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tered here with envy and chagrin in your heart, humiliated at not getting your allowance paid you from home; and you sit with your mind full, in the intervals of the lecture, of how your father behaves to you, and how your brother. What are the people down at home saying about me?-They are thinking: Now he is getting on! they are saying: He will come home a walking dictionary!—Yes, and I should like to go home a walking dictionary; but then there is a deal of work required, and nobody sends me anything, and the bathing here at Nicopolis is dirty and nasty; things are all bad at home, and all bad here.'

Nobody can say that the bathing at Eton is dirty and nasty. But at Eton, as at Nicopolis, the moral disposition in which the pupil arrives at school, the thoughts and habits which he brings with him from home and from the social order in which he moves, must necessarily affect his power of profiting by what his schoolmasters have to teach him. This necessity is common to all schooling. You cannot escape from it here, no more could they at Nicopolis. Epictetus, however, was fully persuaded that what he had to teach was valuable if the mental and moral frame of his pupils were but healthy enough to permit them to profit by it. I hope the Eton masters have the same conviction as to the native value of what they teach. But you know how many doubters and deniers of the value of a classical education we nowadays meet with. Let us put aside all that is said of the idleness, extravagance, and self-indulgence of the schoolboy this may pair off with the complaint of Epictetus about the unsatisfactory moral state of his pupil. But with us there are many people who go on and say: "And when the schoolboy, in our public schools, does learn, he learns nothing that is worth knowing." It is not of the Eton schoolboy only that this is said, but of the public schoolboy generally. We are all in the same boat, all of us in whose schooling the Greek and Latin classics fill the principal place. And it avails nothing that you try and appease the gainsayer by now acquainting yourselves with the diameter of the sun and moon, and with all sorts of matters which to us of an earlier and ruder generation were un

known. So long as the Greek and Latin classics continue to fill, as they do fill, the chief place in your school-work, the gainsayer is implacable and sticks to his sentence: "When the boy does learn, he learns nothing that is worth knowing."

Amidst all this disparagement, one may well ask oneself nervously what is really to be said on behalf of studies over which so much of our time is spent, and for which we have, many of us, contracted a fondness. And after much consideration I have arrived at certain conclusions, which for my own use I find sufficient, but which are of such extreme simplicity that one ought to hesitate, perhaps, before one produces them to other people. However, such as they are, I have been led to bring them out more than once, and I will very briefly rehearse them now. It seems to me that what a man seeks through his education is to get to know himself and the world; that for this knowledge it is before all things necessary that he acquaint himself with the best which has been thought and said in the world; finally, that of this best the classics of Greece and Rome form a very chief portion, and the portion most entirely satisfactory. With these conclusions lodged safe in one's mind, one is staunch on the side of the humanities. And in the same spirit of simplicity in which these conclusions have been reached, I proceed further. People complain that the significance of the classics which we read at school is not enough brought out, that the whole order and sense of that world from which they issue is not seized and held up to view. Well, but the best, in literature, has the quality of being in itself formative-silently formative; of bringing out its own significance as we read it. It is better to read a masterpiece much, even if one does that only, than to read it a little and to be told a great deal about its significance and about the development and sense of the world from which it issues. Sometimes what one is told about the significance of a work, and about the development of a world, is extremely questionable. At any rate, a schoolboy, who, as they did in the times of ignorance at Eton, read his Homer and Horace through, and then read them

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through again, and so went on until he knew them by heart, is not, in my opinion, so very much to be pitied. Still that sounding phrase, the order and sense of a world," sends a kind of thrill through us when we hear it, especially when the world spoken of is a thing so great and so interesting as the Græco-Roman world of antiquity. If we are not deluded by it into thinking that to read fine talk about our classical documents is as good as to read the documents themselves, the phrase is one which we may with advantage lay to heart. I remember being struck, long ago, with a remark on the Greek poet Theognis by Goethe, who did not know Greek well and had to pick out its meaning by the help of a Latin translation, but who brought to everything he read his powerful habits of thought and criticism. "When I first read Theognis," says Goethe, in substance, "I thought him querulous and morbid, and disliked him. But when I came to know how entirely his poetry proceeded from the real circumstances of his life, from the situation of parties in Megara, his native city, and from the effects of that situation upon himself and his friends, then I read him with quite another feeling." How very little do any of us treat the poetry of Theognis in that fashion! was my thought after reading Goethe's criticism. And earlier still I remember being struck at hearing a schoolfellow, who had left the sixth form at Rugby for Cambridge, and who had fallen in somewhere with one of Bunsen's sons, who is now a member of the German Parliament at hearing this schoolfellow contrast the training of George Bunsen, as we then called him, with our own. Perhaps you think that at Rugby, which is often spoken of, though quite erroneously, as a sort of opposition establishment to Eton, we treated the classics in a high philosophical way, and traced the sequence of things in ancient literature, when you at Eton professed nothing of the kind. But hear the criticism of my old schoolfellow. "It is wonderful," said he; not only can George Bunsen construe his Herodotus, but he has a view of the place of Herodotus in literary history, a thing none of us ever thought about.' My friend spoke the truth; but even

