Laudator Temporis Acti

The philology of Christianity.— How little Christianity educates the sense of honesty and justice can be gauged fairly well from the character of its scholars' writings: they present their conjectures as boldly as if they were dogmas and are rarely in any honest perplexity over the interpretation of a passage in the Bible. Again and again they say 'I am right, for it is written —' and then follows an interpretation of such impudent arbitrariness that a philologist who hears it is caught between rage and laughter and asks himself: is it possible? Is this honourable? is it even decent? — How much dishonesty in this matter is still practised in Protestant pulpits, how grossly the preacher exploits the advantage that no one is going to interrupt him here, how the Bible is pummelled and punched and the art of reading badly is in all due form imparted to the people: only he who never goes to church or never goes anywhere else will underestimate that. But after all, what can one expect from the effects of a religion which in the centuries of its foundation perpetrated that unheard-of philological farce concerning the Old Testament: I mean the attempt to pull the Old Testament from under the feet of the Jews with the assertion it contained nothing but Christian teaching and belonged to the Christians as the true people of Israel, the Jews being only usurpers. And then there followed a fury of interpretation and construction that cannot possibly be associated with a good conscience: however much Jewish scholars protested, the Old Testament was supposed to speak of Christ and only of Christ, and especially of his Cross; wherever a piece of wood, a rod, a ladder, a twig, a tree, a willow, a staff is mentioned, it is supposed to be a prophetic allusion to the wood of the Cross; even the erection of the one-horned beast and the brazen serpent, even Moses spreading his arms in prayer, even the spits on which the Passover lamb was roasted — all allusions to the Cross and as it were preludes to it! Has anyone who asserted this ever believed it? Consider that the church did not shrink from enriching the text of the Septuagint (e.g. in Psalm 96, verse 10) so as afterwards to employ the smuggled-in passage in the sense of Christian prophecy. For they were conducting a war and paid more heed to their opponents than to the need to stay honest.

Die Philologie des Christentums.— Wie wenig das Christentum den Sinn für Redlichkeit und Gerechtigkeit erzieht, kann man ziemlich gut nach dem Charakter der Schriften seiner Gelehrten abschätzen: sie bringen ihre Mutmaßungen so dreist vor wie Dogmen und sind über der Auslegung einer Bibelstelle selten in einer redlichen Verlegenheit. »Immer wieder heißt es »ich habe Recht, denn es steht geschrieben —« und nun folgt eine unverschämte Willkürlichkeit der Auslegung, daß ein Philologe, der es hört, mitten zwischen Ingrimm und Lachen stehen bleibt und sich immer wieder fragt: ist es möglich! Ist dies ehrlich? Ist es auch nur anständig? — Was in dieser Hinsicht immer noch auf protestantischen Kanzeln an Unredlichkeit verübt wird, wie plump der Prediger den Vorteil ausbeutet, daß ihm hier niemand in's Wort fällt, wie hier die Bibel gezwickt und gezwackt und die Kunst des Schlecht-Lesens dem Volke in aller Form beigebracht wird: das unterschätzt nur der, welcher nie oder immer in die Kirche geht. Zuletzt aber: was soll man von den Nachwirkungen einer Religion erwarten, welche in den Jahrhunderten ihrer Begründung jenes unerhörte philologische Possenspiel um das Alte Testament aufgeführt hat: ich meine den Versuch, das Alte Testament den Juden unter dem Leibe wegzuziehen, mit der Behauptung, es enthalte nichts als christliche Lehren und gehöre den Christen als dem wahren Volke Israel: während die Juden es sich nur angemaßt hätten. Und nun ergab man sich einer Wut der Ausdeutung und Unterschiebung, welche unmöglich mit dem guten Gewissen verbunden gewesen sein kann: wie sehr auch die jüdischen Gelehrten protestierten, überall sollte im Alten Testament von Christus und nur von Christus die Rede sein, überall namentlich von seinem Kreuze, und wo nur ein Holz, eine Rute, eine Leiter, ein Zweig, ein Baum, eine Weide, ein Stab genannt wird, da bedeute dies eine Prophezeiung auf das Kreuzesholz; selbst die Aufrichtung des Einhorns und der ehernen Schlange, selbst Moses, wenn er die Arme zum Gebet ausbreitet, ja selbst die Spieße, an denen das Passahlamm gebraten wird, – alles Anspielungen und gleichsam Vorspiele des Kreuzes! Hat dies jemals jemand geglaubt, der es behauptete? Man erwäge, daß die Kirche nicht davor erschrak, den Text der Septuaginta zu bereichern (z.B. bei Psalm 96, V. 10), um die eingeschmuggelte Stelle nachher im Sinne der christlichen Prophezeiung auszunützen. Man war eben im Kampfe und dachte an die Gegner, und nicht an die Redlichkeit.

Furthermore, from a verse of the Ninety-fifth Psalm of David they have left out the short phrase, from the tree. For they have changed the verse, Say you to the Gentiles: The Lord has reigned from the tree, to Say you to the Gentiles: The Lord has reigned.

Καὶ ἀπὸ τοῦ ἐνενηκοστοῦ πέμπτου ψαλμοῦ τῶν διὰ Δαυεὶδ λεχθέντων λόγων λέξεις βραχείας ἀφείλοντο ταύτας· ἀπὸ τοῦ ξύλου. Εἰρημένου γὰρ τοῦ λόγου· Εἴπατε <ἐν> τοῖς ἔθνεσιν· Ὁ κύριος ἐβασίλευσεν ἀπὸ τοῦ ξύλου, ἀφῆκαν· Εἴπατε ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν· Ὁ κύριος ἐβασίλευσεν.

Kroklokwafzi? Sem̄emem̄i!
Seiokrontro — prafriplo:
Bifzi, bafzi; hulalem̄i:
quasti basti bo...
Lalu lalu lalu lalu la!

Hontraruru miromente
zasku zes rü rü?
Entepente, leiolente
klekwapufzi lü?
Lalu lalu lalu lala la!

