The Legacy of Greece | Page 4

development of
tools and media and technical processes. The modern artist can feel that,
though he cannot, perhaps, make as good a statue as Pheidias, he could
here and there have taught Pheidias something: and at any rate he can
try his art on subjects far more varied and more stimulating to his
imagination. In philosophy the mixture is more subtle and more
profound. Philosophy always depends in some sense upon science, yet
the best philosophy seems generally to have in it some eternal quality
of creative imagination. Plato wrote a dialogue about the constitution of
the world, the Timaeus, which was highly influential in later Greece,
but seems to us, with our vastly superior scientific knowledge, almost
nonsensical. Yet when Plato writes about the theory of knowledge or
the ultimate meaning of Justice or of Love, no good philosopher can
afford to leave him aside: the chief question is whether we can rise to
the height and subtlety of his thought.

And here another point emerges, equally simple and equally important
if we are to understand our relation to the past. Suppose a man says: 'I
quite understand that Plato or Aeschylus may have had fine ideas, but
surely anything of value which they said must long before this have
become common property. There is no need to go back to the Greeks
for it. We do not go back and read Copernicus to learn that the earth
goes round the sun.' What is the answer? It is that such a view ignores
exactly this difference between the progressive and the eternal, between
knowledge and imagination. If Harvey discovers that the blood is not
stationary but circulates, if Copernicus discovers that the earth goes
round the sun and not the sun round the earth, those discoveries can
easily be communicated in the most abbreviated form. If a mechanic
invents an improvement on the telephone, or a social reformer puts
some good usage in the place of a bad one, in a few years we shall
probably all be using the improvement without even knowing what it is
or saying Thank you. We may be as stupid as we like, we have in a
sense got the good of it.
But can one apply the same process to Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet?
Can any one tell us in a few words what they come to? Or can a person
get the good of them in any way except one--the way of vivid and
loving study, following and feeling the author's meaning all through?
To suppose, as I believe some people do, that you can get the value of a
great poem by studying an abstract of it in an encyclopaedia or by
reading cursorily an average translation of it, argues really a kind of
mental deficiency, like deafness or colour-blindness. The things that we
have called eternal, the things of the spirit and the imagination, always
seem to lie more in a process than in a result, and can only be reached
and enjoyed by somehow going through the process again. If the value
of a particular walk lies in the scenery, you do not get that value by
taking a short cut or using a fast motor-car.
In looking back, then, upon any vital and significant age of the past we
shall find objects of two kinds. First, there will be things like the Venus
of Milo or the Book of Job or Plato's Republic, which are interesting or
precious in themselves, because of their own inherent qualities;
secondly, there will be things like the Roman code of the Twelve

Tables or the invention of the printing-press or the record of certain
great battles, which are interesting chiefly because they are causes of
other and greater things or form knots in the great web of history--the
first having artistic interest, the second only historical interest, though,
of course, it is obvious that in any concrete case there is generally a
mixture of both.
Now Ancient Greece is important in both ways. For the artist or poet it
has in a quite extraordinary degree the quality of beauty. For instance,
to take a contrast with Rome: if you dig about the Roman Wall in
Cumberland you will find quantities of objects, altars, inscriptions,
figurines, weapons, boots and shoes, which are full of historic interest
but are not much more beautiful than the contents of a modern rubbish
heap. And the same is true of most excavations all over the world. But
if you dig at any classical or sub-classical site in the Greek world,
however unimportant historically, practically every object you find will
be beautiful. The wall itself will be beautiful; the inscriptions will be
beautifully cut; the figurines, however cheap and simple, may have
some intentional grotesques among them, but