On Not Knowing Greek (1925)
For it is vain and foolish to talk of Knowing Greek, since in our
ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since
we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to
laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and
ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a
tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that
we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn
back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of
Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight
resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?
It is obvious in the first place that Greek literature is the impersonal
literature. Those few hundred years that separate John Paston from
Plato, Norwich from Athens, make a chasm which the vast tide of European
chatter can never succeed in crossing. When we read Chaucer, we are
floated up to him insensibly on the current of our ancestors’ lives, and
later, as records increase and memories lengthen, there is scarcely a
figure which has not its nimbus of association, its life and letters,
its wife and family, its house, its character, its happy or dismal
catastrophe. But the Greeks remain in a fastness of their own. Fate has
been kind there too. She has preserved them from vulgarity, Euripides
was eaten by dogs; Æschylus killed by a stone; Sappho leapt from a
cliff. We know no more of them than that. We have their poetry, and that
is all.
But that is not, and perhaps never can be, wholly true. Pick up any play
by Sophocles, read—
Son of him who led our hosts at Troy of old, son of
Agamemnon,
and at once the mind begins to fashion itself surroundings. It makes
some background, even of the most provisional sort, for Sophocles; it
imagines some village, in a remote part of the country, near the sea.
Even nowadays such villages are to be found in the wilder parts of
England, and as we enter them we can scarcely help feeling that here, in
this cluster of cottages, cut off from rail or city, are all the
elements of a perfect existence. Here is the Rectory; here the Manor
house, the farm and the cottages; the church for worship, the club for
meeting, the cricket field for play. Here life is simply sorted out into
its main elements. Each man and woman has his work; each works for the
health or happiness of others. And here, in this little community,
characters become part of the common stock; the eccentricities of the
clergyman are known; the great ladies’ defects of temper; the
blacksmith’s feud with the milkman, and the loves and matings of the
boys and girls. Here life has cut the same grooves for centuries;
customs have arisen; legends have attached themselves to hilltops and
solitary trees, and the village has its history, its festivals, and its
rivalries.
It is the climate that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles
here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists.
We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of
stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and
sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is
instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known
to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street,
not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble;
inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue
peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the
slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy
of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.
That is the quality that first strikes us in Greek literature, the
lightning-quick, sneering, out-of-doors manner. It is apparent in the
most august as well as in the most trivial places. Queens and Princesses
in this very tragedy by Sophocles stand at the door bandying words like
village women, with a tendency, as one might expect, to rejoice in
language, to split phrases into slices, to be intent on verbal victory.
The humour of the people was not good natured like that of our postmen
and cabdrivers. The taunts of men lounging at the street corners had
something cruel in them as well as witty. There is a cruelty in Greek
tragedy which is quite unlike our English brutality: Is not Pentheus,
for example, that highly respectable man, made ridiculous in the
_Bacchæ_ before he is destroyed? In fact, of course, these Queens and
Princesses were out of doors, with the bees buzzing past them, shadows
crossing them, and the wind taking their draperies. They were speaking
to an enormous audience rayed round them on one of those brilliant
southern days when the sun is so hot and yet the air so exciting. The
poet, therefore, had to bethink him, not of some theme which could be
read for hours by people in privacy, but of something emphatic,
familiar, brief, that would carry, instantly and directly, to an
audience of seventeen thousand people, perhaps, with ears and eyes eager
and attentive, with bodies whose muscles would grow stiff if they sat
too long without diversion. Music and dancing he would need, and
naturally would choose one of those legends, like our Tristram and
Iseult, which are known to every one in outline, so that a great fund of
emotion is ready prepared, but can be stressed in a new place by each
new poet.
Sophocles would take the old story of Electra, for instance, but would
at once impose his stamp upon it. Of that, in spite of our weakness and
distortion, what remains visible to us? That his genius was of the
extreme kind in the first place; that he chose a design which, if it
failed, would show its failure in gashes and ruin, not in the gentle
blurring of some insignificant detail; which, if it succeeded, would cut
each stroke to the bone, would stamp each finger-print in marble. His
Electra stands before us like a figure so tightly bound that she can
only move an inch this way, an inch that. But each movement must tell to
the utmost, or, bound as she is, denied the relief of all hints,
repetitions, suggestions, she will be nothing but a dummy, tightly
bound. Her words in crisis are, as a matter of fact, bare; mere cries of
despair, joy, hate
οἲ ‘γὼ τάλαιν’, ὄλωλα τῇδ’ ὲν ἡμέρᾀ.