Simarar kos malzipempu
silzuzankunkrei (;)!
Marjomar dos: Quempu Lempu
Siri Suri Sei []!
Lalu lalu lalu lalu la!

• Thrippsy Pillivinx
• Tafa-Lafa
• Radaratoo, Radarate
• Gibberish

You're about to graduate into a complex and borderless world.

They patrol the countryside and reside in the guard-posts. They serve on guard duty for two years.

περιπολοῦσι τὴν χώραν καὶ διατρίβουσιν ἐν τοῖς φυλακτηρίοις. φρουροῦσι δὲ τὰ δύο ἔτη.

One of the chief solaces in the life of a Classical examiner is supplied by the delicious blunders of examinees; not blunders of blank ignorance, but blunders of intelligence; those which come from that sort of half-knowledge, or three-quarter knowledge, which leads a student whose imagination is unchastened by exact knowledge, once he has missed some essential point, to embark on a hopeless sea of conjecture and incongruity. The charm of such efforts lies not in the extent to which they are wrong, but in the extent to which they are right. One single error may drag in its train a whole catalogue of misapprehensions. Thus, on Friday last, I was presented with the following translation of a line in Ovid, describing a hard frost—

"Saepe sonant moti glacie pendente capilli,"

which means—
'Often, if you shake your hair, the icicles which hang to it will rustle.'

The translation given was—
'The goats frequently get on to a glacier, and when it starts to slip away they send forth their voices.'

In this translation one single letter, e read for i [i.e. capelli for capilli], has put the translator on to slippery ground; the slip once made, he started off, and descended in an avalanche of error.

Another, with more science, but less Latin, rendered the passage:—'At the same time from the overshadowing height the wild glaciers roar.'

A favourite student of mine, now a distinguished man of letters, once translated four Latin words thus—

'A beautiful woman must obviously be well dressed.'

The sentiment was irreproachable; but not so obvious was its connection with the original, which means—

'When a man goes out to battle he should leave his wife behind him.'

And yet the translator had some correct knowledge about each of the four words of the original passage (bella plane accinctis obeunda, Tac. Ann. IV.34). He was right in supposing that bella may sometimes mean 'a beautiful woman'; that plane, means 'obviously'; that obeunda indicates necessity; and that accinctis has something to do with dress. But not seizing the construction, not catching the drift of the thought, he failed to produce what Persius calls 'a short half-ounce of right' in the whole.

More remarkable still is a translation quoted to me a few weeks ago by an English headmaster. Juvenal is describing a dinner-party given by a Roman grandee, who feeds on sumptuous fare himself, while he has bad food and bad drink served to his poor dependants at the foot of the table:—

'Vilibus ancipites fungi ponentur amicis,
Boletus domino; sed quales Claudius edit
Ante illum uxoris, post quem nil amplius edit.'

The meaning is—
'Before the poor dependants will be placed toadstools of dubious quality; before mine host, a lordly mushroom, of the sort that the Emperor Claudius ate, before that one administered to him by his wife, after which he ate nothing more,' in allusion to the fact that the Emperor Claudius was poisoned by his wife, Agrippina, who chose his favourite dish of mushrooms as the vehicle for the poison. This was thus translated:—

'Let those who are in doubt be permitted to discharge their worthless friends; let Boletus (the word for 'mushroom,' which, standing first in the line, has a capital letter) do the same to his master; but then that was before Claudius ate his wife, after which he ate nothing more at all.' The exquisite beauty of this translation is that the writer knew the meaning of every word taken separately, except Boletus; he has made sense; and yet there is not one single word (excluding the five last words) in which he has not made an egregious blunder, evincing a fundamental ignorance of the language. Yet, in fact, he knew just as much Latin as those worthy compatriots of ours know of French, who go blurting out their Anglo-Frankish lingo about the streets of Paris, quite pleased with themselves because they are understood by the waiters who have made a special study of that dialect.

In Latin or Greek you must be absolutely right, or you are not right at all; you must know the meaning, the construction, the position in the sentence, of every word—and every one of these things implies a separate intellectual act—or you cannot give the sense of the original; no half-knowledge, no breezy catching of the general sense, is of the slightest avail, for the passage says to you in its every word, 'You must know me not at all, or know me all in all.' The man or woman who has mastered Latin or Greek knows language scientifically, and every other language theoretically is at their mercy.

• Comical Construes
• The Mystery of the Spicy Virgin
• Medio Tutissimus Ibis
• The Sorrowful Wolf
• The Screaming Fathers
• Dr. Syntax and Mr. Pound

Once as I went from Halle to Calbe, a man who was ploughing ran forth from the field and said that his wife was possessed with a devil, beseeching me most instantly that I would enter his house (for it was not far from our way) and liberate her from this demon. At last, touched by his prayers, I granted his request, coming down from my chariot and following him to his house. When therefore I had looked into the woman's state, I found that she had many fantasies, for that she was wont to sleep and eat too little, whence she fell into feebleness of brain and thought herself possessed by a demon; yet there was no such thing in her case.

So I told her husband to see that she kept a good diet, that is, good meat and drink, especially in the evening when she would go to sleep; "for then" (said I) "when all her work is over, she should drink what is called in the vulgar tongue een warme iaute, that is a quart of hot ale, as hot as she can stand, without bread but with a little butter of the bigness of a hazel-nut. And when she hath drunken it to the end, let her go forthwith to bed; thus will she soon get a whole brain again."

Ambulans semel per viam de Hallis usque Calvis, accurrit ad me de agro vir quidam arans, dicens mulierem suam demone obsessam, instantissime petens, ut domum eius intrarem non longe a via nostra positum et eam a demonio liberarem. Cuius precibus compassus tandem placito acquievi et secum in domum suam, descendens de curru, introivi. Cumque mulierem de statu suo examinassem, inveni eam multas habere fantasias, eo quod parum dormire et parum comedere consuevit, unde et capitis debilitatem incurrebat et se demone obsessam existimavit, quod tamen verum minime fuit.

