ISSUE: Autumn 1925
Imagine two young travellers gaining their first view of Athens. Both are thoroughly and perhaps typically American, in that their knowledge is vague, their ideas about history and art are not coordinated, their ethical sense is more highly developed than their aesthetic judgment, and they are apt to think in terms of public utility, while strongly craving individual distinction. One of them, Keith, is an idealist. Though by nature fitted to enjoy the triumphs of art, he is troubled about many things: he wonders whether the culture of a few has not been acquired at the expense of the many. He is, or imagines himself to be, a perfect democrat. Yet his opinions regarding society are in a state of more unstable equilibrium than he supposes. His companion, Barlow, is at once bolder and more conventional. He has accepted some of the hard and cruel-looking results of human experience and fancies himself a realist. In the course of a week they made, without connivance with each other, the following entries in their diaries. These naive outpourings reveal states of mind in which the old American optimism and certitude are curiously overlaid with a new disposition to question all things. Conscience and culture seem to be at odds with one another. The general effect is of a boyish honesty that should encourage us.
Keith’s Diary.—Athens, March 3, 1924:
Travelling in Europe for the purpose of culture is a cruel art. You turn your back upon all your home duties, and at the door to every shrine of beauty in the Old World you have to step over the crouching form of a beggar. To behold with enjoyment the representations of youth and health with which Phidias and Praxiteles enriched humanity you must close your eyes to unmistakable misery lying blind and crippled, cold and hungry, on the stairs. Putting the matter more definitely, here are Barlow and I. spending a holiday in Greece, after filling our minds with as much of ancient Greek literature and history as they would hold, and coming with scarcely a thought of anything later than the second century B. C; and to our surprise, almost, we find here a living people, if suffering be a sign of life. The Athens of our dream is here too, no doubt, and we shall try to find it; but the present reality forces itself upon us first. What are its features? A suddenly overgrown modern city, too poor to pave its streets and suffocated with dust, a population discouraged by a crushing defeat in war, gloomy, heavy-faced, without enough work to keep it half busy; and added to this, an enormous number of destitute refugees from Asia Minor. Ambitions to become an up-to-date industrial country, with an army and a navy, have ruined, temporarily at least, a people who were scarcely a nation, a peasant people, adapted to agriculture and fortunate had they known wherein their happiness really lay. O fortunatos-nimium, sua si bona norint, agricolas! Their German kings served them ill; their allies served them worse; the Turks drove them like chaff; and they themselves appear to have small appreciation of the one outstanding man among them, Venizelos. I counted twenty-seven bullet holes in the front of his house this morning, souvenirs of the old monarchists, and he is said to be on the point of leaving Athens because he despairs of the new politicians. For consolation in their unhappy state the Greeks have a singular toy. It is worth considering, this toy and its use. At least one man in five whom we see strolling along the streets or sitting at little tables drinking water and sometimes sipping coffee from tiny cups holds in his hand a string of beads,—conversation beads i believe they are called. At first I supposed these were “religious” persons, but soon I observed that they were of all ages and classes, and upon inquiry I was informed that they carried these toys in order to keep their minds occupied! Imagine Socrates meeting a modern Athenian thus employed. “O great grandson of Pheidippides, know-est thou what the mind is?” would be neither his first question nor his last; it would stand somewhere about the middle of the dialogue, and the end would not be pleasant for the twirler of beads.
