Humanist Essays (Routledge Revivals)

Gilbert Murray

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317913306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Humanism in Philosophy

First published in 1964, this is a short collection of both literary and philosophical essays. Whilst two essays consider Greek literature written at the point at which the Athenian empire was breaking apart, another group explore the background from which Christianity arose, considering Paganism and the religious philosophy at the time of Christ. These, in particular, display Gilbert Murray's 'profound belief in ethics and disbelief in all revelational religions' as well as his conviction that the roots of our society lie within Greek civilization. Finally, there is an interesting discussion of Order and the motives of those who seek to overthrow it.

Chapter I
Religio Grammatici: The Religion of a ‘Man of Letters’¹

IT is the general custom of this Association to choose as its President alternately a classical scholar and a man of wide eminence outside the classics. Next year you are to have a man of science, a great physician who is also famous in the world of learning and literature. Last year you had a statesman, though a statesman who is also a great scholar and man of letters, a sage and counsellor in the antique mould, of world-wide fame and unique influence.² And since, between these two, you have chosen, in your kindness to me, a professional scholar and teacher, you might well expect from him an address containing practical educational advice in a practical educational crisis. But that, I fear, is just what I cannot give. My experience is too one-sided. I know little of schools and not much even of pass-men. I know little of such material facts as curricula and time-tables and parents and examination papers. I sometimes feel—as all men of fifty should—my ignorance even of boys and girls. Besides that, I have the honour at present to be an official of the Board of Education; and in public discussions of current educational subjects an officer of the Board must in duty be like the poetical heroine—'He cannot argue, he can only feel.'

I believe, therefore, that the best I can do, when the horizon looks somewhat dark not only for the particular studies which we in this Society love most, but for the habits of mind which we connect with those studies, the philosophic temper, the gentle judgement, the interest in knowledge and beauty for their own sake, will be simply, with your assistance, to look inward and try to realize my own confession of faith. I do, as a matter of fact, feel clear that, even if knowledge of Greek, instead of leading to bishoprics as it once did, is in future to be regarded with popular suspicion as a mark of either a reactionary or an unusually feckless temper, I am nevertheless not in the least sorry that I have spent a large part of my life in Greek studies, not in the least penitent that I have been the cause of others doing the same. That is my feeling, and there must be some base for it. There must be such a thing as Religio Grammatici, the special religion of a 'Man of Letters'.

The greater part of life, both for man and beast, is rigidly confined in the round of things that happen from hour to hour. It is

exposed for circumstances to beat upon; its stream of consciousness channelled and directed by the events and environments of the moment. Man is imprisoned in the external present; and what we call a man's religion is, to a great extent, the thing that offers him a secret and permanent means of escape from that prison, a breaking of the prison walls which leaves him standing, of course, still in the present, but in a present so enlarged and enfranchised that it is become not a prison but a free world. Religion, even in the narrow sense, is always seeking for Sotêria, for escape, for some salvation from the terror to come or some deliverance from the body of this death.

And men find it, of course, in a thousand ways, with different degrees of ease and of certainty. I am not wishing to praise my talisman at the expense of other talismans. Some find it in theology, some in art, in human affection; in the anodyne of constant work; in that permanent exercise of the inquiring intellect which is commonly called the search for Truth; some find it in carefully cultivated illusions of one sort or another, in passionate faiths and undying pugnacities; some, I believe, find a substitute by simply rejoicing in their prison, and living furiously, for good or ill, in the actual moment.

And a scholar, I think, secures his freedom by keeping hold always of the past and treasuring up the best out of the past, so that in a present that may be angry or sordid he can call back memories of calm or of high passion, in a present that requires resignation or courage he can call back the spirit with which brave men long ago faced the same evils. He draws out of the past high thoughts and great emotions; he also draws the strength that comes from communion or brotherhood.

Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonidcs,
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old,

come back to comfort another blind poet in his affliction. The Psalms, turned into strange languages, their original meaning often lost, live on as a real influence in human life, a strong and almost always an ennobling influence, I know the figures in the tradition may be unreal, their words may be misinterpreted. But the communion is quite a real fact. And the student, as he realizes it, feels himself one of a long line of torchbearers. He attains that which is the most compelling desire of every human being, a work in life which it is worth living for, and which is not cut short by the accident of his own death.

