, would fill a long course 
 of lectures. Not only have we complemented 
 our knowledge of the great poets that we 
 have, but we have learned important lessons 
 in the book of humanity, we have been brought 
 into touch with a life that is our own. Even 
 our frailties which we nursed as pet ailments 
 of our intellectual and moral structure have 
 been identified. The vulgarity of Herodas 
 is ours, the fantastic turbulence of Timotheus 
 is ours, the so-called Erotic Fragment of Gren- 
 fell quivers with a passion that some of the 
 unmentionable novels of our day simulate, and 
 the charm of Menander for antiquity turns 
 out to be a certain modern sentimentality, as 
 where a husband who has tried to indemnify 
 himself for the supposed infidelity of his wife, 
 reflects on the moral superiority of the party 
 of the other part. 
 
 With the advance of Greek studies has 
 gone hand in hand an advance in the art of 
 translation — the advance of Greek studies,
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 79 
 
 for, as I put it some time ago, the cubic con- 
 tents of Greek, are greater than ever; and I 
 have no sympathy with the pedantry that bars 
 out translation and insists on the original. 
 Many friends have been lost to classical study 
 by the ban that pedants have issued against 
 renderings first into Latin, then into m^odern 
 languages. The French fashion of issuing 
 classic texts, faced with a translation into 
 French, is coming up, and in England Greek 
 scholars of the highest rank, such as Jebb, 
 have won renown not only by their commen- 
 taries, but by renderings that answer as com- 
 mentaries at many subtle points. But trans- 
 lation and methods of translation furnish a 
 theme on which an old teacher might hold 
 forth forever, and after all there abides in 
 the original an incommunicable charm. Jules 
 Janin, the frivolous, tells a story of two 
 French Hellenists who went into rhapsodies 
 over Pindar, and chanted long passages of the 
 original to one another. But when the wife 
 of President Morisset insisted on a transla- 
 tion, and her husband yielded to her request,
 
 go HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 she protested against the gallimaufry he was 
 trying to palm off on her, and declared that 
 it would have been much better if these schol- 
 ars had confessed that they were revelling in 
 indecencies unfit for the ear of a self-respect- 
 ing woman. There is a familiar illustration 
 of the inadequacy of the best rendering pos- 
 sible in Lewes' Life of Goethe, where he 
 translates a verse of Mickell's famous ballad 
 into another English : 
 
 The dews of summer night did fall, 
 
 The moon, sweet regent of the sky, 
 Shone on the walls of Cumnor Hall 
 
 And many an oak that grew thereby. 
 
 The nightly dews commenced to fall. 
 
 The moon, whose empire is the sky. 
 Shone on the sides of Cumnor Hall 
 
 And all the oaks that stood thereby. 
 
 Sweetly did fall the dews of night. 
 
 The moon of heaven, the lovely queen, 
 
 On Cumnor Hall shone silver bright 
 
 And glanced the oaks' broad boughs between. 
 
 Now I venture to say with Lewes that no ren- 
 dering into a foreign tongue is likely to ap- 
 proximate the fidelity of these sacrilegious 
 performances, and what shall be said of a 
 newspaper retranslation into English of a
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 8i 
 
 French version of such a master-poem as 
 Poe's Raven? 
 
 I pushed the shutter. A superb raven darted into my 
 chamber, gracefully fluttering his wings. He did not 
 make me any reverence. He came in as if he felt per- 
 fectly at home, and perched, full of majesty, with the 
 grand airs of a lord or a lady, on a bust of Pallas above 
 my door. 
 
 I could not refrain from smiling before the grave coun- 
 tenance of this bird of ebony. Tell me, I said aloud, what 
 is your lordly name on this Plutonian shore of the night? 
 He responded. Never again. 
 
 This response did not seem to have much sense. Did it 
 ever happen to anybody to find at midnight over his door 
 on a bust of Pallas a bird calling itself "Never again"? 
 
 A gross caricature, you may say, and un- 
 worthy of this audience. Let me exemplify 
 the importance of minute change In diction 
 and rhythm by a rendering of a verse of Ten- 
 nyson, that keeps much closer to the language 
 than Lewes' translations of MIckell : 
 
 The rain had fallen, the poet arose. 
 
 He passed by the town and out of the street. 
 A light wind blew from the gates of the sun 
 
 And waves of shadow went over the wheat. 
 And he sate him down in a lonely place 
 
 And chanted a melody loud and sweet 
 That made the wild swan pause in her cloud 
 
 And the lark drop down at his feet.
 
 83 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 The rain had ceased, the poet rose, 
 
 He passed through town, passed out of street. 
 A light wind from the sun's gates blew. 
 
 And waves of shade went o'er the wheat. 
 Down sate he in a lonely place 
 
 And sang a song both loud and sweet. 
 The wild swan paused within her cloud, 
 
 The lark from heaven dropped at his feet. 
 
 Byron Is not the most musical of poets, and 
 Swinburne declares that he gains by a trans- 
 lation into French prose, but I have recently 
 met with a translation of one familiar line 
 into French prose, and I am sure that " Fare 
 thee well ! and if forever, still forever fare 
 thee well," does not gain In Bourget's ren- 
 dering. Adieu, et si c'est pour toujoiirs, he 
 bien, adieu, pour tou jours adieu. Larmes, 
 vaines larmes, was Brunetiere's obvious trans- 
 lation of " Tears, Idle tears," and there are 
 " tears " in larmes, but not our tears. One 
 reason of the Inadequacy of translation Is 
 the hopeless difference of the phonetic affin- 
 ities of the various mechanical equivalents. 
 Translate " nightingale " by rossignol. If you 
 choose, but the associations of rossignol are 
 as Ignoble as those of " nightingale " are
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 83 
 
 lofty, and everybody knows how the French 
 Melpomene balked at the translation of 
 Othello because of " handkerchief." Mou- 
 choir, with all its vile associations, was not 
 meant for a tragic crisis. What is the con- 
 clusion of the whole matter? Must every- 
 body learn Greek? Such a conclusion would 
 savor too much of that plea for Greek which 
 I declined to make at the outset of these talks. 
 And yet I should like to say a word in closing 
 by way of reply to those who sneer at a smat- 
 tering of this language and that. It is aston- 
 ishing, I have said elsewhere, how much en- 
 joyment one can get from a language one un- 
 derstands imperfectly; and Prince Kropotkin, 
 a linguist as all Russians are, asks, " Is there 
 a higher esthetic delight than to read poetry 
 in a language which one does not yet quite 
 thoroughly understand?" It is astonishing 
 what a moral effect the sentences of a foreign 
 tongue can exercise. It is astonishing what a 
 feeling of fellowship is engendered by a stock 
 quotation from Latin and Greek. Whether 
 it is worth while to spend so much time on
 