Dixi ergo viro suo, ut provideret ei bonam dietam servandam, scilicet bene comedere et potare, presertim vesperi, quando vellet ire dormitum, quod tunc post omnia opera sua expleta biberet, ut vulgo dicitur "een warme iaute", hoc est quarta calide cerevisie, sicut posset sustinere, sine pane cum modico butiro in quantitate nucis avelane. "Qua exhausta statim vadat dormitum, ita cito capitis sui sanitatem recuperabit."

Dear Sir,
    My son is now between nine and ten and should begin Greek at once and be taught by the Berlitz method that he may read as soon as possible that most exciting of all stories, the Odyssey, from that landing in Ithaca to the end. Grammar should come when the need comes. As he grows older he will read to me the great lyric poets and I will talk to him about Plato. Do not teach him one word of Latin. The Roman people were the classic decadence, their literature form without matter. They destroyed Milton, the French seventeenth and our own eighteenth century, and our schoolmasters even to-day read Greek with Latin eyes. Greece, could we but approach it with eyes as young as its own, might renew our youth. Teach him mathematics as thoroughly as his capacity permits. I know that Bertrand Russell must, seeing that he is such a featherhead, be wrong about everything, but as I have no mathematics I cannot prove it. I do not want my son to be as helpless. Do not teach him one word of geography. He has lived on the Alps, crossed a number of rivers and when he is fifteen I shall urge him to climb the Sugar Loaf. Do not teach him a word of history. I shall take him to Shakespeare's history plays, if a commercialised theatre permit, and give him all the historical novels of Dumas, and if he cannot pick up the rest he is a fool. Don't teach him one word of science, he can get all he wants in the newspapers and in any case it is no job for a gentleman. If you teach him Greek and mathematics and do not let him forget the French and German he already knows you will do for him all one man can do for another. If he wants to learn Irish after he is well founded in Greek, let him—it will clear his eyes of the Latin miasma. If you will not do what I say, whether the curriculum or your own will restrain, and my son comes from school a smatterer like his father, may your soul lie chained on the Red Sea bottom.

It's a passage reprinted from Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty (Dublin, Cuala Press, 1944). A new passage, dated September 13th begins on page 322, so what you have here is everything, and may be dated to September 12th.

Where two or three
are gathered together, that
is about enough.

What business had you keeping watch over my affairs? Is that not shameless behavior?

τί δέ σε τἀμὰ δεῖ φυλάσσειν; οὐκ ἀναισχύντου τόδε;

• Let's Stop Somebody from Doing Something!
• Foolish
• Right Thinkers

Finally, what shall we say of this study of philology as a whole—the study of the language, the literature, and the life and thought of an ancient people—three things which we placed in an ascending scale of importance? It might perhaps be supposed that the last of them can be attained without the other two, or the two highest without the lowest; that all we need do is to read some clear and eloquent account of the life and thought of the ancients, or some authoritative critical treatise on the ancient authors, in order to get all the real advantage that can be got from a classical training. This view is quite illusory. Generalisations about the life and thought of a past age are mere empty phrases, unless we possess some direct acquaintance with that life and thought. Critical description of an author's merits and defects is one of the most useless forms of human knowledge, unless we can read the author ourselves, and feel that it is true. The key to the whole lies in the laborious mastery of details—in the first instance, in minutely accurate study of grammar and idiom.

If it be true that many or most theological controversies arise 'ex ignoratione grammaticae,' and if in the sphere of law it is a not uncommon occurrence that important issues depend on the place of a comma or on some minute point of verbal interpretation, it is evident that there can be no short and easy way to the kind of insight which is the scholar's aim. We must climb the hill step by step, if we are to see for ourselves the prospect which it commands from its summit.

What is the true reading of a given text in Latin?

Not what the author just possibly might have said, received on the sole faith of a scribe's word; but what all the probabilities of the case, weighed together, each for what it is worth; the scribe's report and all the available checks upon that report—commonsense, Latinity in general, Latinity of the given date, Latinity of the given author, the recognized rules of the art in which he worked,—what all these give as total result.

That is a rough expression of the general principles of Textual Criticism as practised by the great masters in the great days. What are the principles which have usurped their place since the Disintegration? Allow me to quote an example.

In a celebrated passage of a Patristic author,* where the text has considerable historic interest and importance, the change of a letter brings the reading into agreement with all the above-mentioned tests—(only substituting Greek for Latin). The learned German editor** thus observes: 'Even a mediocre sense,' extracted from the misreading, 'is better than the most plausible emendation.' On this I ventured to observe that on these principles texts might be edited by an office boy. Or, if you prefer it: collators become ipso facto editors. A mediocre sense! What a delicacy in characterizing nonsense, short of arrant nonsense. Such then is criticism. A judge means one who takes down depositions.

* Ignatius ad Romanos titulus.—See Journal of Theol. Studies, Vol. XIX, p. 272.
** Dr. F.X. Funk: Patres Apostolici, ed. Tubing. 1881.

Great is überlieferungsgeschichte and Traube is its prophet. But Traube has no more abolished human error in all copyists of every age, than the great Debrett has abolished Original Sin among Persons of Quality.

If we could Socratically force the school of Funk to tell us what they think and not what they want to think that they think, would they not say something like this: 'You appeal to Latinity and stylistic criticism? What do we know about Latinity? You call solecisms what are just exceptions, material for most interesting monographs. Do you mean to tell us that it is impossible for an ancient writer to write nonsense'—I beg pardon, 'mediocre sense'; I thank thee, Funk, for teaching me that word—'make lopsided constructions and lame rhythms?'

No, it is not impossible; there are possibilities both ways. But probability is our guide; it is more probable that some one copyist somewhere in the tradition has blundered, than that the classical poet lapsed...

Ἰγνάτιος ... τῇ ἠλεημένῃ ... ἐκκλησίᾳ ἠγαπημένῃ καὶ πεφωτισμένῃ ... ἥτις καὶ προκάθηται ἐν τόπῳ χωρίου ῾Ρωμαίων ...