παῖσον, εἰ σθένεις, διπλῆν.
But these cries give angle and outline to the play. It is thus, with a
thousand differences of degree, that in English literature Jane Austen
shapes a novel. There comes a moment—“I will dance with you,” says
Emma—which rises higher than the rest, which, though not eloquent in
itself, or violent, or made striking by beauty of language, has the
whole weight of the book behind it. In Jane Austen, too, we have the
same sense, though the ligatures are much less tight, that her figures
are bound, and restricted to a few definite movements. She, too, in her
modest, everyday prose, chose the dangerous art where one slip means
death.
But it is not so easy to decide what it is that gives these cries of
Electra in her anguish their power to cut and wound and excite. It is
partly that we know her, that we have picked up from little turns and
twists of the dialogue hints of her character, of her appearance, which,
characteristically, she neglected; of something suffering in her,
outraged and stimulated to its utmost stretch of capacity, yet, as she
herself knows (“my behaviour is unseemly and becomes me ill”), blunted
and debased by the horror of her position, an unwed girl made to witness
her mother’s vileness and denounce it in loud, almost vulgar,
clamour to the world at large. It is partly, too, that we know in
the same way that Clytemnestra is no unmitigated villainess.
“δεινὸν τὸ τίκτειν ἐστίν,” she says—“there is a strange power in
motherhood”. It is no murderess, violent and unredeemed, whom Orestes
kills within the house, and Electra bids him utterly destroy—“strike
again”. No; the men and women standing out in the sunlight before the
audience on the hillside were alive enough, subtle enough, not mere
figures, or plaster casts of human beings.
Yet it is not because we can analyse them into feelings that they
impress us. In six pages of Proust we can find more complicated and
varied emotions than in the whole of the _Electra_. But in the _Electra_
or in the _Antigone_ we are impressed by something different, by
something perhaps more impressive—by heroism itself, by fidelity
itself. In spite of the labour and the difficulty it is this that draws
us back and back to the Greeks; the stable, the permanent, the original
human being is to be found there. Violent emotions are needed to rouse
him into action, but when thus stirred by death, by betrayal, by some
other primitive calamity, Antigone and Ajax and Electra behave in the
way in which we should behave thus struck down; the way in which
everybody has always behaved; and thus we understand them more easily
and more directly than we understand the characters in the _Canterbury
Tales_. These are the originals, Chaucer’s the varieties of the human
species.
It is true, of course, that these types of the original man or woman,
these heroic Kings, these faithful daughters, these tragic Queens who
stalk through the ages always planting their feet in the same places,
twitching their robes with the same gestures, from habit not from
impulse, are among the greatest bores and the most demoralising
companions in the world. The plays of Addison, Voltaire, and a host of
others are there to prove it. But encounter them in Greek. Even in
Sophocles, whose reputation for restraint and mastery has filtered down
to us from the scholars, they are decided, ruthless, direct. A fragment
of their speech broken off would, we feel, colour oceans and oceans of
the respectable drama. Here we meet them before their emotions have been
worn into uniformity. Here we listen to the nightingale whose song
echoes through English literature singing in her own Greek tongue. For
the first time Orpheus with his lute makes men and beasts follow him.
Their voices ring out clear and sharp; we see the hairy tawny bodies at
play in the sunlight among the olive trees, not posed gracefully on
granite plinths in the pale corridors of the British Museum. And then
suddenly, in the midst of all this sharpness and compression, Electra,
as if she swept her veil over her face and forbade us to think of her
any more, speaks of that very nightingale: “that bird distraught with
grief, the messenger of Zeus. Ah, queen of sorrow, Niobe, thee I deem
divine—thee; who evermore weepest in thy rocky tomb”.
