The Extant Odes of Pindar. Pindar

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СКАЧАТЬ Somewhat the same lesson as that of the Oresteia is taught later, with more of sweetness and harmony, but not with more force, in the Oedipus Coloneus of Sophokles. And in Pindar we see the same tendencies inchoate. Like Aeschylus he does by implication subordinate to morality both politics and religion. He ignores or flatly denies tales that bring discredit on the gods; he will only bow down to them when they have the virtues he respects in man. Yet he, like Aeschylus and Sophokles, does so bow down, sincerely and without hesitation, and that poets of their temper could do so was well indeed for poetry. By rare and happy fortune they were inspired at once by the rich and varied presences of mythology, 'the fair humanities of old religion,' and also by the highest aspirations of an age of moral and intellectual advance. We do not of course always, or even often, find the moral principles clearly and consciously expressed or consistently supported, but we cannot but feel that they are present in the shape of instincts, and those instincts pervading and architectonic.

      And if we allow so much of ethical enlightenment to these great spokesmen of the Hellenic people, we cannot deny something of like honour to the race among whom they were reared. Let us apportion our debt of gratitude to our forerunners as it is justly due. There would seem to be much of fallacy and of the injustice of a shallow judgment in the contrast as popularly drawn between 'Hellenism' and 'Hebraism,' according to which the former is spoken of as exclusively proclaiming to the world the value of Beauty, the latter the value of Righteousness. In this there is surely much injustice done to Hellas. Because she taught the one, she did not therefore leave the other untaught. It may have been for a short time, as her other greatness was for a short time, though its effects are eternal, but for that short time the national life, of Athens at any rate, is at least as full of high moral feeling as that of any other people in the world. Will not the names of Solon, of Aristeides, of Kallikratidas, of Epameinondas, of Timoleon and many more, remind us that life could be to the Hellene something of deeper moral import than a brilliant game, or a garden of vivid and sweet sights and sounds where Beauty and Knowledge entered, but Goodness was forgotten and shut out? For it is not merely that these men, and very many more endowed with ample portion of their spirit, were produced and reared among the race; they were honoured and valued in a way that surely postulated the existence of high ethical feeling in their countrymen. And even when the days of unselfish statesmen and magnanimous cities were over, there were philosophers whose schools were not the less filled because they claimed a high place for righteousness in human life. To Solon and Aristeides succeeded Socrates and Plato, to Epameinondas and Timoleon succeeded Zeno and Epictetus. That the morality of the Hellenes was complete on all sides, it would of course be irrational to maintain. They had not, for instance, any more than the Hebrews, or any other nation of antiquity, learnt to abhor slavery, though probably it existed in a milder form at Athens than anywhere else in the old or new world: they were more implacable in revenge and laxer in sexual indulgence than the Christian ethics would allow in theory, though not perhaps much more so than Christendom has shown itself in practice. And though undoubtedly the greatest single impulse ever given to morality came from Palestine, yet the ground which nurtured the seeds of Christianity was as much Hellenic as Hebrew. It would be impossible here to enter on an exhaustive comparison of the ethical capacities of the two races, but before we pronounce hastily for the superiority of the Hebrew there are surely some difficulties to surmount. We may well ask, for example, Would Hellas ever have accepted as her chief national hero such a man as David a man who in his life is conspicuous by his crimes not less than by his brilliant gifts, and who dies with the words of blood and perfidy on his lips, charging his son with the last slaughterous satisfaction of his hate which he had sworn before his God to forego? And though the great Hebrew prophets teach often a far loftier morality than this, they cannot have been nearly so representative of the feeling of this nation as were Aeschylus and Sophocles and Pindar of the feeling of theirs. The Hebrews of the prophets' age 'slew the prophets,' and left it to the slayers' descendants to 'build their sepulchres,' and at the same time to show their inherited character still more unmistakeably by once more slaying the last prophet and the greatest.[3]

      In truth in the literature, the art, the life generally of Hellas in her prime, the moral interest whenever it appears, and that is not seldom, claims for itself the grave and preponderant attention which it must claim if it is to appear with fit dignity. But it is not thrust forward unseasonably or in exaggeration, nor is it placed in a false opposition to the interests of the aesthetic instincts, which after all shade into the moral more imperceptibly than might be generally allowed. There must be a moral side to all societies, and the Hellenic society, the choicest that the world has seen, the completest, that is, at once in sensibilities and in energies, could not but show the excellence of its sensibilities in receiving moral impressions, the excellence of its energies in achieving moral conduct.

      This, however, is no place to discuss at length questions in the history of ethics. Yet it must be remembered that in the ancient world departments of thought, and the affairs of men generally, were far less specialized than in modern times. If the philosophy of Hellas be the most explicit witness to her ethical development, her poetry is the most eloquent. And scarcely at any time, scarcely even in Aristotle, did Hellenic philosophy in any department lose most significant traces of its poetical ancestry. But enough here if I have succeeded in pointing out that in the great poet with whom we are concerned there is an ethical as well as a poetical and historical interest, supplying one more reason against neglect of his legacy of song.

      Yet indeed even now there remains a further question which to the mind of any one who at present labours in this field of classical scholarship must recur persistently if not depressingly, and on which it is natural if not necessary to say a few words. If the selection of Pindar in particular as a Greek poet with claims to be further popularized among Englishmen may be defended, there is still a more general count to which all who make endeavours to attract or retain attention to Greek literature will in these times be called upon to plead by voices which command respect. To such pleas this is not the place to give large room, or to discriminate in detail between the reasonable and unreasonable elements in the attacks on a system of education in which a preeminent position is allotted to the literature of antiquity. While fully admitting that much time and labour are still wasted in efforts to plant the study of ancient and especially of Greek literature in uncongenial soil, while admitting also most fully the claims, and the still imperfect recognition of the claims, of physical science to a rank among the foremost in modern education, I should yet be abundantly willing that this attempt to help in facilitating the study of a Greek author should be looked on as implying adhesion to the protest still sometimes raised, that in the higher parts of a liberal education no study can claim a more important place than the study of the history and the literature of Hellas. The interest which belongs to these is far wider and deeper than any mere literary interest. To the human mind the most interesting of phenomena are and ought to be the phenomena of the human mind, and this granted, can there be any knowledge more desirable than the knowledge of the most vigorous and sensitive and in some ways also the most fruitful action of human minds that the world has known hitherto?

      But again, we are told that the age we seek thus toilsomely to illustrate and realize is too remote to justify the attempt, that our civilisation is of too different a type from the Hellenic, and that a gulf of three-and-twenty centuries is too much for our sight to strain across. But is not the Hellenic life at least less remote now to Western Europe than it has ever been since the Northern invasions? Though the separation in time widens does not the separation in thought decrease? Is not one civilisation more like another than it can be to any barbarism? And shall not this same Physical Science herself by accustoming us to look on men in large masses at once, and on the development of humanity as a process of infinite duration, as a sectional growth included in universal evolution—Science, in whose eyes a thousand years are as a watch in the night—shall she not thereby quicken our sympathies with the most gifted race that has appeared in our short human history, and arouse the same feeling toward it as a family may cherish toward the memory of their best and choicest, who has died young?

      Only let us take heed that such regret shall make us not more but less unworthy of those noble forerunners. One symptom of the renewed influence of antiquity on the modern world is doubtless and has been from time to time since the Revival of Letters СКАЧАТЬ