Barlow’s Diary.—Athens, March 4:
I have never had an hour of deeper satisfaction than the hour we spent at sunset on the Acropolis last evening. We stood upon the floor of the Parthenon and looked westward through that grove of stately Doric columns out to the blue sea and Salamis and the indented coast of the Peloponnese, and then turning from right to left swept the horizon of mountains with memorable names, Hymettus noted for its honey, Pentelicus where the marble was quarried to build these temples, Parnes sprinkled with snow,—all turning purple in the clear light,—and the Pass of Daphne through which the Sacred Way still runs to Eleusis. Below streamed the city about the foot of the great rock, its houses white, yellow, and pale red; and as the sunshine faded there flashed upon our minds the meaning of the phrase, “the city of the violet wreath.” The circle was complete, a garland of tender, quivering colors, from faintest lavender to deepest blue. We shall go often to the Acropolis; there are many things to see and study there; the ground is strewn with fragments of exquisite stone-carving, a wealth of invention and fine workmanship unequalled in any other place in the whole world, no doubt; a designer could find endless instruction in copying them. But its four great architectural monuments are in their general effect quite simple and can be enjoyed in the first hour. Keith was in ecstasy. He forgot modern Greece and her woes and his own tormenting idealism. I say the world was made to be enjoyed; and even from a purely moral and practical point of view beauty has its uses. It elevates the mind and gives us some idea of the eternal. At all events there is something in the thought that twenty-four centuries have reflected the Parthenon and its neighboring temples. It was a peculiarly pure joy to stand there. We know so little about ancient Greek religion and private life that we can contemplate these relics simply as works of art, without prejudice for or against the purposes they originally served. They are among the most perfect results of men’s efforts to express in visible shape their conceptions of what is noble. So far as I am aware, these columns and architraves were not symbolical; neither were they primarily utilitarian; they were lifted up to satisfy a craving for structural creation, a desire to see large masses of white marble arranged according to a human ideal, not quite like anything in nature, though in all parts suggestive of natural objects and freely imitative of nature in many details. In how far the builders were definitely inspired by hopes and fears of a strictly religious character, I do not know; I am an unsophisticated traveller. I strongly incline to think that the vital impulse here was not religious, in any so narrow sense of the word that it can be defined in terms of hope and fear, but rather was naively constructive and artistic, like the impulse of an imaginative child playing with blocks. My ignorance has this advantage, that it permits me to speculate freely about such subjects. I guess I’m a pretty good American, ignorant of art, but curious and teachable, and therefore capable of being saved, if culture ever does save.
Keith’s Diary.—Athens, March 6:
The nobility of the Parthenon is what impresses me most; and when I ask myself what I mean by “nobility” in architecture the answer I get is “beauty presented in simplicity.” “Beauty” itself is a word that needs defining, but I shrink from the attempt. Then, no doubt, nobility involves a goodly degree of size also. There is nothing ugly, no, not the slightest detail, in the Parthenon or in any other example of ancient Greek art that we have yet seen, except some figures of satyrs and some tragic and comic masks. The simplicity is amazing. Nature is more complicated; a tree, for example, is a very complex thing. Art is an attempt to isolate certain objects and strip them of their natural accessories. It is a response to a desire, perhaps a selfish and immoral desire, to protect ourselves from reality. As we sat on the parapet of the Acropolis, beside those quiet, painless, even deathless works of art, the multitudinous din of the city rose and assailed our ears, It was a sound made up of many distinguishable elements, the tooting of automobile horns, the shriek of street-car wheels rounding a curve, the braying of asses, the crowing of cocks, the cries of newspaper vendors, the angry screams of women, the laughter of children, the mellow boom of church-bells. Vachel Lindsay might have made a poem out of it! but not even the poem would be simple. And this is life. It is perhaps a little more confused and futile in modern Athens than in any other city I have known. There is here, at all events, no selection, no aristocracy of noise. Somehow this roar, in contrast with the aloofness of the Acropolis, suggests the perfectly unethical and undemocratic attempt of our own country to restrict immigration. One hundred million people, in a land that can easily support five hundred millions, have the arrogance to say that it belongs to them, simply because they hold prior possession, while here are other millions without work who long to begin life over again in the New World. In the abstract, whatever may be the expediency of our new policy, it is quite immoral. The Greeks are more generous, for they not only have admitted, but are housing, clothing, and feeding a multitude of strangers who as yet are absolutely dependent on charity.