 84 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 Latin and Greek in order to recall a musical 
 line from Homer or Virgil, to say from the 
 heart some of the untranslatables, such as 
 Sunt lacrima rerum, such as 7?ieta kai tode 
 toisi genestho, to put one's self into sym- 
 pathetic relation with the scholarly past, it 
 is not for me to say, as my testimony may 
 be suspect, and might reveal more of my 
 life than would be fitting. All that the best 
 of us reach in any range of study is a smat- 
 tering, and I am only thankful for my own 
 smatterings. In crises of life the words that 
 come up to one are not always the words of 
 the mother tongue, but those that had been 
 acquired at school, the words of comfort and 
 counsel that saved the lesson from being an 
 unmitigated bore. Those nails fastened by 
 the masters of assemblies are golden nails. 
 We say of a supreme resolve : iacta alea esto. 
 It means more than " The die is cast," for it 
 means " Let the die be cast and stay cast." 
 But when Ceesar crossed the Rubicon he used 
 Greek and not Latin. Anerrhiphtho kyhos 
 is recorded among the fragments of his favor-
 
 GREEK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 85 
 
 ite Menander. A queer French writer en- 
 graved on his seal the English words " Too 
 late! " — the summary of a life that was on 
 the whole a failure. It does not mean more 
 to us than Trop tard, but it must have meant 
 much more to him. Reading Luther's Table 
 Talk many years ago, I was struck with 
 the fact that whenever the great translator 
 of the Bible was stirred, he quoted Scripture 
 in Latin. Fiihr' uns nicht in Versuchung 
 of his own Vater miser could never have 
 meant the same to him as Ne nos indiicas 
 in tentationem. One's stock of Hebrew may 
 be scant, but one can never forget the narra- 
 tive of Samson and the strange puns in which 
 he, like other strong men of history, indulged, 
 so that from his entrance to his exit, every 
 utterance is a rude jest; and deeply affecting 
 as the story of Joseph is in any version, the 
 three Hebrew words of Jacob's cry over the 
 bloody raiment of his son Joseph defy trans- 
 lation, and linger in the memory long after 
 what Heinrich Heine called the " tick tack " 
 of the model Hebrew verb has become a faint
 
 86 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 echo in the brain. The theme is so vast, the 
 illustrations so abundant, that the symmetry 
 which the Greek so loved and which I, as a 
 lover of all things Greek, so love, has per- 
 force been abandoned, but the Greeks them- 
 selves sacrificed symmetry to Life, and so I 
 have never hesitated to sacrifice symmetry to 
 Life, but as I come to a close, I feel most 
 keenly that any life there has been in my little 
 talk is due to the answering life in your in- 
 dulgent attention, for which you have my 
 heartfelt thanks.
 
 Lecture III 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 
 
 I had given an alternative title to this last 
 lecture, and had called it Hellas and Hes- 
 peria, but the alliteration was so attractive that 
 I have appropriated it for the whole triad, 
 which it fits fairly well. Hesperia, the West- 
 ern land, was to the Greek of old the Land 
 of Hope, and our Western land is the Land 
 of Hope to the Greek of to-day. The island 
 of Pelops is almost depopulated by the stream 
 of emigration to the modern Atlantis, and the 
 Greek of to-day recognizes in the American- 
 ism of to-day the traits of an ideal Hellenism. 
 And so, though I am not a Greek of to-day, 
 but only a Grecian, I cannot help thinking 
 that the recognition of the affinities of ancient 
 Greek and modern American life, which I 
 have dared to call the American element in 
 Greek life, may serve to quicken the interest 
 of the student of the Greek language and lit-
 
 88 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 erature, and even if it abide alone, may wake 
 the sense of kindred, after the forms of the 
 Greek alphabet become misty. 
 
 This general theme has always been a favor- 
 ite of mine. Creon tells his son Haemon that 
 Antigone is " a frigid huggingpiece," and how- 
 ever frigid my huggingpiece may seem to oth- 
 ers, I have pursued it as a phantom of delight 
 ever since I knew what love is, now through 
 the crowds of the agora, now round the steps 
 of the bema, now over the meadows of the 
 Muses where Aristophanes disports himself, 
 now over battlefields illuminated by stark fig- 
 ures in blue and gray. I cannot help thinking 
 that this pursuit has made for life, but like 
 everything that makes for life, it has brought 
 with it trouble, and my indiscreet urging of the 
 theme has cost me more than one rebuke. So, 
 for instance, in one of my essays I said: " It 
 is not in vain that the American student has 
 been endowed with ' that singular buoyancy 
 and elasticity ' which, according to Dean Stan- 
 ley, is the marked peculiarity of our people, 
 nor in vain our unequalled adaptability, our
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 89 
 
 quick perception, our straightforwardness of 
 intellectual vision. We Americans, said Mat- 
 thew Arnold, think straight and see clear." 
 And again: "Ancient history has to be inter- 
 preted into terms of American experience, 
 and it would not be saying too much to main- 
 tain that many of the aspects of American life 
 enable us to understand the ancients better 
 than some of our European contemporaries 
 do. An audacious, inventive, ready-witted 
 people, Americans often comprehend the au- 
 dacious, inventive, ready-witted Greek a demt- 
 mot, while the German professor phrases and 
 the English ' don ' rubs his eyes, and the 
 French savant appreciates the wrong half." 
 Whereupon a British reviewer charged me 
 with " vainglorious patriotism." Sometimes, 
 it is true, I stop and ask myself in an access of 
 disillusionment. What right have I to speak 
 of America? and I hear snub-nosed Socrates 
 asking, What is American? 'Tis a harder 
 question perhaps for a man of my antecedents 
 than " What is Greek? " In the first place, 
 a native is too native to give the right answer,
 
 90 HELLAS AND HESPERL4 
 
 and I dare not invoke the aid of such apostles 
 of Americanism as Professor Brander Mat- 
 thews, Dr. Henry van Dyke or President 
 Butler, the most recent American authorities 
 on the subject; and in order to be truly scien- 
 tific, I should have to muster the evidence of 
 others, from Trollope and Basil Hall of the 
 old time, through Dickens of a later date, 
 down to the witnesses of our own day, friv- 
 olous Max O'Rell, unsympathetic Matthew 
 Arnold and sympathetic James Bryce, and on 
 the basis of those documents draw up a table 
 of American characteristics in which they all 
 agree — our keenness and directness, our au- 
 dacity, our inventiveness, our light-hearted 
 acceptance of the shifts of fortune, a light- 
 heartedness that makes the Greek Therame- 
 nes an American statesman, as he has recently 
 been made the hero of an historical novel, a 
 novel by an American Hellenist, Professor 
 Gaines. Time was when we of this region 
 were more bent on asserting diversity than 
 unity, a diversity that was the result of the 
 conflicting interests, the incessant bickerings,
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 91 
 
 the different ideals, the different social con- 
 ditions. But we are all Americans now, and 
 our Americanism is borne in upon us by for- 
 eign critics, who were the first to teach us 
 that Walt Whitman, whom we all derided 
 fifty years ago, is the true American poet and 
 prophet; all the others mere echoes of Euro- 
 pean voices. I am sorry to say that Walt 
 Whitman would not have heeded the scholar's 
 plea for the classics. You may remember his 
 deliverance in his Leaves of Grass : 
 
 Dead poets, philosophers, priests, 
 
 Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since, 
 
 Language shapers on other shores, 
 
 Nations once powerful, nov? reduced, withdrawn or desolate, 
 
 I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit 
 
 What you have left wafted hither. 
 