And as she silences her own complaint, she perplexes us again with the
insoluble question of poetry and its nature, and why, as she speaks
thus, her words put on the assurance of immortality. For they are Greek;
we cannot tell how they sounded; they ignore the obvious sources of
excitement; they owe nothing of their effect to any extravagance of
expression, and certainly they throw no light upon the speaker’s
character or the writer’s. But they remain, something that has been
stated and must eternally endure.
Yet in a play how dangerous this poetry, this lapse from the particular
to the general must of necessity be, with the actors standing there in
person, with their bodies and their faces passively waiting to be made
use of! For this reason the later plays of Shakespeare, where there is
more of poetry than of action, are better read than seen, better
understood by leaving out the actual body than by having the body, with
all its associations and movements, visible to the eye. The intolerable
restrictions of the drama could be loosened, however, if a means could
be found by which what was general and poetic, comment, not action,
could be freed without interrupting the movement of the whole. It is
this that the choruses supply; the old men or women who take no active
part in the drama, the undifferentiated voices who sing like birds in
the pauses of the wind; who can comment, or sum up, or allow the poet to
speak himself or supply, by contrast, another side to his conception.
Always in imaginative literature, where characters speak for themselves
and the author has no part, the need of that voice is making itself
felt. For though Shakespeare (unless we consider that his fools and
madmen supply the part) dispensed with the chorus, novelists are always
devising some substitute—Thackeray speaking in his own person, Fielding
coming out and addressing the world before his curtain rises. So to
grasp the meaning of the play the chorus is of the utmost importance.
One must be able to pass easily into those ecstasies, those wild and
apparently irrelevant utterances, those sometimes obvious and
commonplace statements, to decide their relevance or irrelevance, and
give them their relation to the play as a whole.
We must “be able to pass easily”; but that of course is exactly what we
cannot do. For the most part the choruses, with all their obscurities,
must be spelt out and their symmetry mauled. But we can guess that
Sophocles used them not to express something outside the action of the
play, but to sing the praises of some virtue, or the beauties of some
place mentioned in it. He selects what he wishes to emphasise and sings
of white Colonus and its nightingale, or of love unconquered in fight.
Lovely, lofty, and serene his choruses grow naturally out of his
situations, and change, not the point of view, but the mood. In
Euripides, however, the situations are not contained within themselves;
they give off an atmosphere of doubt, of suggestion, of questioning; but
if we look to the choruses to make this plain we are often baffled
rather than instructed. At once in the _Bacchæ_ we are in the world of
psychology and doubt; the world where the mind twists facts and changes
them and makes the familiar aspects of life appear new and questionable.
What is Bacchus, and who are the Gods, and what is man’s duty to them,
and what the rights of his subtle brain? To these questions the chorus
makes no reply, or replies mockingly, or speaks darkly as if the
straitness of the dramatic form had tempted Euripides to violate it in
order to relieve his mind of its weight. Time is so short and I have so
much to say, that unless you will allow me to place together two
apparently unrelated statements and trust to you to pull them together,
you must be content with a mere skeleton of the play I might have given
you. Such is the argument. Euripides therefore suffers less than
Sophocles and less than Æschylus from being read privately in a room,
and not seen on a hillside in the sunshine. He can be acted in the mind;
he can comment upon the questions of the moment; more than the others he
will vary in popularity from age to age.
If then in Sophocles the play is concentrated in the figures themselves,
and in Euripides is to be retrieved from flashes of poetry and questions
far flung and unanswered, Æschylus makes these little dramas (the
_Agamemnon_ has 1663 lines; _Lear_ about 2600), tremendous by stretching
every phrase to the utmost, by sending them floating forth in metaphors,
by bidding them rise up and stalk eyeless and majestic through the
scene. To understand him it is not so necessary to understand Greek as
to understand poetry. It is necessary to take that dangerous leap
through the air without the support of words which Shakespeare also asks
of us. For words, when opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give
out, must be blown astray, and only by collecting in companies convey
the meaning which each one separately is too weak to express. Connecting
them in a rapid flight of the mind we know instantly and instinctively
what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into any other
words. There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry; we
cannot know exactly what it means. Take this from the Agamemnon for
instance—
ὀμμάτων δ ἐν ἀχηνίαις ἔρρει πᾶσ’ Ἀφροδίτα.