Barlow’s Diary.—Athens, March 7:
Keith is wallowing again in the slough of despond between two ideals: on the one hand what he terms the Christian Law of Equality and I call rank Tolstoyism; on the other hand what we both agree to name Individual Culture. He is capable of enjoying the Parthenon, “this glorious work of fine intelligence,” as few men can; and I have caught him unaware, when he was rapt in admiration. But then the shadow crosses his face as he remembers how few those are who have the good fortune to stand where he stands and see what he sees. I am pagan enough to desire more Individual Culture than I am likely ever to obtain. A man cannot know too much, whether of literature, history, or science; he cannot be too appreciative of beauty. The problem comes up awkwardly sometimes in these Mediterranean cities, I must admit. When you have to pass a dozen wretched fellow-creatures lying on the cold pavement, really crippled or blind, and holding out their hands for a small coin, you know you ought not to encourage begging, you know you couldn’t possibly give enough to help them permanently, and yet you feel guilty if you don’t do something. Individual culture is expensive. Not that I haven’t known men and women who had so carefully employed their time as to become learned and refined with very small expenditure of money. I can understand Keith’s being troubled with this problem of the relation between the bare economic life and the higher life of mankind; but to me it is perfectly plain that civilization alone, with its models of conduct, its impersonal and immaterial purposes, the select number of thoughts with which it peoples the mind, makes human existence worth while. He has more than once unburdened his soul to me on the subject of unrestricted immigration. I wish I could controvert all his arguments as easily as I handled his crazy ideas about the abstract right of people to move from country to country. If these Mediterranean cities are over-populated, it is not only our right but our duty to keep their unsuccessful individuals from swamping such civilization as we have either inherited or built up. Take our language, for example; nothing is more important for the future of the American people than that we should all speak and read one language and that it should be the same language that is used in England and other parts of the British Empire. Any profound variation, any extensive growth of dialects or of American peculiarities, would be sooner or later a cause of intellectual sterility. Copious immigration would put too great a strain upon our language,—the strain is already enormous—and upon our schools and teachers and writers. Keith was taken aback still farther when I pointed out that his view, or rather the effect of it upon the supply of cheap labor, would be cynically approved of by those “big capitalists” whom he detests. When it comes to the preservation of our speech and our literature and our spiritual union with the rest of that noble race to whom they belong as they do to us, I’m quite willing to let Keith say my attitude is aristocratic. Equality of opportunity as much as you please,—equality of wealth even; but no levelling down of speech and thought!
Keith’s Diary.—Athens, March 8:
Barlow has been turning my principles inside out as usual, but though beaten in argument, I am unconvinced. Like many another weak logician, I had recourse to authority; yet I fear without affecting his opinions about the moral justification of art or of restricting immigration, two subjects that have got curiously mixed up together in our talks, I asked him to go with me to the Areopagus, or Mars’ Hill, where St. Paul made to the Athenians that penetrating and engaging address of his. It is a barren rock, without a vestige of human occupation except a flight of steps cut in its flank, and rises within a bow-shot of the Acropolis, which in Paul’s day was crowded with shining temples and no doubt thronged with worshippers of Athene. “Imagine the scene,” I said to Barlow: “a travel-worn little Jew, surrounded by a small crowd of inquisitive Greeks who wanted to know why he had come to introduce a new religion into Athens, already so full of temples and statues of the gods. On the larger hill clustered the most celebrated and magnificent group of buildings in all Greece, gleaming milky-white against the deep blue sky, buildings dedicated to no barbaric or cruel cult, but to the worship of a deity who was conceived to be the patroness of refinement and humane arts. Can’t you see him wave his arm towards the Parthenon—he must have made a sweeping gesture—when he said: ‘God that made the world, and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands?’ What more would you have, Barlow? What is the value of all your churches and altars, in view of that declaration? Doesn’t it condemn them all, in so far as they are supposed to possess any peculiar sanctity? Are not the Quakers and the other varieties of Puritans absolutely right? And by the way, with reference to our argument about immigration, look down the page here and see what that brave little man said: ‘And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on the face of the earth.’ ” When I looked round to see what impression this had made, Barlow was halfway down the steps, hurrying back to the Acropolis; but in his place I almost felt another presence, firm as the rock we stood upon, unaltered in conviction, undaunted by the failure of the ages to accept his noble conception of God and man. “O unwearied traveller,” I whispered, “go on, do not cease from your missionary journey through a mrorld that is pagan still.”
Barlow’s Diary.—Athens, March 9:
For once i have talked Keith down and made him admit I was right. Then for some reason he insisted on our taking a half hour of precious time, which was all needed for the Greek antiquities, and crawling up to the top of Mars’ Hill, where he read me that speech of St. Paul from the Acts of the Apostles. It is a perfectly barren spot, and there are several better views of the Acropolis. I must say the speech was plucky and no end clever; indeed it was a generous, broadminded, gentlemanly address. Paul didn’t run full tilt against all the Athenian customs and ideas, but acknowledged that they were good in the main. Of course he wound up by telling them that his religion was better than theirs, and so in most respects it was. Keith is right in one thing: Paul must have made a very opportune and significant gesture when he referred to “temples made with hands.” I never before realized the power of that speech and the peculiarity of the situation in which it was delivered. Two ideals of life met there and challenged each other. Which has won? Well, it would be hard to say. Perhaps a third, less fine than either of them, has triumphed thus far. We are going to Rome in a week, where there are not a few temples made with hands.