 I have perused it, own it is admirable (moving awhile 
 
 among it). 
 Think nothing can ever be greater, 
 Nothing can ever deserve more than it deserves. 
 Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it, 
 I stand in my place with my own day here. 
 
 There is much more to the same effect in our 
 typical American poet whom Tennyson ad- 
 mired and George Eliot quoted, and nothing
 
 92 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 could be more characteristic than the utter- 
 ance: 
 
 I stand in mj' place with my own day here. 
 
 And as an American, I am fully in accord with 
 him. A detached American is for the most 
 part a pitiful spectacle. But it is precisely 
 because we stand in our place with our own 
 day here that we cannot dismiss the past so 
 cavalierly as Whitman has done. To the 
 dead all things are dead. To him that is 
 alive there is no dead poetry, no dead lan- 
 guage. " Only those languages," said Low- 
 ell in a famous discourse, " only those lan- 
 guages can be called dead in which nothing 
 living was ever written." There is no need 
 of crediting the past, as Whitman calls it. 
 The past collects its interest by the inevitable 
 process of eternal laws. Classical antiquity 
 is not driftwood, as Whitman intimates, not 
 driftwood out of which to build fires to warm 
 ourselves and dream by, calling up the figures 
 of Jason and Medea, of Paris and Helen, 
 and listening to Arion in his singing-robes.
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 93 
 
 The classical caravel is still seaworthy. No 
 Captain Courageous of Gloucester, Mass., 
 is more popular than Odysseus of Ithaca. 
 Retell the story of the wanderings of the 
 much-enduring to a popular audience, if you 
 wish to find out whether Homer is dead, 
 and what Kipling calls his bloomin' lyre has 
 ceased to bloom. No happier hours in my 
 long career can I recall than those I spent in 
 repeating the tale of Old Audacious to a sym- 
 pathetic audience thirty years ago. Tenny- 
 son's Ulysses I need not mention. Stephen 
 Phillips's Ulysses I mention merely to protest 
 against his perversion of the only true story 
 of Odysseus in Hades. It is then precisely 
 because we stand in our own place here, pre- 
 cisely because we are Americans and Walt 
 Whitman is our prophet, that we insist on our 
 inheritance of the precious past, on which and 
 by which we live. 
 
 But I have already spoken of Greek as 
 an inheritance. To-day we are to consider 
 not so much the inheritance as the kinship. 
 Hellas speaks to us with a kindred voice
 
 94 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 and looks into our eyes with kindred eyes. 
 Like the Greeks, we Americans have found 
 out our oneness by conflict with one another, 
 as well as by contrast with others. The 
 members of the same family seldom see the 
 likeness that strangers recognize at once. 
 There is a national handwriting among all 
 the diversities of chirography, and we write 
 American as we are written down Americans. 
 American is as distinctive now as Greek was 
 then, and it was War, the father of all things, 
 that revealed us to ourselves. America is a 
 find to the American as Greece was a find to 
 the Greeks, to adapt the famous passage of 
 Herodotus. It was the Persian War that 
 gave Greece her unity — a war in which the 
 Greeks themselves were arrayed on different 
 sides, and no sooner was the unity brought 
 about than the old enmity asserted itself, and 
 Greece was split in twain — North against 
 South and South against North. 
 
 True, these historical parallels are not to 
 be urged. The unity of the Greek state was 
 the city, the polis, and recent historians justly
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 95 
 
 lay great stress on the difference between the 
 city state, the Stadtstaat, and the territorial 
 state, the Flachenstaat. We are not to be mis- 
 led by a name. The " fierce democratie " of 
 Athens was a narrov/ oligarchy according to 
 modern conceptions, and the city state was a 
 mere atom in comparison with our empire 
 states. But there are analogies that cannot be 
 lightly thrust aside as mere fancies. Greek 
 history is after all in some respects a pocket 
 edition of American history, and the founders 
 of the Union turned to Greek history rather 
 than to Roman history when they considered 
 the problems of Federal government, just as 
 in the recent development of American life, 
 the Roman Empire is ever in our thoughts 
 and on our lips. A writer famous in his day, 
 Alphonse Karr, in his Journey round my Gar- 
 den, ridicules the botanist because he neglects 
 the element of size. " The same botanical de- 
 scription," he says, " applies to the baobab 
 tree, which looks like a forest in itself, the cir- 
 cumference of its trunk a hundred feet, its age 
 6,000 years, and to the mallow, a little trail-
 
 96 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 ing plant with rose-colored leaves, so small 
 that you can hardly see it in the grass." And 
 yet the botanist is not so far wrong after all. 
 In America we are apt to overstress the 
 element of size. It is a national reproach 
 that we do not distinguish " bigness " and 
 " greatness." The organic structure is the 
 same under different manifestations, and so 
 the pocket handkerchief domain of Hellas 
 has the same weft as the enormous canvas of 
 our American continent. 
 
 Those who emphasize the influence of 
 physical surroundings in the character of a 
 nation — and the emphasis is as old as the 
 scribe that left on record the story of Issachar 
 — are never weary of enlarging on the diver- 
 sity of Greek climate, Greek soil, Greek pro- 
 ductions, as determining the character of the 
 Greek people. It is an old story. It is told 
 in Homer, it is the keynote of Herodotus. 
 It is writ large in Polybius, in Strabo. Cur- 
 tius, the historian of Alexander the Great, fol- 
 lowing Greek authorities, doubtless, makes 
 the climate of India responsible for the char-
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 97 
 
 acter of the Hindus, and oddly enough, it is 
 a modern Curtius that has penned the fas- 
 cinating chapters in which he unfolds the in- 
 fluence of land and sea on the Greek people. 
 Every geographer, every historian, comments 
 on the great variety of Greek climate, mar- 
 vellous variety considering the limited extent 
 of Greek territory proper. The extremes are 
 perhaps not quite so great as in this country, 
 but racial sensitiveness might restore the par- 
 allel in one direction, as facilities of com- 
 munication would restore the parallel in an- 
 other. From Maine to Florida is practically 
 not so far as from Thessaly to Laconia in the 
 heyday of ancient Greek life. But what 
 of the universal neighborhood of the sea? 
 No part of Greek territory was more than 
 forty miles from what they called in one 
 mood, Her that troubleth, thalatta, in other 
 moods. Him that bridgeth, pontos (indefen- 
 sible etymologies,! fear, but undoubted facts). 
 To the foreigner the American prairie has 
 become more characteristic than the American 
 coast line; and the American flag is rarely
 
