LECTURES ON CLASSICAL SUBJECTS.*
THE strongest argument against the decay of Greek, so eagerly wished for by the modern prophets of education, is the vitality of classical studies. At no time since the revival of learning have Greek and Latin been more sedu- lously and intelligently studied. Not only has research brought to light many works hitherto known only by name, but scholars have not been wanting to annotate and explain them. Of course, if knowledge for its own sake is of no value, then the classics may go with most of the sciences into oblivion. But so long as we prize a knowledge of the past, Latin and Greek will be recognised as the best means of discipline yet revealed to us. We hear every day of the over- whelming importance of practical training ; yet classical scholars are more energetic than ever, and the literature of their subject is always increasing.
Professor Hardie's book, for instance, has no practical application, and yet needs no apology. It deals, not with the niceties of scholarship, but with the broader questions suggested by an intelligent reading of the Greek and Latin literatures. The author discusses the feeling of the ancient poets for Nature, the beliefs of the Greeks and Romans con- cerning the life after death, the element of romance in ancient literature ; and he discusses them all with a clearness and moderation which deserve the highest praise. But Professor Hardie, like the most of his colleagues, is not quite free from pedantry. He has dwelt so long with the ancients that he regards them as a kind of ingenuous surprise. He seems as if he did not expect them to have the same views of life and the future as ourselves. He is too apt to take the unexpressed for the non-existent, forgetting that the poet does not always exhaust his opinions and beliefs in his works. For instance, there can be little doubt to those, who read the classics with the same simplicity which they bring to the study of modern literature that the ancients entertained a general belief in the life after death. As Aristotle said, they were not at one regarding the survival of the soul. But at no time has there been complete unanimity upon the supernatural, and the Greeks do not seem to have differed more widely than their successors in civilisation. Homer was no dogmatist, but his heroes did not die. Menelaus, said the poet, would be transported to the Elysian plains; and Achilles implored the shade of Patroclus "not to be wroth with him, if he heard in Hades that Achilles had accepted a ransom for Hector." And at a much later time Lucretius proved by his energetic advocacy that scepticism was un- popular, and contrary to the prevailing belief. It is true that Professor Hardie accepts the ancients' faith in an after life, but we think that he is at too great pains to prove the obvious. For, indeed, the Greeks and Romans had not only a simple faith, they had as many superstitions as the most credulous folk of the Middle Age. They believed devoutly in ghosts and magic. They had their professors of the black art, as cunning and dangerous as Gilles de Betz himself. Professor Hardie himself quotes from the Mostellaria of Plautus an admirable scene in which a haunted house is described. And coming down to later times, we may find in the works of Lucian innumerable proofs of magic and superstition. There were witches in Thessaly, as readers of Apuleius will remember ; and it is strange that Professor Hardie has not quoted a line from that ingenious author, who not only
• Lectures on Classical Subjects. By W. B. Hardie, X.A. London: Itscioillas and Co. [7s. net. described the sorceries of his time in his Metamorphoses, but was himself unjustly charged with the crime of witchcraft.
The least satisfactory chapter in the book is that entitled " The Vein of Romance in Greek and Roman Literature." In the first place, Professor Hardie gives us no satisfactory definition of romance, and only indirectly describes the romantic poet. And he describes him in terms so contra- dictory that we can find nothing like him in literature. On the one hand, we are told, "the romantic poet shows a certain discontent, a certain restlessness" ; on the other, "he shrinks a little from what is painful,"--a most reck- less statement. But whatever is the secret of romance, Professor Hardie finds but little of it in classical literature. He says that " Athenian civilisation was adverse to the claims of women and adverse to romance." If the one follows from the other, the argument is not sound ; and we believe that all the elements of romance may be found in classical literature. After all, romance depends upon treat- ment rather than upon material. The essence of all literature is pretty much the same,—the conflicts of love and war, adventures by sea and land. Nothing can be more romantic, in the common sense, than the Iliad. Is not the war, which divides the world, undertaken for love of a woman? The material, indeed, is always the same ; it is only the treatment which reveals the romantic spirit. Now, where the classical poet is content to reduce the truth to simple terms, the romantic poet embroiders his theme until the means of expression are more obvious than the end. He will exaggerate the un- essential, he will repeat what is plain and simple, until the purpose of his story is disguised and obscured. In this sense the classics knew little of romance; but there is no subject now described as romantic which the Greek and Roman poets did not treat with a skill and sympathy as great as those which their successors could boast. In treatment, of course, there is a complete contrast between the two. On the one hand are restraint, balance, simplicity ; on the other an artistic recklessness, garrulity, and complication. Each method has its beauty : this a beauty of austerity, that a beauty of opulence ; and, as Professor Hardie rightly says, " every man is born a classicist or romanticist." But we cannot agree with the Professor that " to go back from the most fervent works of modern romance to Sophocles and Phidias is a transition which will strike the two types of mind very differently." We believe that no modern work exceeds in " fervour " the masterpieces of Sophocles, in which the passion is the more closely concentrated because the poet's means of expression are purposely economical.
Professor Hardie discusses the feeling of the ancients for Nature with far greater wisdom. It has so long been the fashion to pretend that a feeling for Nature is a modern faculty that we are the better pleased to find a scholar who holds that the ancients too were conscious of the beauty of sea and mountain. But they were frank in their admiration of what they saw. They were not ashamed to own that the cataract haunted them. They did not pretend to read into a simple landscape the theories of life and death with which Nature has inspired the modern poet. Above all, they sub- ordinated Nature to Drama. With them landscape was a background, and that is all. Virgil, who painted as many pictures in words as any poet that ever wrote a line, painted always with the utmost restraint. In two lines he can evoke a scene that will never fade from the memory, but he did not attempt to draw tears from a landscape, or to link it with a vague and fleeting pathos. Indeed, it might be argued that in the treatment of landscape the poets have declined (with splendid intervals) since the death of Virgil. These are some of the questions discussed by Professor Hardie, who, even when he compels you to disagree, still prompts you to sympathetic argument.
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