Keith’s Diary.—Athens, March 10:
To-day we have visited the National Museum. It contains many famous statues and is, I suppose, the best place in the world for the study of Greek art. What impressed me above all were the carvings in relief, found in ancient cemeteries, and depicting domestic scenes at the moment when some member of the family is about to depart from this life. I purposely use the expression “depart from this life,” for two of the suggestions generally connected with dying are absent, namely that of physical pain and dwindling and that of certitude in regard to a future state. Unless we misinterpreted the relation of the figures, the one who is standing and at whom the others appear to be looking represents in most cases the departing person. In the faces of all is a look of profound sorrow, unrelieved by hope: the parting, they understand, is forever. To take a typical example, a matron seated in a chair holds the hand of her son and gazes into his face; he stands before her speechless while her lips appear to move. The father of the young man completes the group, waiting pensively for his turn to say farewell. On the countenance of the youth there is such a look of grief as a child might show when awed by the prospect of an impending trouble which it did not understand: a look of bewilderment, of dread, and of determination to be brave. Here we have the most authentic record of the ancient Greek view of death. There is no hint that though the body perish the soul continues to exist. The young man in my example appears to be in perfect health. No mark of decay is on him nor, as I remember, on any of the figures of the departing. Scorn of the flesh, contempt for life, a sense of the inferiority of the body to the soul, or indeed any distinction between body and soul, are not indicated. A characteristically Christian account of the last earthly parting would show the triumph of spirit and the humiliation of flesh. And the effect desired would be to confirm the beholder’s faith in a future personal existence. It troubles me to think that the truth, in a matter of such universal and infinite importance should have been withheld from a people so highly developed as the ancient Greeks; unless indeed—
Barlow’s Diary—Athens, March 10:
I have never felt so deeply the eternizing power of art as I did to-day in the National Museum. The steles, or funeral reliefs, for instance, simply annihilate twenty-four hundred years and bring you into the households of people who lived before Pericles or Plato. Ancient war differed much from modern war; ancient worship was unlike modern worship; we need a good deal of help from the antiquarians when we study the carvings on the Acropolis which depict fighting and religious ceremonies. But death and grief were just the same then as now. As Keith was quick to see, however, pagan art represented them quite differently from Christian art. The body and its life or soul went out together, like the wax and the flame of a taper, and they went out completely, with no prospect of being rekindled as one may sometimes relight a candle by touching a burning match to the smoke before it cools. It is strange that while Christian funeral sculpture usually represents the survivors as disconsolate and the departing person as very confident, the ancient Greek steles show the reverse. In them the departing one looks puzzled, though resolute and almost resigned, while the faces and attitudes of the surviving relatives speak encouragement. There is no weeping on either part, no rending of garments, no abandonment to despair. The emotions that must inevitably have been felt,—disappointment, grief, and hopelessness—are suppressed, and that too without apparent constraint. The decorum of these scenes must have been habitual and inbred, not forced. The harmony and order of family life are preserved even in these supremely agonizing moments: parents retain their places of honor; children retain their bearing of affectionate respect. That which raises my opinion of the candor of the Greeks to the highest pitch is the fact that death is represented in these tablets exactly as it must, I am sure, appear to the mind of anyone who is in an unaffected condition: I mean free from theory on the subject. I am not for a moment wishing to suggest that one at least of the opinions about a future life with which mankind has been either tormented or consoled may not be true; what I like in those Greek sculptors is that they made faithful pictures of a state of society in which the acceptance of death was very simple and natural. We ought, I think, to be always ready and glad to discover any universal or widespread good in humanity, any virtue common to all ages and to all peoples. It is only a narrow and crabbed kind of religious feeling which would blind men to the nobility of such a way of facing death as the Greek monuments reveal. It was not ecstatic, and therefore not liable to grotesque error. The serene grace that almost subdues the poignancy of everlasting separation in these domestic scenes is al! the more admirable because it is the result not of faith but of experience; for upon experience rather than metaphysics or tradition or sporadic revelation must a really universal view of life and human destiny be founded. What I mean by culture, when Keith and I are talking seriously, is a wide and sympathetic knowledge of experience.