 98 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 seen In foreign ports. The Greeks were a 
 maritime people, and the dwellers on our 
 vast plains can hardly be called a seafaring 
 people, but their language Is our language, 
 and English, American English, like Greek, 
 is full of nautical Imagery: "We ship our 
 goods," " We board our cars." One rec- 
 ognizes the old Norse yearning for the sea in 
 the prairie schooner, and far in the interior 
 the echoes of the old Viking time are easily 
 waked. It Is not without significance that our 
 battleships bear the names of the different 
 States, and inland Tennessee is as vitally in- 
 terested in her namesake as Virginia, whose 
 capes stretch out to receive the commerce of 
 the world. A favorite theme of the ancient 
 sophists was the reflections of an inlander at 
 sight of a ship. There is no American in- 
 lander of whom such a fancy could be enter- 
 tained. The new navy draws its recruits from 
 the Western States as from the Eastern. The 
 great lakes, the great rivers, provide for the 
 training of the man from Ohio and the man 
 from Missouri, and offer watery paths for the
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 99 
 
 " whalebacks " of the MIchigander and the 
 Chicagese. So even at this point of seeming 
 dissimilarity there is a certain analogy between 
 Greek and American. Despite all the preach- 
 ments of political economists and all the 
 frightful waste of naval armaments, Ameri- 
 cans like Greeks are all sea-fighters, just as 
 the Lacedaemonians, who were late in learn- 
 ing the lesson, learned it too well for the 
 Athenians who were born to the sea. 
 
 But continental Greece was not all of 
 Greece. The whole Mediterranean was 
 fringed with Greek colonies — to adopt a fig- 
 ure of Cicero's — and it might well be main- 
 tained, as has been maintained by Mr. Free- 
 man, that the true analogue of the United 
 States, which we do not hesitate to call Amer- 
 ica, is the Cocked Hat Island. Sicily lay in 
 the region which was to the Greeks the Land 
 of Promise. Westward Ho ! was an old cry 
 in the time of Archilochus. The West was, 
 as I have said, the Land of Hope to the 
 Greeks, and it is America that is still the Hope 
 of this Pandora world. America is the last
 
 loo HELLAS AND HESPERL4 
 
 word of modern history, as Greece was the 
 last word of ancient history. Like the Greeks, 
 we are the heirs of the ages. The Romans 
 were not ancients. The Romans are of us 
 and we are Hving their life, so that it is 
 not necessary to hunt up more or less re- 
 mote analogies. When we read Ferrero, we 
 are reading the history of our own times. 
 Modern research has pushed antiquity far 
 back, and with our large knowledge of early 
 conditions, much that was considered axio- 
 matic in my youth would be set down as non- 
 sense now. Think of the elaborate discus- 
 sions as to the antiquity of the art of writing. 
 If anyone were to broach such a subject now, 
 we should be tempted to use the argumentum 
 laterculinum of our cousins on the other side 
 and heave a Ninevitish brick at him. No 
 sooner do we reach by the instrumentality of 
 the spade what we consider the bedrock of 
 ancient culture, than the bedrock turns out to 
 be no bedrock at all, but a layer of concrete 
 superimposed on yet other layers. No sooner 
 do we begin to speak of Mycenaean civiliza-
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM loi 
 
 tion than we have to consider pre-Myceneean 
 conditions. The Hittites had it all their own 
 way for a while, and we were inclined to bar- 
 gain with them as did Abraham for a place 
 in which to bury dead theories, other people's 
 dead theories, but the other -ites are bound 
 to have their innings. Enough, the Greeks are 
 to us as they were to the Egyptians of old — 
 mere children — and, if children, then heirs as 
 we are of a rich world of achievement and ex- 
 perience. In time then, as in space, the 
 American is as the Greek. 
 
 And the American, like the Greek, has pro- 
 ceeded to realize his inheritance, and that in- 
 heritance is the republican, or if you choose 
 the democratic, form of government, the com- 
 monwealth, to give it its best name. We 
 cannot well think of Greece as anything but 
 a commonwealth. The kings (basileis), the 
 lords (anaktes) , of the early time were 
 poetical shadows. The commonwealth was 
 the normal form of Greek political life. 
 After every convulsion of the state, the Hel- 
 lenes reverted as a matter of course to the
 
 I02 HELLAS AND HESPERL4 
 
 plane which seems to be basic. But it was 
 not basic. It was the conquest of ages of 
 experience, as was ours. It was won from 
 generations of conflict, as was ours. Traces 
 of the old conditions survive in the names and 
 functions of certain officers in Athens. In 
 Sparta the kingship had a more or less unreal 
 life, but the colonies were all republics, and 
 the colonies had the mania for written con- 
 stitutions — paper constitutions we are begin- 
 ning to call them, and more's the pity. For 
 the art of writing belongs to the religious 
 sphere, and while it may not have been the 
 exclusive property of the priestly guild, there 
 was a sacredness about the written law that 
 was universally recognized. The law-giver 
 couched his law in writing, and the popular 
 appeal to " the higher law," the unwritten 
 law, the saying, " What is the Constitution 
 among friends?" — these are not cheering 
 symptoms of American life. Whether the 
 " boss " who looms larger and larger in our 
 political life — the " boss " who is the incorpo- 
 ration of individualism, as opposed to the fun-
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 103 
 
 damental principles of the commonwealth — 
 shall ripen into t\\e,tyrannos of the Greek state, 
 remains to be seen. What is well worth noting 
 is the Greek horror of the function which has 
 been transmitted to us through the ages. The 
 Greeks were not given to assassination as a 
 political measure. Now and then a man was 
 found conveniently dead in the market for 
 willow-wares, now and then there was a ju- 
 dicial murder. But the tyrant was an excep- 
 tion. The tyrannicide was a theme of eulogy 
 from the immortal pair of friends, commem- 
 orated in the Skolion of Callistratus, down to 
 the latest Greek rhetorician of the imperial 
 time. " A fine shroud is the tyrannis " is a 
 famous saying of a famous tyrant, and the 
 man who put on the purple robe had good 
 reason to ask himself how the raiment would 
 look as a cerement. And yet the Greek tyran- 
 nos at the beginning was as harmless a word 
 as the Dutch " boss." The same jealousy of 
 the rights of the people is shown by our Eng- 
 lish use of the word " usurper." The danger 
 of the assumption of undelegated powers has
 
