All men, through me, the unfaltering will of Zeus!”
So spake the unshorn God, the Archer bold,
And turn’d to tread the ways of Earth so wide;
While they, all they, had marvel to behold
How Delos broke in gold
Beneath his feet, as on a mountainside
Sudden, in Spring, a tree is glorified
And canopied with blossoms manifold.
But he went swinging with a careless stride,
Proud, in his new artillery bedight,
Up rocky Cynthus, and the isles descried—
All his, and their inhabitants—for wide,
Wide as he roam’d, ran these in rivalry
To build him temples in many groves:
And these be his, and all the isles he loves,
And every foreland height,
And every river hurrying to the sea.
But chief in thee,
Delos, as first it was, is his delight.
Where the long-robed Ionians, each with mate
And children, pious to his altar throng,
And, decent, celebrate
His birth with boxing-match and dance and song:
So that a stranger, happening them among,
Would deem that these Ionians have no date,
Being ageless, all so met;
And he should gaze
And marvel at their ways,
Health, wealth, the comely face
On man and woman—envying their estate—
And yet
You shall he least be able to forget,
You maids of Delos, dear ones, as ye raise
The hymn to Phoebus, Leto, Artemis,
In triune praise,
Then slide your song back upon ancient days
And men whose very name forgotten is,
And women who have lived and gone their ways:
And make them live agen,
Charming the tribes of men,
Whose speech ye mock with pretty mimicries
So true
They almost woo
The hearer to believe he’s singing too!
Speed me, Apollo: speed me, Artemis!
And you, my dears, farewell! Remember me
Hereafter if, from any land that is,
Some traveller question ye—
“Maidens, who was the sweetest man of speech
Fared hither, ever chanted on this beach?”
I you beseech
Make answer to him, civilly—
“Sir, he was just a blind man, and his home
In rocky Chios. But his songs were best,
And shall be ever in the days to come.”
Say that: and as I quest
In fair wall’d cities far, I’ll tell them there
(They’ll list, for ’twill be true)
Of Delos and of you.
But chief and evermore my song shall be
Of Prince Apollo, lord of Archery.
God of the Silver Bow, whom Leto bare—
Leto, the lovely-tress’d.
Did time permit, I might quote you a chorus of Aeschylus, a passage from Thucydides or from Aristotle, to illustrate Gibbon’s saying that the Greek language “gave a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of metaphysics.” But there it is, and it has haunted our literature; at first filtering through Latin, at length breaking from Constantinople in flood and led to us, to Oxford and Cambridge, by Erasmus, by Grocyn:
Thee, that lord of splendid lore
Orient from old Hellas’ shore.
To have a sense of Greek, too, is to own a corrective of taste. I quote another old schoolmaster here—a dead friend, Sidney Irwin:
What the Greeks disliked was extravagance, caprice, boastfulness, and display of all kinds. … The Greeks hated all monsters. The quaint phrase in the Odyssey about the Queen of the Laestrygones—“She was tall as a mountain, and they hated her”—would have seemed to them most reasonable. …
To read Greek is to have a perpetual witness to the virtue of pruning—of condensing—a perpetual protest against all that crowds, and swells, and weakens the writer’s purpose. To forget this is but to “confound our skill in covetousness.” We cannot all be writers … but we all wish to have good taste, and good taste is born of a generous caution about letting oneself go. I say generous, for caution is seldom generous—but it is a generous mood which is in no haste to assert itself. To consider the thing, the time, the place, the person, and to take yourself and your own feelings only fifth is to be armour-proof against bad taste.
VIII
They tell us that Greek is going, here. Well, I hold no brief for compulsory Greek; and I shall say but one word on it. I put it, rather idly, to a vote in a Cambridge Combination Room, the other day, and was amazed to find how the votes were divided. The men of science were by no means unanimous. They owned that there was much to be said even for compulsory Greek, if only Greek had been intelligently taught. And with that, of course, I agree: for to learn Greek is, after all, a baptism into a noble cult. The Romans knew that. I believe that, even yet, if the schools would rebuild their instruction in Greek so as to make it interesting, as it ought to be, from the first, we should oust those birds who croak and chatter upon the walls of our old universities. I find the following in FitzGerald’s Polonius:
An old ruinous tower which had harboured innumerable jackdaws, sparrows, and bats, was at length repaired. When the masons left it, the jackdaws, sparrows, and bats came back in search of their old dwellings. But these were all filled up. “Of what use now is this great building?” said they, “come let us forsake this useless stone-heap.”
And the beauty of this little apologue is that you can read it either way.
IX
But, although a student of English Literature be ignorant of Greek and Latin as languages, may he not have Greek and Latin literature widely opened to him by intelligent translations? The question has often been asked, but I ask it again. May not some translations open a door to him by which he can see them through an atmosphere, and in that atmosphere the authentic ancient gods walking: so that returning upon English literature he may recognise them there, too, walking and talking in a garden of values? The highest poetical speech of any one language defies, in my belief, translation into any other. But Herodotus loses little, and North is every whit as good as Plutarch.
Sigh no more, ladies; ladies, sigh no more!
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in
