VII

What, in the next place, can I say of Greek, save that, as Latin gave our fathers the model of prose, Greek was the source of it all, the goddess and genius of the well-head? And, casting about to illustrate, as well as may be, what I mean by this, I hit on a minor dialogue of Plato, the "Phaedrus," and choose you a short passage in Edward FitzGerald's rendering:

When Socrates and Phaedrus have discoursed away the noon-day under the plane trees by the Ilissus, they rise to depart toward the city. But Socrates (pointing perhaps to some images of Pan and other sylvan deities) says it is not decent to leave their haunts without praying to them, and he prays:

'O auspicious Pan, and ye other deities of this place, grant to me to become beautiful inwardly, and that all my outward goods may prosper my inner soul. Grant that I may esteem wisdom the only riches, and that I may have so much gold as temperance can handsomely carry.

  'Have we yet aught else to pray for, Phaedrus? For myself I
  seem to have prayed enough.'

Phaedrus: 'Pray as much for me also: for friends have all in common.'

Socrates: 'Even so be it. Let us depart'

To this paternoster of Socrates, reported more than four centuries before Christ taught the Lord's Prayer, let me add an attempted translation of the lines that close Homer's hymn to the Delian Apollo. Imagine the old blind poet on the beach chanting to the islanders the glorious boast of the little island—how it of all lands had harboured Leto in her difficult travail; how she gave birth to the Sun God; how the immortal child, as the attendant goddesses touched his lips with ambrosia, burst his swaddling bands and stood up, sudden, a god erect:

  But he, the Sun-God, did no sooner taste
  That food divine than every swaddling band
     Burst strand by strand,
  And burst the belt above his panting waist—
     All hanging loose
  About him as he stood and gave command:
  'Fetch me my lyre, fetch me my curving bow!
  And, taught by these, shall know
  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 mountain-side
  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.