The Legacy of Greece | Page 5

the rest will have a
special truthfulness and grace; the vases will be of good shapes and the
patterns will be beautiful patterns. If you happen to dig in a
burying-place and come across some epitaphs on the dead, they will
practically all--even when the verses do not quite scan and the words
are wrongly spelt--have about them this inexplicable touch of beauty.
I am anxious not to write nonsense about this. One could prove the
point in detail by taking any collection of Greek epitaphs, and that is
the only way in which it can be proved. The beauty is a fact, and if we
try to analyse the sources of it we shall perhaps in part understand how
it has come to pass.
In the first place, it is not a beauty of ornament; it is a beauty of
structure, a beauty of rightness and simplicity. Compare an athlete in
flannels playing tennis and a stout dignitary smothered in gold robes.
Or compare a good modern yacht, swift, lithe, and plain, with a
lumbering heavily gilded sixteenth-century galleon, or even with a
Chinese state junk: the yacht is far the more beautiful though she has

not a hundredth part of the ornament. It is she herself that is beautiful,
because her lines and structure are right. The others are essentially
clumsy and, therefore, ugly things, dabbed over with gold and paint.
Now ancient Greek things for the most part have the beauty of the
yacht. The Greeks used paint a good deal, but apart from that a Greek
temple is almost as plain as a shed: people accustomed to arabesques
and stained glass and gargoyles can very often see nothing in it. A
Greek statue has as a rule no ornament at all: a young man racing or
praying, an old man thinking, there it stands expressed in a stately and
simple convention, true or false, the anatomy and the surfaces right or
wrong, aiming at no beauty except the truest. It would probably seem
quite dull to the maker of a mediaeval wooden figure of a king which I
remember seeing in a town in the east of Europe: a crown blazing with
many-coloured glass, a long crimson robe covered with ornaments and
beneath them an idiot face, no bones, no muscles, no attitude. That is
not what a Greek meant by beauty. The same quality holds to a great
extent of Greek poetry. Not, of course, that the artistic convention was
the same, or at all similar, for treating stone and for treating language.
Greek poetry is statuesque in the sense that it depends greatly on its
organic structure; it is not in the least so in the sense of being cold or
colourless or stiff. But Greek poetry on the whole has a bareness and
severity which disappoints a modern reader, accustomed as he is to
lavish ornament and exaggeration at every turn. It has the same
simplicity and straightforwardness as Greek sculpture. The poet has
something to say and he says it as well and truly as he can in the
suitable style, and if you are not interested you are not. With some
exceptions which explain themselves he does not play a thousand pretty
tricks and antics on the way, so that you may forget the dullness of
what he says in amusement at the draperies in which he wraps it.
But here comes an apparent difficulty. Greek poetry, we say, is very
direct, very simple, very free from irrelevant ornament. And yet when
we translate it into English and look at our translation, our main feeling,
I think, is that somehow the glory has gone: a thing that was high and
lordly has become poor and mean. Any decent Greek scholar when he
opens one of his ancient poets feels at once the presence of something
lofty and rare--something like the atmosphere of Paradise Lost. But the

language of Paradise Lost is elaborately twisted and embellished into
loftiness and rarity; the language of the Greek poem is simple and
direct. What does this mean?
I can only suppose that the normal language of Greek poetry is in itself
in some sense sublime. Most critics accept this as an obvious fact, yet,
if true, it is a very strange fact and worth thinking about. It depends
partly on mere euphony: Khaireis horôn fôs is probably more
beautiful in sound than 'You rejoice to see the light', but euphony
cannot be everything. The sound of a great deal of Greek poetry, either
as we pronounce it, or as the ancients pronounced it, is to modern ears
almost ugly. It depends partly, perhaps, on the actual structure of the
Greek language: philologists tell us that, viewed as a specimen, it is in
structure and growth and in