I think that this is true in a
sense, that the Greeks were penetrated by an insatiable curiosity, and
desired to study the principles and arrive at the truth of things. But
I do not, upon reflection, think that it is wholly true, because the
modern spirit is greatly in love with classification and with detail,
while the Greek spirit rather aimed at beauty, and investigated the
causes of things with wonder and delight, in what may be called the
romantic, the poetical spirit.
The mistake that the orator seemed to me to make was that he implied,
or appeared to imply, that the Greek spirit could be attained by the
study of Greek. My own belief is that the essence of the Greek spirit
was its originality, its splendid absence of deference, its disregard
of what was traditional. The Greeks owed nothing to outside influences.
If the dim origins of their art were Egyptian, they strode forward for
themselves, and spent no time in investigating the earlier traditions.
Again, in literature, they wasted no force in attempting to imbibe
culture from outside influences; they merely developed the capacities
of their own sonorous and graceful language; they infused it with their
own vivid and beautiful personality.
Of course, it may be urged that there probably did not exist in the
world at that date treasures of ancient literature and art. The
question is what the Greeks would have done if they had found
themselves in a later world, stocked, and even overstocked, with old
masterpieces and monuments of human intellect and energy and skill.
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