Chapter IV

But secretly she knew her most perilous enemy. It was not sadness, or selfishness, or the Voices, or the odd wilderness of a determined recluse. It was Eternity.

There was no telling when Eternity might claim her. Sometimes she awoke at dawn, and went down into the dewy garden to work among the roses and iris and pansy plants, with the birds all singing and the sun dancing like a great wise morning star. The day wore on, as she digged and transplanted and clipped and watered, till, weary a little, she went into the house and took up the endless bit of sewing, or some story or poem to finish. And all at once, in spite of the sun, the earth-smell, the brisk village-sounds beyond her garden-fence, she knew that her anchor dragged,--she had slipped her moorings in the safe harbor of Time, and was drifting off, off into Eternity.

Then she cared nothing for rose-bugs, or iris-roots, or stockings to darn, or stories to read. She thought of Love, and Sin, and Death; of nations at war and her friends' souls in joy or agony, of God Himself,--and they were all as nothing. She saw the flickering garden, she heard the song-sparrow and the clucking hen, she felt her own scrubbed and earth-stained fingers and her beating heart, but these were not necessary to her. She was terribly remote; terribly careless and still and proud; for she was in Eternity.

'What does it all matter?' she would murmur. 'What if they drink and steal and sin and die? or love and lose and win and die too? And what of me? What of me?--We are all in Eternity. God Himself is in Eternity.'

But she kept the peril close. None of the neighbors, who hailed her on the street or gossiped on the vine-hung porch, ever noticed that often, as she talked, she would clasp her hands with a sudden fierce little gesture, as if she were holding tight to some strong arm, and that in her heart she was whispering, even while the swift crooked smile danced across her lips, 'O God, make me remember! make me remember! We're in Time, now: not in Eternity yet: _not in Eternity yet!_'

The Greek Genius

By John Jay Chapman

The teasing perfection of Greek Literature will perhaps excite the world long after modern literature is forgotten. Shakespeare may come to his end and lie down among the Egyptians, but Homer will endure forever. We hate to imagine such an outcome as this, because, while we love Shakespeare, we regard the Greek classics merely with an overwhelmed astonishment. But the fact is that Homer floats in the central stream of History, Shakespeare in an eddy. There is, too, a real difference between ancient and modern art, and the enduring power may be on the side of antiquity.

The classics will always be the playthings of humanity, because they are types of perfection, like crystals. They are pure intellect, like demonstrations in geometry. Within their own limitations they are examples of miracle; and the modern world has nothing to show that resembles them in the least. As no builder has built like the Greeks, so no writer has written like the Greeks. In edge, in delicacy, in proportion, in accuracy of effect, they are as marble to our sandstone. The perfection of the Greek vehicle is what attacks the mind of the modern man and gives him dreams.

What relation these dreams bear to Greek feeling it is impossible to say--probably a very remote and grotesque relation. The scholars who devote their enormous energies to a life-and-death struggle to understand the Greeks always arrive at states of mind which are peculiarly modern. The same thing may be said of the severest types of Biblical scholar. J. B. Strauss, for instance, gave his life to the study of Christ, and, as a result, has left an admirable picture of the German mind of 1850. Goethe, who was on his guard if ever a man could be, was still a little deceived in thinking that the classic spirit could be recovered. He left imitations of Greek literature which are admirable in themselves, and rank among his most characteristic works, yet which bear small resemblance to the originals. The same may be said of Milton and of Racine. The Greeks seem to have used their material, their myths and ideas, with such supernal intellect that they leave this material untouched for the next comer. Their gods persist, their mythology is yours and mine. We accept the toys,--the whole baby-house which has come down to us: we walk in and build our own dramas with their blocks.

What a man thinks of influences him, though he chance to know little about it; and the power which the ancient world has exerted over the modern has not been shown in proportion to the knowledge or scholarship of the modern thinker, but in proportion to his natural force. The Greek tradition, the Greek idea became an element in all subsequent life; and one can no more dig it out and isolate it than one can dig out or isolate a property of the blood. We do not know exactly how much we owe to the Greeks. Keats was inspired by the very idea of them. They were an obsession to Dante, who knew not the language. Their achievements have been pressing in upon the mind of Europe, and enveloping it with an atmospheric appeal, ever since the Dark Ages.

Of late years we have come to think of all subjects as mere departments of science, and we are almost ready to hand over Greece to the specialist. We assume that scholars will work out the history of art. But it is not the right of the learned and scholarly only, to be influenced by the Greeks, but also of those persons who know no Greek. Greek influence is too universal an inheritance to be entrusted to scholars, and the specialist is the very last man who can understand it. In order to obtain a diagnosis of Greek influence one would have to seek out a sort of specialist on Humanity-at-large.