Ignatius ... to the church that has found mercy ... beloved and enlightened ... which also presides in the place of the district of the Romans ...

Ignatius ... to the church that has found mercy ... beloved and enlightened ... which also presides over the Romans in Christ's stead ...

It is objected that the classical languages repel by their difficulty—that the learner is oppressed by a mass of dry technical details, grammatical and so forth—that the average boy never gets as far as the literature at all, forgets all he has learned of it as soon as learnt, and has no occasion to use his painfully-acquired knowledge in after life. And it is suggested that in studies of less difficulty, more akin to modern life, acquisition would be easier and more pleasant, progress would be more rapid, while the pupil would carry away a larger body of knowledge, all of it useful in later life.

But I have no faith in the idea that everything in learning can be made easy and pleasant to the learner. The path to knowledge cannot be made an easy path. No mental mastery can ever be acquired except by downright hard effort, by accurate learning of hard lessons, by looking difficulties in the face, and by gradually discovering that the mind possesses within itself the means of overcoming them. I believe that mere difficulty, if encountered in a worthy subject, has its uses. Mr Gladstone thus writes to Mrs Gladstone in 1861: "Tell Harry (her son) that he is right; Latin is hard; and it is in great part because it is hard that it is useful."

In Latin it requires several intellectual operations to grasp the full meaning and connection of each inflected word; and the non-inflected words are very few in number. Take a sentence of two words only: vellem mortuos, 'I would that they were dead.' To understand this sentence thoroughly, a student must know (1) the person, (2) tense, (3) voice, (4) number, (5) mood, of the verb vellem; (6) that it comes from volo, meaning (7), "I wish" ; and that (8) the subjunctive has here a particular shade of meaning. As to mortuos, he must know that it is (9) the accusative, (10) plural, (11) masculine, from (12) mortuus, meaning (13) "dead"; and (14) the reason why the accusative is necessary. In all, fourteen distinct intellectual operations for the proper comprehension of two words!

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

Again, there is the Greek nation — the common blood, the common language; the temples and religious ritual; the whole way of life we understand and share together — indeed, if Athens were to betray all this it would not be well done.

αὖτις δὲ τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν ἐὸν ὅμαιμόν τε καὶ ὁμόγλωσσον καὶ θεῶν ἱδρύματά τε κοινὰ καὶ θυσίαι ἤθεά τε ὁμότροπα, τῶν προδότας γενέσθαι Ἀθηναίους οὐκ ἂν εὖ ἔχοι.

• "a people descended from the same ancestors" (Jay) ~ "the common blood" (Herodotus)
• "speaking the same language" (Jay) ~ "the common language" (Herodotus)
• "professing the same religion" (Jay) ~ "the temples and religious ritual" (Herodotus)
• "very similar in their manners and customs" (Jay) ~ "the whole way of life we understand and share together" (Herodotus)

The aim of culture is chiefly to make many things known. The more things are known, the less importance is given to each individual thing: less faith, less absolute faith. To know many things means to judge more freely and therefore better. The fewer things are known, the more it is believed that only those things exist, only those matter, only those are important. This leads to fanaticism, that is to know only one thing and thus to believe, to have faith only in that. Cf. the Germans and their disposition towards specialization. Fanaticism, too, is a kind of specialization.

La cultura ha principalmente lo scopo di far conoscere molte cose. Più cose si conoscono, meno importanza si dà a ciascuna cosa: meno fede, meno fede assoluta. Conoscere molte cose significa giudicarle più liberamente e dunque meglio. Meno cose si conoscono, più si crede che soltanto quelle esistono, soltanto quelle contano, soltanto quelle hanno importanza. Si arriva così al fanatismo, ossia a conoscere una sola cosa e dunque a credere, ad avere fede soltanto in quella. Cfr. i tedeschi che sono portati alla specializzazione. Anche il fanatismo è una specializzazione.

I walked into my classes and said: 'I'm a reactionary mastodon out of the lost past. You don't need to come to this lecture. But if you do I will explain something to you. I know an embarrassing lot. Terrible. You know almost nothing. I've taken an oath before God to change this equation in your favor. Now shut up.'

"Ho! are you come back to your politics?" cries the squire: "as for those I despise them as much as I do a f--t." Which last words he accompanied and graced with the very action, which, of all others, was the most proper to it.

And first let us behold the whole earth, situated in the centre of the world, a solid spherical mass gathered into a globe by the natural gravitation of all its parts, clothed with flowers and grass and trees and corn, forms of vegetation all of them incredibly numerous and inexhaustibly varied and diverse. Add to these cool fountains ever flowing, transparent streams and rivers, their banks clad in brighest verdure, deep vaulted caverns, craggy rocks, sheer mountain heights and plains of immeasurable extent; add also the hidden veins of gold and silver, and marble in unlimited quantity.

Think of all the various species of animals, both tame and wild! think of the flights and songs of birds! of the pastures filled with cattle, and the teeming life of the woodlands! Then why need I speak of the race of men? who are as it were the appointed tillers of the soil, and who suffer it not to become a savage haunt of monstrous beasts of prey nor a barren waste of thickets and brambles, and whose industry diversifies and adorns the lands and islands and coasts with houses and cities. Could we but behold these things with our eyes as we can picture them in our minds, no one taking in the whole earth at one view could doubt the divine reason.

Ac principio terra universa cernatur, locata in media sede mundi, solida et globosa et undique ipsa in sese nutibus suis conglobata, vestita floribus herbis arboribus frugibus, quorum omnium incredibilis multitudo insatiabili varietate distinguitur. Adde huc fontium gelidas perennitates, liquores perlucidos amnium, riparum vestitus viridissimos, speluncarum concavas altitudines, saxorum asperitates, inpendentium montium altitudines inmensitatesque camporum; adde etiam reconditas auri argentique venas infinitamque vim marmoris.