The meaning is just on the far side of language. It is the meaning which
in moments of astonishing excitement and stress we perceive in our minds
without words; it is the meaning that Dostoevsky (hampered as he was by
prose and as we are by translation) leads us to by some astonishing run
up the scale of emotions and points at but cannot indicate; the meaning
that Shakespeare succeeds in snaring.
Æschylus thus will not give, as Sophocles gives, the very words that
people might have spoken, only so arranged that they have in some
mysterious way a general force, a symbolic power, nor like Euripides
will he combine incongruities and thus enlarge his little space, as a
small room is enlarged by mirrors in odd corners. By the bold and running
use of metaphor he will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but
the reverberation and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing
has made; close enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough
to heighten, enlarge, and make splendid.
For none of these dramatists had the license which belongs to the
novelist, and, in some degree, to all writers of printed books, of
modelling their meaning with an infinity of slight touches which can
only be properly applied by reading quietly, carefully, and sometimes
two or three times over. Every sentence had to explode on striking the
ear, however slowly and beautifully the words might then descend, and
however enigmatic might their final purport be. No splendour or richness
of metaphor could have saved the _Agamemnon_ if either images or
allusions of the subtlest or most decorative had got between us and the
naked cry
ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶ. ὢ ’πολλον, ὢ ’πολλον.
Dramatic they had to be at whatever cost.
But winter fell on these villages, darkness and extreme cold descended
on the hillside. There must have been some place indoors where men
could retire, both in the depths of winter and in the summer heats,
where they could sit and drink, where they could lie stretched at their
ease, where they could talk. It is Plato, of course, who reveals the
life indoors, and describes how, when a party of friends met and had
eaten not at all luxuriously and drunk a little wine, some handsome boy
ventured a question, or quoted an opinion, and Socrates took it up,
fingered it, turned it round, looked at it this way and that, swiftly
stripped it of its inconsistencies and falsities and brought the whole
company by degrees to gaze with him at the truth. It is an exhausting
process; to contract painfully upon the exact meaning of words; to judge
what each admission involves; to follow intently, yet critically, the
dwindling and changing of opinion as it hardens and intensifies into
truth. Are pleasure and good the same? Can virtue be taught? Is virtue
knowledge? The tired or feeble mind may easily lapse as the remorseless
questioning proceeds; but no one, however weak, can fail, even if he
does not learn more from Plato, to love knowledge better. For as the
argument mounts from step to step, Protagoras yielding, Socrates pushing
on, what matters is not so much the end we reach as our manner of
reaching it. That all can feel—the indomitable honesty, the courage,
the love of truth which draw Socrates and us in his wake to the summit
where, if we too may stand for a moment, it is to enjoy the greatest
felicity of which we are capable.
Yet such an expression seems ill fitted to describe the state of mind of
a student to whom, after painful argument, the truth has been revealed.
But truth is various; truth comes to us in different disguises; it is
not with the intellect alone that we perceive it. It is a winter’s
night; the tables are spread at Agathon’s house; the girl is playing the
flute; Socrates has washed himself and put on sandals; he has stopped in
the hall; he refuses to move when they send for him. Now Socrates has
done; he is bantering Alcibiades; Alcibiades takes a fillet and binds it
round “this wonderful fellow’s head”. He praises Socrates. “For he cares
not for mere beauty, but despises more than any one can imagine all
external possessions, whether it be beauty or wealth or glory, or any
other thing for which the multitude felicitates the possessor. He
esteems these things and us who honour them, as nothing, and lives among
men, making all the objects of their admiration the playthings of his
irony. But I know not if any one of you has ever seen the divine images
which are within, when he has been opened and is serious. I have seen
them, and they are so supremely beautiful, so golden, divine, and
wonderful, that everything which Socrates commands surely ought to be
obeyed even like the voice of a God.” All this flows over the arguments
of Plato—laughter and movement; people getting up and going out; the
hour changing; tempers being lost; jokes cracked; the dawn rising.