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then, as I listened to him, I felt emotion at hearing of the place of Herodotus in literary history. Yes, not only to be able to read the admirable works of classical literature, but to conceive also that Græco-Roman world, which is so mighty a factor in our own world, our own life, to conceive it as a whole of which we can trace the sequence and the sense and the connection with ourselves, this does undoubtedly also belong to a classical education, rightly understood.

But even here, too, a plain person can proceed, if he likes, with great simplicity. As Goethe says of life: Strike into it anywhere, lay hold of it anywhere, it is always powerful and interesting-so one may almost say of classical literature. Strike into it where you like, lay hold of it where you like, you can nearly always find a thread which will lead you, if you follow it, to large and instructive results. Let us to-night follow a single Greek word in this fashion, and try to compensate ourselves, however imperfectly, for having to divert our thoughts, just for one lecture, from the diameter of the sun and moon.

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The word I will take is the word eutrapelos, eutrapelia. Let us consider it first as it occurs in the famous funeral oration put by Thucydides into the mouth of Pericles. The word stands there for one of the chief of those qualities which have made Athens, says Pericles, "the school of Greece"; for a quality by which Athens is eminently representative of what is called Hellenism: the quality of flexibility. happy and gracious flexibility," Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians; and it is no doubt a charming gift. Lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice, freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners, all these seem to go along with a certain happy flexibility of nature, and to depend upon it. Nor does this suppleness and flexibility of nature at all necessarily imply, as we English are apt to suppose, a relaxed moral fibre and weakness. In the Athenian of the best time it did not. the Athenians," says Professor Curtius, "the sense of energy abhorred every kind of waste of time, their sense of

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measure abhorred bombast and redundancy, and their clear intelligence everything partaking of obscurity or vagueness; it was their habit in all things to advance directly and resolutely to the goal. Their dialect is characterised by a superior seriousness, manliness, and vigor of language."

There is no sign of relaxation of moral fibre here; and yet, at the same time, the Athenians were eminent for a happy and gracious flexibility. That quality, as we all know, is not a characteristic quality of the Germanic nations, to which we ourselves belong. Men are educable, and when we read of the abhorrence of the Attic mind for redundancy and obscurity of expression, its love for direct and telling speech, and then think of modern German, we may say with satisfaction that the circumstances of our life have at any rate educated us into the use of straightforward and vigorous forms of language. But they have not educated us into flexibility. All around us we may observe proofs of it. The state of Ireland is a proof of it. We are rivals with Russia in Central Asia, and at this moment it is particularly interesting to note how the want of just this one Athenian quality of flexibility seems to tell against us

our Asiatic rivalry with Russia. "Russia," observes one who is perhaps the first of living geographers-an Austrian, Herr von Hellwald-" possesses far more shrewdness, flexibility, and congeniality than England; qualities adapted to make the Asiatic more tractable." And again: "There can be no dispute which of the two, England or Russia, is the more civilized nation. But it is just as certain that the highlycivilized English understand but indifferently how to raise their Asiatic subjects to their own standard of civilisation, whilst the Russians attain, with their much lower standard of civilisation, far greater results amongst the Asiatic tribes, whom they know how to assimilate in the most remarkable manner. Of course they can only bring them to the same level which they have reached themselves; but the little which they can and do communicate to them counts actually for much more than the great boons which the English do not know how to impart. Under the auspices of

Russia the advance in civilisation amongst the Asiatics is indeed slow and inconsiderable, but steady, and suitable to their natural capacities and the disposition of their race. On the other hand, they remain indifferent to British civilisation, which is absolutely incomprehensible to them."