 I04 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 Its signal in the name, and we Americans as 
 heirs of the Greek republican spirit do well 
 to watch the encroachments of executive office. 
 Our forefathers, as we have seen, studied the 
 structure of Greek federation. Our contem- 
 poraries on the other side are watching the 
 steps that seem to be leading us to Caesarism. 
 The benevolent tyrant can never be to us the 
 ideal form of government. A safe slavery 
 (asphalbs dideuein) is as abhorrent to us as it 
 was to the Greeks. It is not an uncommon 
 thesis that the human race was never happier 
 than under the Antonines, and yet the sup- 
 pression of Christianity was one of the condi- 
 tions of that happiness in the eyes of the phi- 
 losopher on the throne. But we must accept the 
 dangers and the degeneracies of the republic 
 with Its form. In fact the student of Greek 
 history is reminded at every turn of the ten- 
 dencies of our day, if dangers and degener- 
 acies are thought to be harsh expressions, and 
 I might have discharged myself of the func- 
 tion I have undertaken In this lecture by a 
 talk on Life In the Time of Aristophanes.
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 105 
 
 How Athenian life answers to ours, I can il- 
 lustrate by my own experience, as indeed 
 nearly everything I have said in these confer- 
 ences, I have lived. Once I was commissioned 
 to give an outline of Aristophanes' plays in a 
 few lines, and those who know Aristophanes 
 and America will recognize the meaning of 
 the summary, "Aristophanes," I said, "Aris- 
 tophanes, an aristocrat by party allegiance, 
 was from the beginning in opposition to de- 
 mocracy and progress, to the elevation of the 
 masses, to the career open to talent, to free 
 thought, to finer art, to art for art's sake, to 
 community of goods, to women's rights, to 
 every form of sophistic phrase-making and 
 humanitarian claptrap," The slogans and 
 counterslogans of American life are all to be 
 heard in the poems of the bald-head bard. 
 And Aristophanes' picture of Athenian life is 
 strikingly like our own — with its fads, its 
 fancies, its futilities. French feuilletonistes 
 and French scholars have written whole books 
 on Aristophanes that are essentially commen- 
 taries on actualities, and Aristophanes' most
 
 io6 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 audacious woman-play, the Lyslstrata, has 
 been reproduced amid rapturous applause be- 
 fore a French audience. 
 
 But despite the license of the modern novel, 
 English and American, your lecturer is not pre- 
 pared to compare the seams in our social life 
 with the seams in the social life of Greece. 
 Public life offers analogies enough — I will not 
 say for warning — the admonitions of history, 
 that so-called " Philosophy teaching by exam- 
 ples," amount to very little — but for amuse- 
 ment. There is hardly a trick in modern 
 politics that cannot be paralleled, if not in the 
 verse of Aristophanes, in the prose of Greek 
 historians and orators and thinkers. Caucuses 
 and rings and heelers were as familiar to them 
 as to us, and unfortunately the accuracy of the 
 description of the parasites that infest the life 
 of the commonwealth has not helped to extir- 
 pate the brood. The plague-bearing mosquito 
 abides, and has taken on a Greek name, and an 
 Apollo is needed to quell the plague-bearing 
 rats that are the successors of the plague- 
 bearing mice of antiquity.
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 107 
 
 But I must not allow my discourse to as- 
 sume the pessimistic character so natural to 
 those whose time of life prompts them to 
 extol the past at the expense of the pres- 
 ent. The old teacher, once justly detested, 
 appears to the old pupil glorified by the hues 
 of his own iridescent youth, and the better 
 days of the republic when analyzed by the 
 light of contemporary documents are not the 
 Saturnia regna one fancies them to have been, 
 because of the halo of oratory that encircled 
 the heroes of that time, in the days when life 
 was younger. So I am not going to ransack 
 Plato's Dialogues for melancholy pictures of 
 our present in order to reinforce my parallels 
 of Greek and American life. Our ship of 
 state — a figure we owe ultimately to a Greek 
 poet, Alcaeus, for all the Greek poets were 
 more or less nautical, the Boeotian Pindar as 
 well as the islander Bacchylides — our ship of 
 state has a strange way of righting herself, had 
 that way in the time of the chainbox, which 
 may be supposed to symbolize the days of 
 slavery, and will continue to have it in these
 
 io8 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 times of the water-ballast, which may be sup- 
 posed to represent the wave of prohibition. 
 One danger of which one hears and thinks a 
 great deal is the danger of having said ship 
 swamped by alien passengers, who will in time 
 become crew, become officers. Here in Vir- 
 ginia — in the Southern States generally — the 
 danger does not seem imminent. In fact we 
 are inviting foreigners to embark on our un- 
 dermanned enterprises. But to an old-fash- 
 ioned man one of the charms of a visit to Eng- 
 land is the infrequency of alien names on the 
 signs of the shops. In the retail business sec- 
 tion of the city where I live, the English name 
 is the exception. Nearly all the signs seem to 
 have been made in Germany. When the lin- 
 guist scans the roster of our army and navy, 
 he finds representatives of every European 
 land — as good Americans doubtless as the 
 best, though the names bewray the foreign 
 descent. There is no harm in this, nay much 
 good in it. There is a tingle of adventure in 
 the mingling of blood. Matthew Arnold has 
 held forth on the exceeding preciousness of
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 109 
 
 Celtic blood in quickening the sluggish current 
 of Anglo-Saxon veins, and Du Maurier has 
 insisted humorously on the importance, if not 
 the necessity, of a dash of Jewish ichor for 
 the highest manifestation of genius. We all 
 feel that we can care for the natives of West- 
 ern Europe. Other problems are more serious. 
 A dear friend of mine, now numbered with 
 most of my friends, an alumnus of this uni- 
 versity, used to insist years and years ago with 
 what was considered humorous exaggeration 
 on the danger of the complete absorption of 
 the original stock of our population in the 
 Mongolian, The Chinese, he maintained, had 
 a mission analogous to that of the Norway 
 rat, and the introduction to Virginius Dab- 
 ney's chief literary performance, Don Miff, is 
 addressed to his almond-eyed descendant. 
 That was many years before statesmen began 
 to discuss gravely the Yellow Peril. 
 
 Now it is not my purpose in these desultory 
 talks of an old student who has spent his life 
 apart from politics to enter into the circle of 
 fire, as it ought to be called, rather than the
 
 no HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 burning question of our relations to Asiatic im- 
 migration, I can only say, so far as the Greek, 
 aspect of the matter goes, that the Greek suc- 
 ceeded in unifying and harmonizing a vast 
 number of foreign elements. When we at- 
 tempt to push our researches into pre-Hellenic 
 times, we encounter a great variety of strains. 
 The names of stream and mountain give up 
 their secrets, and the story of Greek cults re- 
 veals many Hnes of foreign influence and for- 
 eign origin. Great as was the assimilative 
 power of the Greek, not less great, it is to be 
 confidently hoped, is the assimilative power of 
 the American. If we scan the annals of Greek 
 literature narrowly, we find that some of the 
 most characteristic figures are foreigners or 
 half-foreigners. When we think of the great 
 historians, Thucydides looms up as one of the 
 peaks of the biceps Parnassus, and Thucydides 
 was only a semi-Greek. The Holkham bust 
 presents us with the features of an English 
 gentleman, and I have heard Percy Gardner, 
 who believes in the lessons of Greek iconogra- 
 phy, hold forth on the Jewish cast of the
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM iii 
 