Quae vero et quam varia genera bestiarum vel cicurum vel ferarum! qui volucrium lapsus atque cantus! qui pecudum pastus! quae vita silvestrium! Quid iam de hominum genere dicam? qui quasi cultores terrae constituti non patiuntur eam nec inmanitate beluarum efferari nec stirpium asperitate vastari, quorumque operibus agri, insulae litoraque collucent distincta tectis et urbibus. Quae si ut animis sic oculis videre possemus, nemo cunctam intuens terram de divina ratione dubitaret.

Various points call for notice in the above passage.

(1) In media mundi parte reconditas auri argentique venas. Note the position of mundi and of auri argentique: boxed up respectively between media and parte, and between reconditas and venas, they make the connection unmistakeable. See what is said on 'Loose Connection,' Vol. I. App. § 31 (o).

(2) Vestita floribus, herbis, arboribus. Mark the force of the Asyndeton. When several nouns are coupled together, the rule is to use the copula with each noun, or with none.

(3) Quorum omnium. This is the usual order. The relative almost invariably comes first.

(4) Fontium gelidas perennitates....speluncarum concavas altitudines, etc. Note the especial force and beauty of these Abstract Plurals. The use of the Plural is to suggest the various particular instances of the thing mentioned; hence it is more concrete than the Singular, and used for that reason. Yet we also have below immanitate belluarum, stirpium vastitate [sic, read asperitate], etc., where the qualities are, as it were, poetically personified.

(5) Note especially the use of the figure Chiasmus. Where two nouns are strung together, or contrasted, each with an Adjective or other word qualifying it, it is usual to put the corresponding words either next to each other, or removed from each other, so as to emphasise the antithesis. Thus montium altitudines immensitatesque camporum; fontium gelidas perennitates, liquores perlucidos amnium; nec immanitate belluarum nec stirpium asperitate, etc.

(6) Quae si, ut animis, sic oculis, etc.: this is the almost invariable order of ut....sic in comparisons. The sic Clause comes last, because most important: in English we usually prefer the reverse order.

And the speaker goes on to expatiate on the beauties of sea and air. At the root of this is still the old Homeric view, that nature is delightful when it is commodious—when its roughness has been tamed by man to his own profit and convenience. Cities (or towns) are seen as purely pleasing. But grafted on to this is a more romantic idea: caves, rough rocks, and overhanging mountains are attractive in themselves, part of the evidence for divine providence and the good planning of the world. Here we catch the sensibility that Virgil was to deepen and enrich when he created the harbour of the first Aeneid; we may also fancy a likeness to the landscapes that were being painted on the walls of rich men's homes at this period. In this passage we feel Cicero (or Stoicism) to fit a large pattern of cultural history and to be comfortably in the flow of an old but evolving tradition: as he moves from wild to cultivated nature, he seems closer to the second Georgic than to Homer. Houses and towns take their modest place in a broadly expansive prospect that embraces shores and islands as well as agricultural land; nature is valued first and foremost for its beauty and only secondarily for its practical use.

This vision of nature is still centred upon man, and indeed is offered as a demonstration of the divine forethought for humankind; even the caves and cliffs are put into the world, as on to the walls of those villas, to gratify our eyes.

The promised land, if it be anywhere, lies away beneath our feet. No more prancing upwards. No more uplift. No more little Excelsiors crying world-brotherhood and international love and Leagues of Nations. Idealism and materialism amount to the same thing on top of Pisgah, and the space is very crowded. We're all cornered on our mountain top, climbing up one another and standing on one another's faces in our scream of Excelsior.

To your tents, O Israel! Brethren, let us go down. We will descend. The way to our precious Canaan lies obviously downhill. An end of uplift. Downhill to the land of milk and honey.

Living in Vienna, Dr. Spitzer knew French, Hebrew, German, and Hungarian by the time he was seven. He subsequently added Latin, Greek, English, Italian, Provençal, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian, Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Old Church Slavonic, Albanian, and Neo-greek. At the age of 48 he learned Turkish, and nine years later he took on Russian.

"But I really know only two," he says, "German and Latin."

The scope of his knowledge appeared to us limitless — he was reputed to know 32 (or was it 36?) languages, although he admitted to knowing only two well: Latin and German.

• Ancient Polyglots
• A Polyglot
• Job Application

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Moreover, the much-admired Republic of Zeno, the founder of the Stoic sect, may be summed up in this one main principle: that all the inhabitants of this world of ours should not live differentiated by their respective rules of justice into separate cities and communities, but that we should consider all men to be of one community and one polity, and that we should have a common life and an order common to us all, even as a herd that feeds together and shares the pasturage of a common field. This Zeno wrote, giving shape to a dream or, as it were, shadowy picture of a well-ordered and philosophic commonwealth; but it was Alexander who gave effect to the idea.

καὶ μὴν ἡ πολὺ θαυμαζομένη Πολιτεία τοῦ τὴν Στωικῶν αἵρεσιν καταβαλομένου Ζήνωνος εἰς ἓν τοῦτο συντείνει κεφάλαιον, ἵνα μὴ κατὰ πόλεις μηδὲ κατὰ δήμους οἰκῶμεν ἰδίοις ἕκαστοι διωρισμένοι δικαίοις, ἀλλὰ πάντας ἀνθρώπους ἡγώμεθα δημότας καὶ πολίτας, εἷς δὲ βίος ᾖ καὶ κόσμος, ὥσπερ ἀγέλης συννόμου νομῷ κοινῷ συντρεφομένης. τοῦτο Ζήνων μὲν ἔγραψεν ὥσπερ ὄναρ ἢ εἴδωλον εὐνομίας φιλοσόφου καὶ πολιτείας ἀνατυπωσάμενος, Ἀλέξανδρος δὲ τῷ λόγῳ τὸ ἔργον παρέσχεν.

The considerable slope, at nearly the foot of which the Abbey stood, gradually acquired a steeper form beyond its grounds; and at half a mile distant was a bank of considerable abruptness and grandeur, well clothed with wood; and at the bottom of this bank, favourably placed and sheltered, rose the Abbey Mill Farm, with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it.

