The Great Laboratory
Modern poets can never praise Greek poetry too much; modern philosophers, Greek philosophy; modern orators, Greek oratory. But the shift away from ancient studies as the basis of all education has tended to leave such employments in the hands of the conservative, or at least of those whose imaginations live largely on the past, and has thus contributed to the notion that practical affairs—economy and polity—are not properly to be studied in Greek literature. To the extent that knowledge has been multiplied since Aristotle’s day, this is, of course, true. We cannot look to the Greeks for information which they did not have, and it would be most un-Greek to neglect superior sources of knowledge merely on the ground that other sources were better established in an old tradition. Undoubtedly this alienation of men of affairs from ancient studies has been due less to the deficiencies of the Greeks than to the deficiencies of the teachers of Greek, who, so long holding a vested interest in education everywhere, permitted themselves, like other vested interests, to fall into sluggish routine and tyranny, a pitiless round of grammar without sense and of words without life. The reaction against their monopoly has been, like most reactions so forced, excessive. In our discovery that we had overvalued the scanty amount of grammar and prosody which unwilling students actually carried away from their compulsory struggles with Greek, with the mere letter of its language without any deeper spirit or meaning, many have come to undervalue the Greek world as a laboratory in which, better than anywhere else in history, we may study human beings vividly and rationally engaged in the conduct of human life.
No other laboratory can ever compare with this in importance for us. Racial or national jealousies do not enter into our calculations here. We have no more right as Americans or Britons or Frenchmen or Germans to be jealous of the primacy of Greece in such matters than to be jealous of the multiplication tables because they happen to enjoy a certain strategic position with regard to other facts. It is true that we are no longer allowed the luxury of believing, with the eighteenth century, for instance, that in looking back to Greece we are looking at the very fathers of the race, who “discovered not devised” the rules of nature, which until then there had been no men to find out. All the more, however, are the Greeks instructive to us when we realize that they, too, had to free themselves from immensely ancient bonds of tradition and superstition. What clear reason did for them, ceaselessly revolving and inquiring, it has at least a chance to do for us, if we want it to. Study the Greeks and you are likely to stop hugging prejudices, or taking pride in them. Study the Greeks, and a hundred petty reverences fall away in a light as lucid as the Athenian atmosphere. Our own day’s work concerns us every day, as it did the Greeks, but, as a good maxim says, the man who knows only his business does not know his business. Why will some one not speak out and say what events have lately shown—that a knowledge of history and literature is indispensable in affairs, and that only those men, barring a genius or two, have shown any conspicuous talent for leadership in our terrible decade who have known something about history and literature? It is true. If we were beasts, we should not especially need history; we should have instinct. But having, as men, exchanged instinct for reason, we need as much of the past as we can get—remembering that every man is free, thanks to the multiplication of records, to choose his own past; that is, to choose that part of human history between him and Adam which to him is worth most. The Middle Ages are good to illustrate devotion; the Renaissance, passionate individualism; the rise of the Americas, civilized men pitted against virgin nature. But Greece surpasses them all not only in reasonableness but also in completeness and sharpness of outline. She is the best microcosm, with the scale best adjusted to our vision. She is the best crystal, most purely revealing the vast matters therein pictured; she is the best laboratory, and under the simplest and loveliest conditions exhibits the processes of life which ordinarily appear confused and vexed.
The claim frequently made, that we cannot find in Greek experience enough that is analogous with our problems, because Greece had so simple and circumscribed an existence and lived in a world so little complicated by machinery, means no more than to say that in a laboratory generations of guinea-pigs succeed one another with a lower mortality than in Guinean jungles, or that diamonds may be made out of their raw materials without the geological convulsions of which in nature they are admirable but accidental byproducts. That is what laboratories are for, to exhibit simply the behaviour of complex things. And the parallel between laboratories for matter and laboratories for mind has more than a fanciful value. Life in Greece was reduced to the simple facts of the human intelligence, leaning less than anywhere else upon mere tradition, upon mere materials, upon mere superfluities. Much as we have grown in range of knowledge by our study of the physical universe, and little as we can afford to reject any wisdom founded upon it, we need often to remember that in practice the centre of our universe is still the mind of man, that for the most part we have to conduct our affairs as if really the Ptolemaic system were good astronomy, as it is very fair politics and morals. The study of the material universe and all sorts of highly specialized studies tend to draw us away from these central facts, as pedants and casuists are continually being drawn away from fundamental principles. The principles, however, are still fundamental.