 countenance of Zeno the Stoic. After Alex- 
 ander the spread of the Greek language 
 makes It hard to draw the line between Greek 
 and Barbarian. The Asiatic translated his 
 name into Greek, at a later time into Greco- 
 Latin. What did Lucian's mother call the 
 little Samosatan who had to learn Greek in 
 his boyhood, as we have done, but under more 
 advantageous circumstances. We pedants of 
 to-day may criticize his Greek, but we cannot 
 attain to his lightness, his airiness, and only the 
 closest analysis can distinguish the Syrian oil 
 color from the Greek water color. The dom- 
 ination of a nationality comes through its lan- 
 guage. No truer Frenchmen than the Gal- 
 licized Germans of the eighteenth century, 
 and some of the chauvinistes of our times 
 bear unFrench names. And English, or if 
 you choose, the American type of English, is 
 destined to accomplish the same end for the 
 masses of foreigners that come to our shore. 
 A generation, a short time in the history of the 
 race, is not so short in an undulatory world like 
 ours. Things move more slowly in Europe,
 
 113 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 but even there the enclave has to give way, 
 and the tide of the dominant language over- 
 flows the barriers. Even to-day the sacred 
 soil of Attica is occupied mainly by Albanians, 
 but Albanian must yield to Greek — and 
 Italian quarters and Bohemian quarters will 
 not hold their own against the encroachments 
 of the tide of American life. 
 
 And this potent organon of language is 
 wielded by a people at whose versatility the 
 European observer stands aghast. The bar- 
 riers are to be broken down, not only by the 
 tide of affairs, but by the impetuous winds of 
 human will — of American will. Speed, says 
 Henley, and the hug of God's winds. The ver- 
 satility of the Greek was notorious. The ready 
 shift of the Greekling under the Roman Em- 
 pire has been made proverbial by Juvenal ; and 
 Johnson, whom no Frenchman loves, whose 
 popularity is a mystery even to such a sympa- 
 thetic soul as Taine, has imitated Juvenal's 
 characteristic and applied it to the French. 
 And yet it is a Frenchman, as we shall see, that 
 has given most emphatic expression to the as-
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 113 
 
 tonishing versatility of the American genius. 
 The conditions of our colonial life may have 
 had something to do with it, but the same ver- 
 satility can be found in our oldest communities. 
 Some of us oldsters have seen a bishop become 
 a general. Priest, actor, ballet-dancer, musical 
 composer, poet, general — such a combination 
 does not stagger those who have known 
 preacher, lawyer, school-master, horse-jockey, 
 prize-fighter, politician, rolled into one — I beg 
 pardon, politician means all that. True, in 
 serious matters like art, the Greek did not 
 move so readily from one province to another. 
 In fact, the limitation of the prose writer to 
 prose, of the poet to poetry, and so on along 
 all the lines of literary effort, is one of the 
 most striking characteristics of the Greek. 
 But in the various demands of practical life, 
 the life which they saw so steadily and lived 
 so whole. If I may be allowed to adapt a fa- 
 mous line, your Greek was always equal to 
 the occasion, and this mobility shows itself 
 also in the sphere of morals, and here the 
 American is quite his equal. Max O'Rell
 
 114 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 attributed to our English blood the rapid 
 passage from poker to prayers, from three- 
 card monte to four-part psalmody. True, M. 
 Blouet says it is our English blood. It is, I 
 suppose, that " spleen " by which Frenchmen 
 explain everything. But if it is English, it is 
 enhanced by our intense vitality. Not Eng- 
 lish but Greek is the ready receptivity of for- 
 eign ideas. In this respect the Channel is 
 broader than the Atlantic. Nay, there is much 
 that crosses the water to us and then recrosses 
 it to our English cousins. The American 
 scholar Is often more German than the Ger- 
 man. Yes! we are versatile and versatile to 
 a purpose. What does a man like Hopklnson 
 Smith care for the old Greek sneer that has 
 its echo In the English saying " Jack of all 
 trades and master of none " ? What your own 
 Professor Humphreys, with his exact com- 
 mand of all the canons of literature and 
 science? It is to be hoped that the advance of 
 specialization will not rob us of the Greek 
 readiness to turn our hands to anything that 
 lies near. It is the curse of modern machinery
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 115 
 
 that it reduces the human being to a mere 
 feeder of a monster of cogs and belts. Advance 
 did I say? Specialization is as old as Jubal and 
 Tubal Cain. The Egyptians were noted spe- 
 cialists; there were doctors for every part of 
 the body, and Jack the Ripper was a specialist 
 under the name of the paraschistes, or side- 
 splitter, a name that we attach to a very differ- 
 ent function from that of the man who opened 
 bodies for embalming. There were specialists 
 in Greece, specialists in surgery, manufacturers 
 of hair-nets for women; specialists in Rome, 
 who made it their business to efface the scars 
 of branded slaves that had risen in the world. 
 But the Greek note is universality, and it is to 
 be hoped that we shall never lose that Greek 
 note, which is the admiration of all who come 
 to our shores, and which is so important a fac- 
 tor in our subjugation of this vast continent. 
 But before leaving this part of my theme — 
 the likeness of Greek to American, of Ameri- 
 can to Greek — I must not omit one trait that 
 the genuine American and genuine Greek have 
 In common, although I may be behind the
 
 ii6 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 times In asserting It, a trait that belongs to the 
 democratic character of both nationalities. It 
 Is not freedom of speech, that parrhesia of 
 which the Greeks were so proud. A certain 
 bluntness Is found under all forms of govern- 
 ment, but It is a subtler freedom than that — 
 it is freedom from snobbery. Flatterers and 
 parasites the Greeks had with them always. 
 They were conspicuous In the decline of the 
 nationality, and Plutarch has an entertaining 
 essay on the way to distinguish the flatterer 
 from the friend. But they were scarcely less 
 conspicuous in an earlier period, and Ribbeck's 
 dehghtful study of the " Kolax " claims for 
 that variety a semi-religious origin. But a 
 " snob " the Greek never was, and the snob- 
 bery of the American Is an imported snobbery. 
 The Books of Snobs could not have been writ- 
 ten by an American of the old type. That the 
 imported disease, like the English sparrow, 
 has increased greatly and multiplied in this 
 country the satirist may maintain. But 
 the salt water of the herring pond seems 
 to have killed the germ in our American pro-
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 117 
 
 genitors. True, It is associated with high 
 things and high words, but it spoils high 
 things and high words, and the man of old 
 American stock prefers " faith " to " loy- 
 alty " and " obedience " to " homage." Snob- 
 bish commentators cannot understand how 
 Pindar could have called Hiero " friend " ; 
 the Italian student of the poet compares the 
 Theban singer to a Knight of the Order of 
 the Annunziata, who is the peer of his sov- 
 ereign. True Americans are all Knights of 
 a spiritual Annunziata order. 
 