It is in that sense that I understand Religio. And now I would ask you to consider with me the proper meaning of Grammatikê, and the true business of the 'Man of Letters' or 'Grammaticus'.

II

A very very, long time ago—the palaeontologists refuse to give us dates—mankind, trying to escape from his mortality, invented Grammata or letters. Instead of being content with his spoken words,

which fly as a bird flies and are past, he struck out the plan of making marks on wood or stone, or bone or leather or some other material, significant marks which should somehow last on, charged with meaning, in place of the word that had perished. Of course the subjects for such perpetuation were severely selected. Infinitely the greater part of man's life, even now, is in the moment, the sort of thing that is lived and passes without causing any particular regret, or rousing any definite action for the purpose of retaining it. And when the whole process of writing or graving was as difficult as it must have been in remote antiquity, the words that were recorded, the moments that were so to speak made imperishable, must have been very rare indeed. One is tempted to think of the end of Faust; was not the graving of a thing on brass or stone, was not even the painting of a reindeer in the depths of a palaeolithic cave, a practical though imperfect method of saying to the moment 'Verweile dock, Du bist so schön' ('Stay longer, thou art so beautiful')? Of course the choice was, as you would expect, mostly based on material considerations and on miserably wrong considerations at that. I suppose the greater number of very ancient inscriptions or Grammata known to the world consist either in magical or religious formulae, supposed to be effective in producing material welfare; or else in titles of kings and honorific records of their achievements; or else in contracts and laws in which the spoken word eminently needed preserving. Either charms or else boasts or else contracts; and it is worth remembering that so far as they have any interest for us now it is an interest quite different from that for which they were engraved. They were all selected for immortality by reason of some present personal urgency. The charm was expected to work; the boast delighted the heart of the boaster; the contract would compel certain slippery or forgetful persons to keep their word. And now we know that the charm did not work. We do not know who the boaster was, and, if we did, would probably not admire him for the thing he boasts about. And the slippery or forgetful persons have long since been incapable of either breaking or fulfilling the contract. We are in each case only interested in some quality in the record which is different from that for which people recorded it. Of course there may be also the mere historical interest in these things as facts; but that again is quite different from the motive for their recording.

In fact one might say to all these records of human life, all these Grammata that have come down to us, what Marcus Aurelius teaches us to say to ourselves:

each one is 'a little soul carrying a corpse'. Each one, besides the material and temporary message it bears, is a record, however imperfect, of human life and character and feeling. In so far as the record can get across the boundary that separates mere record of fact from philosophy or poetry, so far it has a soul and still lives.

This is clearest, of course, in the records to which we can definitely attribute beauty. Take a tragedy of Aeschylus, a dialogue of Plato, take one of the very ancient Babylonian hymns or an oracle of Isaiah. The prophecy of Isaiah referred primarily to a definite set of facts and contained some definite—and generally violent—political advice; but we often do not know what those facts were, nor care one way or another about the advice. We love the prophecy and value it because of some quality of beauty, which subsists when the value of the advice is long dead; because of some soul that is there which does not perish. It is the same with those magnificent Babylonian hymns. Their recorders were doubtless conscious of their beauty, but they thought much more of their religious effectiveness. With the tragedy of Aeschylus or the dialogue of Plato the case is different, but only different in degree. If we ask why they were valued and recorded, the answer must be that it was mainly for their poetic beauty and philosophic truth, the very reasons for which they are read and valued now. But even here it is easy to see that there must have been some causes at work which derived their force simply from the urgency of the present, and therefore died when that present faded away.

And similarly an ancient work may, or indeed must, gather about itself new special environments and points of relevance. Thucydides and Aristophanes' Knights and even Jane Austen are different things now from what they were in 1913. I can imagine a translation of the Knights which would read like a brand-new topical satire. No need to labour the point. I think it is clear that in any great work of literature there is a soul which lives and a body which perishes; and further, since the soul cannot ever be found naked without any body at all, it is making for itself all the time new bodies, changing with the times.