Truth, it seems, is various; Truth is to be pursued with all our
faculties. Are we to rule out the amusements, the tendernesses, the
frivolities of friendship because we love truth? Will truth be quicker
found because we stop our ears to music and drink no wine, and sleep
instead of talking through the long winter’s night? It is not to the
cloistered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude that we are to
turn, but to the well-sunned nature, the man who practises the art of
living to the best advantage, so that nothing is stunted but some things
are permanently more valuable than others.
So in these dialogues we are made to seek truth with every part of us.
For Plato, of course, had the dramatic genius. It is by means of that,
by an art which conveys in a sentence or two the setting and the
atmosphere, and then with perfect adroitness insinuates itself into the
coils of the argument without losing its liveliness and grace, and then
contracts to bare statement, and then, mounting, expands and soars in
that higher air which is generally reached only by the more extreme
measures of poetry—it is this art which plays upon us in so many ways
at once and brings us to an exultation of mind which can only be reached
when all the powers are called upon to contribute their energy to the
whole.
But we must beware. Socrates did not care for “mere beauty”, by which he
meant, perhaps, beauty as ornament. A people who judged as much as the
Athenians did by ear, sitting out-of-doors at the play or listening to
argument in the market-place, were far less apt than we are to break off
sentences and appreciate them apart from the context. For them there
were no Beauties of Hardy, Beauties of Meredith, Sayings from George
Eliot. The writer had to think more of the whole and less of the detail.
Naturally, living in the open, it was not the lip or the eye that struck
them, but the carriage of the body and the proportions of its parts.
Thus when we quote and extract we do the Greeks more damage than we do
the English. There is a bareness and abruptness in their literature
which grates upon a taste accustomed to the intricacy and finish of
printed books. We have to stretch our minds to grasp a whole devoid of
the prettiness of detail or the emphasis of eloquence. Accustomed to
look directly and largely rather than minutely and aslant, it was safe
for them to step into the thick of emotions which blind and bewilder an
age like our own. In the vast catastrophe of the European war our
emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before
we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction. The only
poets who spoke to the purpose spoke in the sidelong, satiric manner of
Wilfrid Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. It was not possible for them to be
direct without being clumsy; or to speak simply of emotion without being
sentimental. But the Greeks could say, as if for the first time, “Yet
being dead they have not died”. They could say, “If to die nobly is the
chief part of excellence, to us out of all men Fortune gave this lot;
for hastening to set a crown of freedom on Greece we lie possessed of
praise that grows not old”. They could march straight up, with their
eyes open; and thus fearlessly approached, emotions stand still and
suffer themselves to be looked at.
But again (the question comes back and back), Are we reading Greek as it
was written when we say this? When we read these few words cut on a
tombstone, a stanza in a chorus, the end or the opening of a dialogue of
Plato’s, a fragment of Sappho, when we bruise our minds upon some
tremendous metaphor in the _Agamemnon_ instead of stripping the branch
of its flowers instantly as we do in reading _Lear_—are we not reading
wrongly? losing our sharp sight in the haze of associations? reading
into Greek poetry not what they have but what we lack? Does not the
whole of Greece heap itself behind every line of its literature? They
admit us to a vision of the earth unravaged, the sea unpolluted, the
maturity, tried but unbroken, of mankind. Every word is reinforced by a
vigour which pours out of olive-tree and temple and the bodies of the
young. The nightingale has only to be named by Sophocles and she sings;
the grove has only to be called ἄβατον, “untrodden”, and we
imagine the twisted branches and the purple violets. Back and back we
are drawn to steep ourselves in what, perhaps, is only an image of the
reality, not the reality itself, a summer’s day imagined in the heart of
a northern winter. Chief among these sources of glamour and perhaps
misunderstanding is the language. We can never hope to get the whole
fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English. We cannot hear it, now
dissonant, now harmonious, tossing sound from line to line across a
page. We cannot pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals
by which a phrase is made to hint, to turn, to live. Nevertheless it is
the language that has us most in bondage; the desire for that which
perpetually lures us back. First there is the compactness of the
expression. Shelley takes twenty-one words in English to translate
thirteen words of Greek.
