The Legacy of Greece | Page 6

power of expressing things, the most
perfect language they know. And certainly one often finds that a
thought can be expressed with ease and grace in Greek which becomes
clumsy and involved in Latin, English, French or German. But neither
of these causes goes, I think, to the root of the matter.
What is it that gives words their character and makes a style high or
low? Obviously, their associations; the company they habitually keep
in the minds of those who use them. A word which belongs to the
language of bars and billiard saloons will become permeated by the
normal standard of mind prevalent in such places; a word which
suggests Milton or Carlyle will have the flavour of those men's minds
about it. I therefore cannot resist the conclusion that, if the language of
Greek poetry has, to those who know it intimately, this special quality
of keen austere beauty, it is because the minds of the poets who used
that language were habitually toned to a higher level both of intensity
and of nobility than ours. It is a finer language because it expresses the
minds of finer men. By 'finer men' I do not necessarily mean men who
behaved better, either by our standards or by their own; I mean men to
whom the fine things of the world, sunrise and sea and stars and the
love of man for man, and strife and the facing of evil for the sake of
good, and even common things like meat and drink, and evil things like
hate and terror, had, as it were, a keener edge than they have for us and
roused a swifter and a nobler reaction.

Let us resume this argument before going further. We start from the
indisputable fact that the Greeks of about the fifth century B. C. did for
some reason or other produce various works of art, buildings and
statues and books, especially books, which instead of decently dying or
falling out of fashion in the lifetime of the men who made them, lasted
on and can still cause high thoughts and intense emotions. In trying to
explain this strange fact we notice that the Greeks had a great and
pervading instinct for beauty, and for beauty of a particular kind. It is a
beauty which never lies in irrelevant ornament, but always in the very
essence and structure of the object made. In literature we found that the
special beauty which we call Greek depends partly on the directness,
truthfulness, and simplicity with which the Greeks say what they want
to say, and partly on a special keenness and nobility in the language,
which seems to be the natural expression of keen and noble minds. Can
we in any way put all these things together so as to explain them--or at
any rate to hold them together more clearly?
An extremely old and often misleading metaphor will help us. People
have said: 'The world was young then.' Of course, strictly speaking, it
was not. In the total age of the world or of man the two thousand odd
years between us and Pericles do not count for much. Nor can we
imagine that a man of sixty felt any more juvenile in the fifth century B.
C. than he does now. It was just the other way, because at that time
there were no spectacles or false teeth. Yet in a sense the world was
young then, at any rate our western world, the world of progress and
humanity. For the beginnings of nearly all the great things that
progressive minds now care for were then being laid in Greece.
Youth, perhaps, is not exactly the right word. There are certain
plants--some kinds of aloe, for instance--which continue for an
indefinite number of years in a slow routine of ordinary life close to the
ground, and then suddenly, when they have stored enough vital force,
grow ten feet high and burst into flower, after which, no doubt, they die
or show signs of exhaustion. Apart from the dying, it seems as if
something like that happened from time to time to the human race, or to
such parts of it as really bear flowers at all. For most races and nations
during the most of their life are not progressive but simply stagnant,

sometimes just managing to preserve their standard customs,
sometimes slipping back to the slough. That is why history has nothing
to say about them. The history of the world consists mostly in the
memory of those ages, quite few in number, in which some part of the
world has risen above itself and burst into flower or fruit.
We ourselves happen to live in the midst or possibly in the close of one
such period. More change has