Our word "flexibility" has here carried us a long way, carried us to Turkestan and the valleys of the Jaxartes and Oxus. Let us get back to Greece, at any rate.

The generation of Pericles is succeeded by the generation of Plato and Aristotle. Still the charming and Athenian quality of eutrapelia continues to be held in high esteem. Only the word comes to stand more particularly for flexibility and felicity in the giveand-take of gay and light social intercourse. With Aristotle it is one of the virtues; the virtue of him who in this pleasant sort of intercourse, so relished by the Greeks, manages exactly to hit the happy and right mean, the virtue opposed to buffoonery on the one side, and to morose rusticity, or clownishness, on the other. It is in especial the virtue of the young, and is akin to the grace and charm of youth. When old men try to adapt themselves to the young, says Plato, they betake themselves, in imitation of the young, to eutrapelia and pleasantry.

Four hundred years pass, and we come to the date of the Epistle to the Ephesians. The word eutrapelia rises in the mind of the writer of that Epistle. It rises to St. Paul's mind, and he utters it; but in how different a sense from the praising and admiring sense in which we have seen the word used by Thucydides and Aristotle! Eutrapelia, which once stood for that eminently Athenian and Hellenic virtue of happy and gracious flexibility, now conveys this favorable sense no longer, but is ranked with filthiness and foolish talking among things which are not convenient. Like these, it is not to be once named among the followers of God: "neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting (eutrapelia), which are not convenient.

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This is an extraordinary change, you will say. But now, as we have descended four hundred years from Aristotle to St. Paul, let us ascend, not four hundred, not quite even one hundred years,

from Thucydides to Pindar. The religious Theban poet, we shall see (and the thing is surely very remarkable), speaks of the quality of eutrapelia in the same disapproving and austere way as the writer of the Epistle to the Ephesians. The young and noble Jason appears at Iolcos, and being questioned about himself by Pelias, he answers that he has been trained in the nurture and admonition of the old and just Centaur, Chiron. "From his cave I come, from Chariclo and Philyra, his stainless daughters, who there nursed me. These twenty years am I with them, and there hath been found in me neither deed nor word that is not convenient; and now, behold, I am come home, that I may recover my father's kingdom." The adjective euThe adjective eutrapelos, as it is here used in connection with its two nouns, means exactly a word or deed, in Biblical phrase, of vain lightness, a word or deed such as is not convenient.

There you have the history of the varying use of the words eutrapelos, eutrapelia. And now see how this varying use gives us a clue to the order and sense, as we say, of all that Greek world, so nearly and wonderfully connected with us, so profoundly interesting for us, so full of precious lessons.

We must begin with generalities, but we will try not to lose ourselves in them, and not to remain amongst them long. Human life and human society arise, we know, out of the presence in man of certain needs, certain instincts, and out of the constant endeavor of these instincts to satisfy and develop themselves. We may briefly sum them up, these needs or instincts, as being, first and foremost, a general instinct of expansion; then, as being instincts following diverse great lines, which may be conveniently designated as the lines of conduct, of intellect and knowledge, of beauty, of social life and manners. Some lines are more in view and more in honor at one time, some at another. Some men and some nations are more eminent on one line, some on another. But the final aim, of making our own and of harmoniously combining the powers to be reached on each and all of these great lines, is the ideal of human life. And our race is for ever recalled to this NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXX., No. 1

aim, and held fast to it, by the instinct of self-preservation in humanity.

The ideal of human life being such as it is, all these great and diverse powers to the attainment of which our instincts, as we have seen, impel us, hang together; cannot be truly possessed and employed in isolation. Yet it is convenient, owing to the way in which we find them actually exhibiting themselves in human life and in history, to treat them separately, and to make distinctions of rank amongst them. In this view, we may say that the power of conduct is the greatest of all the powers now named; that it is three-fourths of life. And wherever much is founded amongst men, there the power of conduct has surely been present and at work, although of course there may be and are, along with it, other powers too.

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Now, then, let us look at the beginnings of that Greece to which we owe so much, and which we may almost, so far as our intellectual life is concerned, call the mother of us all. "So well has she done her part," as the Athenian Isocrates truly says of her, that the name of Greeks seems no longer to stand for a race, but to stand for intelligence itself, and they who share in Hellenic culture are called Greeks even before those who are merely of Hellenic blood." The beginnings of this wonderful Greece, what are they?