III

Both soul and body are preserved, imperfectly of course, in Grammata or Letters; in a long series of marks scratched, daubed, engraved, written or printed, stretching from the inscribed bone implements and painted rocks of prehistoric man, through the great literatures of the world, down to this morning's newspaper and the MS. from which I am speaking; marks which have their own history also and their own vast varieties. And 'the office of the art Grammatikê is so to deal with the Grammata as to recover from them all that can be recovered of that which they have saved from oblivion, to reinstate as far as possible the spoken word in its first impressiveness and musicalness'.¹ That is not a piece of modern sentiment. It is the strict doctrine of the scribes. Dionysius Thrax gives us the definition;

; an

a skill produced by practice, in the things said in poets and prose-writers; and he goes on to divide it into six parts, of which the first and most essential is Reading Aloud

—with just the accent, the cadences, the expression, with which the words were originally spoken before they were turned from

to

from 'winged' words to permanent Letters. The other five parts are concerned with analysis; interpretation of figures of speech; explanation of obsolete words and customs; etymology; grammar in the narrow modern sense; and lastly

or, roughly, literary criticism. The first part is synthetic and in a sense creative; and most of the others are subservient to it. For I suppose if you had attained by study the power of reading aloud a play of Shakespeare exactly as Shakespeare intended the words to be spoken, you would be pretty sure to have mastered the figures of speech and obsolete words and niceties of grammar. At any rate, whether or no you could manage the etymologies and the literary criticism, you would have done the main thing. You would, subject to the limitations we considered above, have recreated the play.

We intellectuals of the twentieth century, poor things, are so intimately accustomed to the use of Grammata that probably many of us write more than we talk and read far more than we listen. Language has become to us primarily a matter of Grammata. We have largely ceased to demand from the readers of a book any imaginative transliteration into the living voice. But mankind was slow in acquiescing in this renunciation. Isocrates, in a well-known passage (5, 10) of his Letter to Philip, laments that the scroll he sends will not be able to say what he wants it to say. Philip will hand it to a secretary and the secretary, neither knowing nor caring what it is all about, will read it out 'with no persuasiveness, no indication of changes of feeling, as if he were giving a list of items'. The early Arab writers in the same situation used to meet it squarely. The sage wrote his own book and trained his disciples to read it aloud, each sentence exactly right, and generally, to avoid the mistakes of the ordinary untrained reader, he took care that the script should not be intelligible to such persons.

These instances show us in what spirit the first Grammatici, our fathers in the art, conceived their task, and what a duty they have laid upon us. I am not of course overlooking the other and perhaps more extensive side of a scholar's work; the side which regards a piece of ancient or foreign writing as a phenomenon of language to be analysed and placed, not as a thing of beauty to be recreated or kept alive. On that side of his work the Grammaticus is a man of science or Wissenschaft, like another. The science of language demands for its successful study the same rigorous exactitude as the other natural sciences, while it has for educational purposes some advantages over most of them. Notably, its subject matter is intimately familiar to the average student, and his ear very sensitive to its varieties. The study of it needs almost no apparatus, and gives great scope for variety and originality of attack. Lastly, its extent is vast and its subtlety almost infinite; for it is a record, and a very fine one, of all the immeasurable varieties and gradations of human consciousness. Indeed, as the Grammata are related to the spoken word, so is the spoken word itself related to the thought or feeling. It is the simplest record, the first precipitation. But I am not dealing now with the Grammaticus as a man of science, or an educator of the young, I am considering that part of his function which belongs specially to Religio or Pietas.

IV

Proceeding on these lines we see that the scholar's special duty is to turn the written signs in which old poetry or philosophy is now enshrined back into living thought or feeling. He must so understand as to re-live. And here he is met at the present day by a direct frontal criticism. 'Suppose, after great toil and the expenditure of much subtlety of intellect, you succeed in re-living the best works of the past, is that a desirable end? Surely our business is with the future and present, not with the past. If there is any progress in the world or any hope for struggling humanity, does it not lie precisely in shaking off the chains of the past and looking steadily forward?' How shall we meet this question?

First, we may say, the chains of the irrind are not broken by any form of ignorance. The chains of the mind are broken by understanding. And so far as men are unduly enslaved by the past it is by understanding the past that they may hope to be freed. But, sec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• I. LITERARY
• II. PHILOSOPHICAL