It was a sweet view—sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.

In the 20th cent. new and immensely powerful agents of vertical unification bring about a new phenomenon: the pseudo-self-proletarianization of the élite. A Chairman of the Arts Council is pleased to confess his addiction to Dallas. That purports to be self-deprecation, though really it is nothing of the kind. Ancient culture does not tempt the élite to stoop.

Tradition is not solely, or even primarily, the maintenance of certain dogmatic beliefs; these beliefs have come to take their living form in the course of the formation of a tradition. What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of 'the same people living in the same place'. It involves a good deal which can be called taboo: that this word is used in our time in an exclusively derogatory sense is to me a curiosity of some significance. We become conscious of these items, or conscious of their importance, usually only after they have begun to fall into desuetude, as we are aware of the leaves of a tree when the autumn wind begins to blow them off—when they have separately ceased to be vital. Energy may be wasted at that point in a frantic endeavour to collect the leaves as they fall and gum them onto the branches: but the sound tree will put forth new leaves, and the dry tree should be put to the axe. We are always in danger, in clinging to an old tradition, or attempting to re-establish one, of confusing the vital and the unessential, the real and the sentimental.

It is not of advantage to us to indulge a sentimental attitude towards the past. For one thing, in even the very best living tradition there is always a mixture of good and bad, and much that deserves criticism; and for another, tradition is not a matter of feeling alone. Nor can we safely, without very critical examination, dig ourselves in stubbornly to a few dogmatic notions, for what is a healthy belief at one time may, unless it is one of the few fundamental things, be a pernicious prejudice at another. Nor should we cling to traditions as a way of asserting our superiority over less favoured peoples. What we can do is to use our minds, remembering that a tradition without intelligence is not worth having, to discover what is the best life for us not as a political abstraction, but as a particular people in a particular place; what in the past is worth preserving and what should be rejected; and what conditions, within our power to bring about, would foster the society that we desire. Stability is obviously necessary. You are hardly likely to develop tradition except where the bulk of the population is relatively so well off where it is that it has no incentive or pressure to move about. The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate.

We must also remember that—in spite of every means of transport that can be devised—the local community must always be the most permanent, and that the concept of the nation is by no means fixed and invariable. It is, so to speak, only one fluctuating circle of loyalties between the centre of the family and the local community, and the periphery of humanity entire. Its strength and its geographical size depend upon the comprehensiveness of a way of life which can harmonise parts with distinct local characters of their own. When it becomes no more than a centralised machinery it may affect some of its parts to their detriment, or to what they believe to be their detriment; and we get the regional movements which have appeared within recent years. It is only a law of nature, that local patriotism, when it represents a distinct tradition and culture, takes precedence over a more abstract national patriotism.

I hold—in summing up—that a tradition is rather a way of feeling and acting which characterises a group throughout generations; and that it must largely be, or that many of the elements in it must be, unconscious; whereas the maintenance of orthodoxy is a matter which calls for the exercise of all our conscious intelligence. The two will therefore considerably complement each other. Not only is it possible to conceive of a tradition being definitely bad; a good tradition might, in changing circumstances, become out of date. Tradition has not the means to criticise itself; it may perpetuate much that is trivial or of transient significance as well as what is vital and permanent. And while tradition, being a matter of good habits, is necessarily real only in a social group, orthodoxy exists whether realised in anyone's thought or not. Orthodoxy also, of course represents a consensus between the living and the dead: but a whole generation might conceivably pass without any orthodox thought; or, as by Athanasius, orthodoxy may be upheld by one man against the world. Tradition may be conceived as a byproduct of right living, not to be aimed at directly. It is of the blood, so to speak, rather than of the brain: it is the means by which the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present. In the cooperation of both is the reconciliation of thought and feeling.

And there is a story of a drink-addict at Syracuse who used to put eggs in the ground under his sleeping-mat, and went on drinking continuously for a long enough time to hatch them.

καὶ ἐν Συρακούσαις δὲ φιλοπότης τις ὑποτιθέμενος ὑπὸ τὴν ψίαθον εἰς τὴν γῆν τοσοῦτον ἔπινε, ὡς φασί, χρόνον συνεχῶς, ἕως ἐκλέποι τὰ ᾠά.

How were your American years?
Decisive beyond all expectation. In Baltimore I enrolled in Johns Hopkins University. I had the good fortune to encounter and become acquainted with extraordinary people. One above all: Leo Spitzer, who taught Romance Philology. The first time I saw him, he entered the lecture hall with a stack of books held in place with his chin. His hair was a color between white and grey. And his enormous tweed jacket gave him an unkempt appearance. He was fascinating.

How did he end up in America?
He was a Viennese Jew. Persecuted. Early on, as an employee of the Austrian Empire, he was deputed to censor the letters that Italian prisoners sent home. This experience was the origin of a remarkable book. You see, Spitzer was able to combine great humanity with specialization.

And your relations?
Lovely. I wanted to be considered by him as more than a pupil. One day we were talking — I seem to have been distressed — and I told him that sometimes I didn’t know where I stood and that this was the result of having lost everything. He replied that it is what little we carry with us that is the factor determining our situation. Books — he pointed to them.

Which meant?
He explained it to me. To you (he said) it seems as though you have wound up here, in America, by the will of others, or by force majeure. In part that is true. Where we pitch our tent partly depends on others. But with this as our baggage, gesturing toward the books, we always know where we are and why.

Cosa sono stati gli anni americani?
Decisivi oltre ogni previsione. A Baltimora mi iscrissi alla John Hopkins University. Ebbi la fortuna di conoscere e frequentare persone meravigliose. Una su tutte: Leo Spitzer che insegnava filologia romanza. La prima volta che lo vidi faceva il suo ingresso in aula con una pila di libri tenuta in equilibrio con il mento. I capelli tra il bianco e il grigio. E la giacca enorme di tweed gli conferivano un'aria trasandata. E affascinante.