 I have referred to Professor Brander Mat- 
 thews as the great champion of Americanism 
 In language and literature and life, and I have 
 been reading a discourse of his pronounced 
 some years ago, in which he repelled the 
 charge that we i\.merlcans are a people terri- 
 bly practical, systematically hostile to all 
 idealism. And it Is true that if there Is any ad- 
 jective that fits an American in European 
 eyes, it is practical. To be an American is 
 to be practical. A German grammarian de- 
 sirous of vindicating his method to his coun-
 
 ii8 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 trymen emphasized the fact that it had been 
 adopted by a practical American, and that 
 practical American is the man who is address- 
 ing you, a man who was at that time thought 
 by his own countrymen to be steeped in Ger- 
 man idealism. I have therefore been called 
 practical simply because I am an American, 
 just as I have been called a Yankee by a 
 French critic, because I am an American. 
 True, mistakes enough may be made in the 
 application of these sweeping characteristics of 
 a nationality, and I remember that Robert 
 Louis Stevenson records somewhere how he 
 picked out in a New York hotel a cadaverous, 
 omnivorous individual as a typical American, 
 who turned out to be a genuine Briton. What- 
 ever mistakes may be made in applying these 
 characteristics to this man and that, there can 
 be no mistake about the practical feature of 
 our American people. There are those that 
 have denied us energy, and it has been main- 
 tained perhaps by way of paradox that your 
 typical American spends his time in a rocking 
 chair on a back porch, whittling sticks and ex-
 
 AMERICANISM 4ND HELLENISM 119 
 
 emplifying his national indolence by the in- 
 vention of labor-saving machines. Nothing 
 could be more " practical " than the labor- 
 saving machine, as nothing can be more au- 
 dacious than the American protest, futile as 
 it is, against the primal doom of toil. But 
 practical we are and practical was the Greek. 
 The most artistic of races was at the same 
 time the most bent on getting results, and the 
 latest phase of philosophic thought, pragma- 
 tism, most effectively preached by an Ameri- 
 can, is nothing more than the interpretation of 
 a Greek word. The sphere of human work 
 was divided by the Greek into zones of artis- 
 tic creation and practical efficiency, poiein and 
 prattein. Prattein encroached more and more 
 on poiein, but poiein held its own in so far as 
 it gave the life of art to prattein. When 
 Horace put utile before didci, he was follow- 
 ing the Greek order — though the Greek way 
 of mixing liquors differed in different ages, 
 first wine on water, then water on wine. We 
 do not like to think that Shakespeare was so 
 practical a man as the record shows him to
 
 120 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 have been, that he valued so highly the ma- 
 terial results of his work as a dramatist and 
 an actor — but that did not render the work 
 itself less idealistic. But the Greek went fur- 
 ther than that. The artistic work itself must 
 be practical. Every tool must follow the lines 
 of greatest efficiency. Poetry was valuable for 
 its moral lessons. Philosophy was not mere 
 speculation, it was largely ethics. The Greek 
 found himself In Socrates, and Plato was in 
 the first line a teacher of righteousness. When 
 Grote, the friend of John Stuart Mill, was 
 looking for a motto to be prefixed to his work 
 on Plato, he had no difficulty in finding one to 
 rejoice the heart of the utilitarian. The glori- 
 fication of money as the ultimate expression 
 of achievement was ancient Greek as it Is 
 modern American. It was said of Euripides 
 that he hated women so because he loved them 
 so, and all the teachings of Cynic and Stoic — 
 all the preachments against the love of money 
 from the answer of the Pythia to Sparta down 
 to the present day with its praise of the simple 
 life only show that human nature changes
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM izi 
 
 not, and the Greek and the American are ad- 
 vanced types of humanity. " Money talks " 
 is an American saying. The brazen tongue 
 must wag in a golden mouth. " Money, money 
 is the man," is an ancient saying quoted by the 
 loftiest of Greek poets, quoted, it is true, 
 in protest against the domination of filthy 
 lucre, but we, who live in a plutocracy, recog- 
 nize the voice of the people. " Obolus dia- 
 bolus," is the title of one of the sermons 
 preached by the old Augustin friar, Abraham 
 a Sancta Clara, and Greek and American 
 alike are not averse from this form of devil 
 worship. 
 
 I am not at the end of my analogies. They 
 come up on every side, at the bidding of fancy, 
 at the bidding of experience, but I am nearing 
 the limit of my time, and this talk — alas! we 
 have no equivalent for the French causerie — 
 must come to a close in a few minutes. So far 
 as there is any coherence in what I have said, 
 I have tried to illustrate, or at any rate to 
 point out certain resemblances between Greek 
 and American life and character. I have not
 
 122 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 even attempted to be systematic. After an in- 
 ordinately long introduction I dwelt — or 
 rather lighted, for I have not dwelt on any- 
 thing — I touched on American and Greek 
 surroundings, American and Greek position in 
 time, the common republican basis of the 
 American and Greek state, the assimilative 
 power of both nationalities, the versatility and 
 practicality of Greek and American. But 
 concrete examples would be at once more in- 
 teresting and convincing than analysis, and 
 analogies are easily made, easily drawn, it 
 may be said, and as easily unmade, as easily 
 wiped out. What one sees in history is often 
 nothing more than the projection of the in- 
 dividuality of the beholder. We peer into 
 the open eye to see our own image. One 
 statesman reads Plato and gathers from Re- 
 public and Laws lessons of momentous impor- 
 tance for the conduct of the commonwealth. 
 Another reads Plato and vows that he has 
 carried away nothing except Eryximachus' 
 remedy for sneezing, so dramatically intro- 
 duced in the Symposium. And when analogy
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 123 
 
 ventures into the domain of prophecy — we 
 all know how the wise man becomes the wise- 
 acre, and the example of Mr. Freeman, who 
 foresaw the dissolution of the great American 
 commonwealth prefigured in the fate of the 
 Achaean League, is ever before the student of 
 our history. The end has been far other than 
 was dreamed of by the philosophizing histo- 
 rian. The petty states of Greece were swept in- 
 to the current of the Roman Empire, a cur- 
 rent that came from without. The attitude of 
 the Roman to the Greek was that of contempt- 
 uous tolerance, not of half-wondering hatred. 
 Consolidation, fusion, domination, these are 
 the American processes of which Greece knew 
 nothing. Greece was after all a spiritual 
 power, and the lessons that we are to learn 
 come from Rome, as I have already hinted, 
 Rome, once etymologized as the Greek rhome, 
 " strength," anon as the English " stream." 
 And so we come back to the ship of state, 
 which the Greek poet launched so many cen- 
 turies ago. A mighty stream is this on which 
 you and I are borne as part of a proud fleet.
 
