Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/561

Rh with conditions existing in modern times. He is led to suppose that later periods offer nothing to compare with the Iliad and Æneid; with the intellect of Aristotle; with the morals of Cicero, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius; with the philosophy or excellence of Socrates and Plato; with the daintiness of the Greek lyric poets; with the abandon of Horace; or with the heroism of Marathon and Thermopylæ. He is led to suppose that one must look to Greece and Rome for models of purity and devotion; he is told that only by study of the classical writers can he gain sure foundation in morals and true intellectual polish; that the fulness of the Greek language was the outcome of God's desire to have a fit vehicle for revelation. And finally he is left to gather that our colleges by their teaching of Greek and Latin enable students to come in close touch with all this nobility of thought and life.

Yet no one need feel humiliation because he lives in an inferior age or belongs to a deteriorated race. The sentences extolling the distant past mean nothing; they are but echoes from voices of the long-buried Humanists, which by long reverberation have become polished in form, musical in rhythm. No "literary function" would be complete unless some modern Humanist had repeated them with the fervor of a Thibetan priest.

No one denies that the author of the Iliad had marvelous skill in description, but not a few have regretted that a writer of such ability had no better subject than the quarrels and combats of lustful savages, whose exploits, so vividly pictured, are those of mere brutes. In point of morals, the Homeric poems are not superior to the Kalevala, to which they are inferior in imagery. Of course, this matter is one of taste, but one may be pardoned for supposing that the Kalevala, less extravagant in description than the Iliad, would have gained the stronger hold on popular fame if it too had been translated by Alexander Pope. But neither the Iliad nor the Æneid is superior to Paradise Lost or to the Inferno, which, produced by greater intellects, are free from the grossness which characterizes the Homeric poems.

Aristotle no more typified Greek intellect than Ajax typified Greek physique, or than a building with forty-five stories typifies New York's dwelling houses. He was a giant amid pygmies, a phenomenon in the Greek intellectual sky as startling as was Donati's comet in our physical sky, half a century ago. Like Leibnitz, Kant and Spencer, he broke away from the trammels which bound his contemporaries and devoted himself to the study of actual conditions in search of sure basis for philosophy. Like Leibnitz, Kant and Spencer, he received the maledictions of those who belonged to the prevailing schools. Were he living now he would be but one of many, possibly the chief. It is unjust to compare him with Spencer, as some have done, for the latter lived in an age of greater knowledge and greater advantages. Plato's