Com'era finito negli Stati Uniti?
Era un ebreo viennese. Perseguitato. Da giovane era stato addetto, come ufficiale dell'impero austriaco, al controllo e alla censura delle lettere che i soldati italiani prigionieri spedivano a casa. Da quell'esperienza nacque un libro straordinario. Ecco, Spitzer sapeva coniugare grande umanità e specialismo.

E i vostri rapporti?
Bellissimi. Sentivo il desiderio di essere considerata da lui più che un'allieva. Un giorno conversando, forse presa dallo sconforto, gli dissi che a volte non sapevo dove fossi e che questo dipendesse dal fatto che avevo perso tutto. Mi rispose che è quel poco che portiamo con noi a determinare il posto in cui finiamo. Indicava i libri.

Cosa voleva dire?
Me lo spiegò. A lei, disse, le sembrerà di essere finita qui, in America, per volontà di altri o per ragioni di forza maggiore. In parte è così. In parte dipende dagli altri dove pianteremo la nostra tenda. Ma con questo bagaglio, indicando i libri, si sa sempre dove siamo e perché.

The "well-read man" is not much in demand (unless he is famous) and has indeed become rather a figure of fun. Professors of literature tend to regard him as a mere dilettante; scientists are likely to look down on him as a humanistic snob—for if they, by his standards, are illiterate, he is certainly innumerate by theirs. He gets even shorter shrift from activist students who incline to see a life spent in the imagined world of books as a betrayal of the real world that calls so urgently for attention.

How much of the literature honored in college syllabuses is still really read—as distinct from being studied (and then forgotten?) in order to get a degree?

Perhaps some responsible journal should publish a questionnaire listing fifty or so authors from different times and places and invite the reader to enter in the box beside each name the appropriate symbol: A ( "I know his work well" ), B ( "I look into him now and then"), C ("I mean to read him one day"), D ("Haven't read him and don't intend to") or, all else failing, E ("Never heard of him").

Italian (and not only Italian) suffers from the techniques of language instruction now in fashion. Unlike French and Spanish, Italian is not an international language and the ability to speak it is useful only in Italy. Its primary value is as an instrument of culture, which means that what is needed is a fluent reading knowledge. This is not best attained by the current teaching methods, with their stress on "speaking skills" and their avoidance of what used to be called grammar. Many of the Italian writers most worth attention use a formal, often archaic language far removed from the sapless koiné of the textbooks and tapes and a student can waste two years on them only to discover, when finally he comes face to face with a knotty page of Machiavelli, that he has not been taught what he needed.

The academic belief that all disciplines are equally valuable, provided they are conducted in accordance with the rules, is of questionable merit. If one truly believes in one's subject, one ought to think it superior to other subjects. The Grecian should believe, and publicly maintain, that Greek literature is simply better than (for instance) French.

For the scholar, value resides in the rigor and purity of the methods employed and in the objective concern for truth that governs them. What you work on does not greatly matter: provided you work in the right way. Housman's labors to establish an exemplary text of Manilius, an author he despised, is the all too "classical" monument to these beliefs. I do not want to get caught up in an argument about the irrelevance of scholarship to our time of troubles. We need some scholars and will continue to need them. They have their place. But they cannot be allowed to set the standard for the whole humanistic enterprise. Though we may honor their professed dedication to disinterested knowledge, it belongs to an age in which the sum of things was felt to be secure. To devote several years to a subject for which one does not even claim much general importance or to setting up some quite minor text—this, at a time when the future of literacy is in question, may in its way be heroic: heroic, but not serious, to adapt the Austrian mot.* If the substance of humane culture is to survive, it will not be scholarship that saves it, and if the universities survive as centers of humane learning, it will be because they come to recognize that their task is not to train scholars but to educate men.

* American scholars like on the whole to pretend that their work is serious, whatever the evidence to the contrary. I recall a young English classicist on a visiting appointment here causing mild scandal when he described his main interest as "tinkering with the text of Seneca." You are not, in this country, supposed to let the cat out of the bag so nonchalantly.

Modern society cannot get on without scientists and technologists; the social scientists are taking care that it will not be able to do without them. But it could manage very well without us. Who would even notice that no one was any longer talking about Plato's theory of art or Baudelaire's debt to Swedenborg? And our position is weakened from the inside by the fact that we do not really believe in what we are doing or know why we are doing it. If society one day pointed an accusing finger and said, "You cost a lot of money. What use are you?" I doubt that our collective answer would convince even us.

The arts teach us to be discontent with this "world we live in"—though not of course in the sense (or the non-sense) of directing our attention to some "other world," for they are autochthonous and belong here. They remind us that we have no gods, no sanctities of place, no valid ceremonies to mark the seasons of the year and the stations of our lives, and scarcely any more the innocent realm of natural creatures and forms. We call those who have less food and less gadgets then we do "underprivileged." We ourselves are the least privileged of men; yet, but for the arts, we would not even know it.

A contemporary critic has reminded the world that "on ne peut pas porter partout avec soi le cadavre de son père." Never was a witty saying more false. We all carry with us, wherever we go, the bodies of our fathers, not, it is true, lifeless and on our shoulders, but living within us, wrought into the fibre of our being.

We are all futurists to the extent of believing with Guillaume Appollonaire [sic] that "On ne peut pas porter partout avec soi le cadavre de son père."

On ne peut pas transporter partout avec soi le cadavre de son père. On l'abandonne en compagnie des autres morts. Et, l'on s'en souvient, on le regrette, on en parle avec admiration. Et, si l'on devient père, il ne faut pas s'attendre à ce qu'un de nos enfants veuille se doubler pour la vie de notre cadavre.

Friends who have worked on the textual traditions of other authors assure me that their experience is identical with my own—that the average printed apparatus criticus is loaded with error and misleading information of every imaginable kind.

One, in truth, one god there is,
who created heaven and wide earth
and sea's grey swell and winds' forces.
But we mortals, many of us, deceived in heart,
set up as consolation of woes        5
images of gods from stones or figures
of bronze or gold or ivory.
Adorning them with sacrifices and vain festivals,
in this way we suppose that we are pious.