 134 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 But there were times when the current meant 
 wreckage; and I turn my eyes from the days 
 of danger and distress, too real to me still 
 for indulgence in fanciful historical parallels. 
 My plea has been for the vitality of the 
 studies to which I have been addicted, and 
 as those studies have been part of my own 
 life — not simply a meros but a melos — I have 
 never disentwined the thews and sinews that 
 have kept me going after a fashion until 
 now. My Greek study has not simply been 
 a marginal note on my American life, and 
 vice versa. My life has been written bu- 
 strophedon fashion, and as I turn the fur- 
 row, the Greek line can't be distinguished 
 from the American. A Southerner, I shared 
 the fortunes of my people in the Civil War, 
 but whether on the edge of battle in the field 
 or in the vise of penury at home, my thoughts 
 were with those who registered the experiences 
 of the Peloponnesian War, with Thucydides 
 and Aristophanes. But I am sure it will be a 
 relief to this personal tone if I can turn on 
 the phonograph and introduce a new speaker
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 125 
 
 on the subject I have tried to sketch. This 
 time I will call on a modern Greek to tell you 
 what he thinks of Hellenism and American- 
 ism, of the relation of Hellas to Hesperia. 
 
 The modern Greek, whatever may be said 
 about his racial affinities with the ancient 
 Greek, commends himself to our affection and 
 regard by his passionate identification of the 
 Hellenes that now are with the Hellenes that 
 once were. It is all living Greece to him. 
 Hellenism is his watchword, and not unGreek 
 is the eager appropriation of all that modern 
 civilization offers. One is constantly reminded 
 of agencies that were set to work seventy or 
 eighty years ago, such as the Society for 
 the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, to 
 which we owe Miiller's History of Greek Lit- 
 erature — a book that can never become obso- 
 lete. A similar society is in active operation 
 in Greece, and one of the prime movers was, 
 I am sorry to say, was my friend, that finest 
 type of the modern Greek, Dimitrios Bikelas, 
 to whom I referred in a previous lecture, 
 the famous author of Loukis Laras, a novel
 
 126 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 that has been translated into almost every 
 European tongue. The name of the series 
 may be roughly rendered Library of Useful 
 Knowledge, and as I was meditating the theme 
 of my present lecture, I came across the num- 
 ber that deals with America. I am rather 
 fond of reading books that depict American 
 life from the point of view of foreigners, and 
 I had just been reading a series of articles in 
 which a modern Greek immigrant expresses 
 his astonishment at the cheapness of Ameri- 
 can viands and the extravagant charges of 
 American bootblacks. So I turned not with- 
 out interest to what our modern Hellene had 
 to say about the modern Hesperia, and I was 
 still more interested to find that the conclud- 
 ing pages of the booklet were given up to a 
 somewhat elaborate parallelism of Hellenism 
 and Americanism. Americanism, the author 
 maintains, is really a revival of Hellenism, 
 and the Americanization of the world, which 
 he seems to consider inevitable, is really car- 
 rying on the good work begun by Alexander. 
 I wish I had space to give in detail his list of
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 127 
 
 analogues, his vindication of American soci- 
 ety as based on the soundest ethical, hygienic 
 and economic principles. Some of these an- 
 alogues I am afraid you would consider fan- 
 ciful, some that are true in principle are 
 hardly borne out by the actual facts. The 
 ancient Spartans, says our author, used to 
 throw into the ravine called Kaiadas all de- 
 fective infants — a proceeding against which 
 the eulogists of Christianity were wont to de- 
 claim with intense abhorrence. Analogous to 
 this, he thinks, is the restriction of immigration 
 to those who are physically fit for the work 
 of life. The modern American, he goes on to 
 say, has the Greek passion for physical per- 
 fection. The America of to-day, like the 
 Greece of yore, reposes on democratic princi- 
 ples. Each man is master of his own fate, 
 and our modern Greek seems to believ^e in 
 presidential potentialities as well as presiden- 
 tial possibilities for every American school- 
 boy. It is indeed very interesting to see how 
 our generous encomiast accepts legislation as 
 realization, how he hails the preachments of
 
 128 HELLAS AND HESPERIA 
 
 divines and lecturers as an assurance of proph- 
 ecies fulfilled. " To will perfection," he 
 seems to think, " is the norm of man," and he 
 is not so far wrong. We are as our ideals. 
 Marriage is to be forbidden to those who are 
 physically and mentally unfit for the connubial 
 relation, and the American child is to be the 
 most perfect product of the age. Oddly 
 enough he does not count the facility of di- 
 vorce as an evidence of our readiness to multi- 
 ply experiments in that direction. The crown- 
 ing glory of Americanism, he declares, is the 
 American woman. The more American wom- 
 en married to Europeans, the better for the 
 European races. The Spartan women in an- 
 tiquity were in great demand as nurses. The 
 American woman ought to be in great demand 
 as a wife — quite apart, he takes care to add, 
 from the substantial dowry so many of them 
 bring to the common stock. America makes 
 for life, for progress. The Americanization 
 of Europe is inevitable — we see it in every 
 port, in every capital of Europe — and moving 
 as it does on Hellenic lines, it is a blessing to
 
 AMERICANISM AND HELLENISM 129 
 
 the world as was the Hellenization of the 
 Orient of old. All this is rather amusing than 
 convincing, and yet there is enough sober 
 truth behind the smiling sophistry to warrant 
 the citation here as an envoi to my own anal- 
 ogies, which, I trust, are at least a little less 
 fanciful than those of my Athenian colleague. 
 And now as I am about to close this lecture, 
 or rather this series of rambling talks, it oc- 
 curs to me that I have omitted one striking 
 trait of the Greek character, which is also a 
 marked feature of our own nationality. Ready 
 wit, audacity, resourcefulness, practicality, all 
 these we have in common with the Greeks. 
 We are versatile as they were, we moralize 
 as they moralized, Franklin is as Theognis, 
 but these are not necessarily amiable ways, and 
 I am going to take refuge in that delightful 
 tolerance for which Matthew Arnold could 
 find no adequate translation, because he 
 thought that epieikeia was a national Greek 
 virtue. He made a shift of rendering it Into 
 English by " sweet reasonableness," and it 
 is to this " sweet reasonableness," this readi-
 
 I30 HELLAS AND HESPERL4 
 
 ness to put up with things, this acceptance of 
 the situation, this large allowance for individ- 
 ual failings, this good humor in the crowded 
 mart of life, this epieikeia which some con- 
 sider the bane of our politics, it is this epiei- 
 keia to which I make my final appeal. The 
 half-consciousness of failure that haunts gen- 
 ius, as I have phrased it, may become the full 
 consciousness of failure to the old student who 
 has submitted his unfashionable wares to the 
 inspection of the new generation. But the 
 new generation has, I trust, retained the char- 
 acteristics as well as the traditions of the old, 
 and your indulgent attention during the course 
 of these deliverances has sustained me to the 
 end of my task.
 
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