πᾶς γοῦν ποιητὴς γίγνεται, κἂν ἄμουσος ᾖ τὸ πρίν, οὗ ἂν Ἕρως
ἅψηται
. . . For every one, even if before he were ever so undisciplined,
becomes a poet as soon as he is touched by love.
Every ounce of fat has been pared off, leaving the flesh firm. Then,
spare and bare as it is, no language can move more quickly, dancing,
shaking, all alive, but controlled. Then there are the words themselves
which, in so many instances, we have made expressive to us of our own
emotions, _thalassa, thanatos, anthos, aster_—to take the first that
come to hand; so clear, so hard, so intense, that to speak plainly yet
fittingly without blurring the outline or clouding the depths Greek is
the only expression. It is useless, then, to read Greek in translations.
Translators can but offer us a vague equivalent; their language is
necessarily full of echoes and associations. Professor Mackail says
“wan”, and the age of Burne-Jones and Morris is at once evoked. Nor can
the subtler stress, the flight and the fall of the words, be kept even
by the most skilful of scholars—
. . . thee, who evermore weepest in thy rocky tomb
is not
ἅτ’ ἐν τάφῳ πετραίῳ,
αἰ, δακρύεις.
Further, in reckoning the doubts and difficulties there is this
important problem—Where are we to laugh in reading Greek? There is a
passage in the _Odyssey_ where laughter begins to steal upon us, but if
Homer were looking we should probably think it better to control our
merriment. To laugh instantly it is almost necessary (though
Aristophanes may supply us with an exception) to laugh in English.
Humour, after all, is closely bound up with a sense of the body. When we
laugh at the humour of Wycherley, we are laughing with the body of that
burly rustic who was our common ancestor on the village green. The
French, the Italians, the Americans, who derive physically from so
different a stock, pause, as we pause in reading Homer, to make sure
that they are laughing in the right place, and the pause is fatal. Thus
humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue, and when
we turn from Greek to Elizabethan literature it seems, after a long
silence, as if our great age were ushered in by a burst of laughter.
These are all difficulties, sources of misunderstanding, of distorted
and romantic, of servile and snobbish passion. Yet even for the
unlearned some certainties remain. Greek is the impersonal literature;
it is also the literature of masterpieces. There are no schools; no
forerunners; no heirs. We cannot trace a gradual process working in many
men imperfectly until it expresses itself adequately at last in one.
Again, there is always about Greek literature that air of vigour which
permeates an “age”, whether it is the age of Æschylus, or Racine, or
Shakespeare. One generation at least in that fortunate time is blown on
to be writers to the extreme; to attain that unconsciousness which means
that the consciousness is stimulated to the highest extent; to surpass
the limits of small triumphs and tentative experiments. Thus we have
Sappho with her constellations of adjectives, Plato daring extravagant
flights of poetry in the midst of prose; Thucydides, constricted and
contracted; Sophocles gliding like a shoal of trout smoothly and
quietly, apparently motionless, and then with a flicker of fins off and
away; while in the _Odyssey_ we have what remains the triumph of
narrative, the clearest and at the same time the most romantic story of
the fortunes of men and women.
The _Odyssey_ is merely a story of adventure, the instinctive
story-telling of a sea-faring race. So we may begin it, reading quickly
in the spirit of children wanting amusement to find out what happens
next. But here is nothing immature; here are full-grown people, crafty,
subtle, and passionate. Nor is the world itself a small one, since the
sea which separates island from island has to be crossed by little
hand-made boats and is measured by the flight of the sea-gulls. It is
true that the islands are not thickly populated, and the people, though
everything is made by hand, are not closely kept at work. They have had
time to develop a very dignified, a very stately society, with an
ancient tradition of manners behind it, which makes every relation at
once orderly, natural, and full of reserve. Penelope crosses the room;
Telemachus goes to bed; Nausicaa washes her linen; and their actions
seem laden with beauty because they do not know that they are beautiful,
have been born to their possessions, are no more self-conscious than
children, and yet, all those thousands of years ago, in their little
islands, know all that is to be known. With the sound of the sea in
their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they are even more
aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of
life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own
standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of
existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when
we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and
its consolations, of our own age.