The
doubt is whether the creative impulse would have died away, and whether
the Greeks would have tended to fling themselves into the passionate
study, the eager apprehension, of the beautiful inheritance of the
ages. I cannot myself believe it. They would have had, I believe, an
intense and ardent appreciation of what had been, but the desire to see
and hear some new thing of which St. Paul spoke, the deep-seated desire
for self-expression, would have kept them free from any tame surrender
to tradition, any danger of basing their cultivation on what had been
represented or thought or sung by their human predecessors. I cannot,
for instance, conceive of the Greeks as devoting themselves to
erudition; I cannot imagine their giving themselves up to the same
minute appreciation of ancient forms of expression which we give to the
Greek literature itself.
Moreover, unless we concede to the Greek literature the position of the
high-water mark of human expression, and believe that the intellect of
man had since that day suffered decline and eclipse, we ought not to
allow an ancient literature to overshadow our own energies, or to give
up the hope of creating a vivid literature, at once classical and
romantic, of our own.
And even if we did concede to Greek literature this august supremacy, I
cannot believe that our best intellect ought to be practised in the
awestruck submissiveness of mind that too often results from our
classical education.
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