Greek history begins for us, as I have more than once had occasion to say, with the sanctuaries of Tempe and Delphi, and with the Apolline worship and priesthood which in those sanctuaries under Olympus and Parnassus established themselves. The northern sanctuary of Tempe soon yielded to Delphi as the centre of national Hellenic life and of Apolline religion. We are accustomed to think of Apollo as the awakener and nourisher of what is called genius. And so from the very first the Greeks, too, considered him. But in those earliest days of Hellas, and at Delphi, where the hardy and serious tribes of the Dorian highlands made their influence. felt, Apollo was not only the nourisher of genius, he was also the author of every higher moral effort. He was the prophet of his father Zeus, in the highest view of Zeus, as the source of the

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ideas of moral order and of right. For to this higher significance had the names of Zeus and Phoebus-names originally derived from sun and air-gradually risen. They had come to designate a Father, the source of the ideas of moral order and of right; and a Son, his prophet purifying and inspiring the soul with these ideas, and also with the idea of intellectual beauty.

Now the ideas of moral order and of right which are in human nature, and which are, indeed, a main part of human life, were especially, we are told, a treasure possessed by the less gay and more solitary tribes in the mountains of Northern Greece. These Dorian tribes were Delphi's first pupils. And the graver view of life, the thoughts which give depth and solemnity to man's consciousness, the moral ideas, in short, of conduct and righteousness, were the governing elements in the manner of spirit propagated from Delphi. The words written up on the temple there called all comers to soberness and righteousness. The Doric and Æolic Pindar felt profoundly this severe influence of Delphi. It is not to be considered as an influence at war with the idea of intellectual beauty to mention the name of Pindar is in itself sufficient to show how little this was, or could be, the case. But it was above all an influence charged with the ideas of moral order and of right. And there were confronting these Dorian founders of Hellas, and well known to them, and connected with them in manifold ways, other Greeks of a very different spiritual type; the Asiatic Greeks of Ionia, full of brilliancy and mobility, but over whom the ideas of moral order and of right had too little power, and who could never succeed in founding among themselves a serious and powerful state. It was evident that the great source of the incapacity which accompanied, in these Ionians of Asia, so much brilliancy, that the great enemy in them to the Halt, as Goethe calls it, the steadiness, which moral natures so highly prize, was their extreme mobility of spirit, their gay lightness, their cutrapelia. For Pindar, therefore, the word eutrapelos, expressing easy flexibility and mobility, becomes a word of stern opprobrium, and conveys the reproach of vain folly.

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But

The Athenians were Ionians. they were Ionians transplanted to Hellas, and who had breathed, as a Hellenic state, the air of Delphi, that bracing atmosphere of the ideas of moral order and of right. In this atmosphere the Athenians, Ionian as they were, imbibed influences of character and steadiness which for a long while balanced their native vivacity and mobility, distinguished them profoundly from the Ionians of Asia, and gave them men like Aristeides.

Still, the Athenians were Ionians. They had the Ionian quickness and flexibility, the Ionian turn for gaiety, wit, and fearless thinking, the Ionian impatience of restraint. This nature of theirs asserted itself, first of all, as an impatience of false restraint. It asserted itself in opposition to the real faults of the Dorian spirit, faults which became more and more manifest as time went on; to the unprogressiveness of this spirit, to its stiffness, hardness, narrowness, prejudice, want of insight, want of amiability. And in real truth, by the time of Pericles, Delphi, the great creation of the Dorian spirit, had broken down, and was a witness to that spirit's lack of a real power of life and growth. Bribes had discredited the sanctity of Delphi; seriousness and vital power had left it. It had come to be little more than a name, and what continued to exist there was merely a number of forms.

Now, then, was the turn of the Athenians. With the idea of conduct, so little grasped by the Ionians of Asia, still deeply impressed on their soul, they freely and joyfully called forth also that pleasure in life, that love of clear thinking and of fearless discussion, that gay social temper, that ease and lightness, that gracious flexibility, which were in their nature. These were their gifts, and they did well to bring them forth; the gifts are in themselves gifts of great price, like those other gifts contributed by the primitive and serious Dorian tribes, their rivals. Man has to advance, we have seen, along several lines, and he does well to advance along them. "In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand; for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good."

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