εἷς ταῖς ἀληθείαισιν, εἷς ἐστιν θεός,
ὃς οὐρανόν τ' ἔτευξε καὶ γαῖαν μακράν
πόντου τε χαροπὸν οἶδμα καὶ ἀνέμων βίας.
θνητοὶ δὲ πολλοὶ καρδίαν πλανώμενοι,
ἱδρυσάμεσθα πημάτων παραψυχήν        5
θεῶν ἀγάλματ' ἐκ λίθων ἢ χαλκέων
ἢ χρυσοτεύκτων ἢ ἐλεφαντίνων τύπους·
θυσίας τε τούτοις καὶ κενὰς πανηγύρεις
στέφοντες οὕτως εὐσεβεῖν νομίζομεν.

PEDANTRY is a Word of a very various and mix'd Meaning, and therefore hard to be defin'd: But I will describe it to the Dr. as well as I can, by pointing out some of the chief Marks and Moles of it.

The first and surest Mark of a Pedant is, to write without observing the receiv'd Rules of Civility, and common Decency: And without distinguishing the Characters of those he writes to, or against: For Pedantry in the Pen, is what Clownishness is in Conversation; it is written, Ill-breeding.

It is Pedantry, to effect the Use of an hard Word, where there is an easy one; or of a Greek or Latin Word, where there is an English one, that signifies the very same thing.

To over-rate the Price of Knowledge, and to make as great ado about the true rendring of a Phrase, or accenting of a Word, as if an Article of Faith, or the Fortune of a Kingdom depended upon it, is Pedantry. And so is an assuming and positive Way of delivering ones self, upon Points especially not worth our Concern, and not capable of being perfectly clear'd.

To depart from the Common Ways of writing or speaking, and such as have been us'd by the best Pens, on Purpose to shew ones self more exact; and knowing than the Rest of the World, is a Piece of Affection, that savours of Pedantry.

Pedantry consists also in low and mean Ways of Speech, which are a vicious Affectation of what is natural and easy, as hard Words are of Learning and Scholarship.

An Itch of contradicting Great Men, or Establish'd Opinions upon very slight Grounds, is another Instance of Pedantry.

The Subject is fruitful; but I will confine myself to one Particular more of the Pedant's Character; and that is, a Love of quoting Books or Passages not extant, or never seen by him, in order to amaze and confound his poor Reader, and make himself terrible in the Way of Learning.

She [Cumberland's mother, Johanna née Bentley] also told me, that, when in conversation with him on the subject of his works, she found occasion to lament that he had bestowed so great a portion of his time and talents upon criticism instead of employing them upon original composition, he acknowledged the justice of her regret with extreme sensibility, and remained for a considerable time thoughtful and seemingly embarrassed by the nature of her remark; at last recollecting himself he said—"Child, I am sensible I have not always turned my talents to the proper use for which I should presume they were given to me: yet I have done something for the honour of my God and the edification of my fellow creatures; but the wit and genius of those old heathens beguiled me, and as I despaired of raising myself up to their standard upon fair ground, I thought the only chance I had of looking over their heads was to get upon their shoulders."

The people, as a whole, are undisciplined, senseless, unmanageable, very ready to be turned in any direction whatsoever, faithless, fickle, passionate, treacherous, mistaken, a mere useless noise, and easily swayed toward praise and toward anger.

δῆμος ἄπας ἄτακτος, ἄνους, ἄπρακτος, ἑτοιμότατος ἐφ' ὅ τι ἂν τύχῃ μεταχθῆναι, ἄπιστος, ἀβέβαιος, ὀξύς, προδοτιχός, ἐψευσμένος, φωνὴ μόνον ἀνωφελής, καὶ πρὸς ἔπαινον καὶ πρός ὀργὴν εὐχερής.

Labels: asyndetic privative adjectives

A favorite philological pastime has been to search out all possible Greek sources for Horace and other Roman writers. This is in itself quite commendable, but the comparisons are sometimes far-fetched and, more important still, the conclusions are not seldom quite erroneous. If some of our philologians are right, a Roman writer cannot trim his fingernails, so to speak, in his verse, or comb his hair or kiss his sweetheart without taking the thought and the expression from a Greek source.

No poems perhaps have become so encrusted by the barnacles of later tradition and interpretation as these, and we need to scrape these away if we are to see them in their true shape.

In New Mexico he always awoke a young man; not until he rose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older. His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one's body feel light and one's heart cry "To-day, to-day," like a child's.

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.

That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!

He hated the Press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass-media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth century.

The other gods are either far distant,
or do not have ears,
or do not exist or pay no attention to us,
but we see you present,
not made of stone or wood, but real.
We pray to you...

ἄλλοι μὲν ἢ μακρὰν γὰρ ἀπέχουσιν θεοί,
    ἢ οὐκ ἔχουσιν ὦτα,
ἢ οὐκ εἴσιν, ἢ οὐ προσέχουσιν ἡμῖν οὐδὲ ἕν,
    σὲ δὲ παρόνθ᾿ ὁρῶμεν,
οὐ ξύλινον οὐδὲ λίθινον, ἀλλ᾿ ἀληθινόν.
    εὐχόμεσθα δή σοι...

• Otto Weinreich, "Antikes Gottmenschentum," Ausgewählte Schriften, II: 1922-1937 (Amsterdam: R. Grüner, 1973), pp. 171-197 (at 190-192)
• Victor Ehrenberg, "Athenian Hymn to Demetrius Poliorcetes," Aspects of the Ancient World (1946; rpt. New York: Arno, 1973), pp. 179-198 (unavailable to me)
• Miroslav Marcovich, "Hermocles' Ithyphallus for Demetrius," Studies in Graeco-Roman Religions and Gnosticism (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988), pp. 8-19 (these lines discussed on pp. 13-17)
• Angelos Chaniotis, "The Ithyphallic Hymn for Demetrios Poliorketes and Hellenistic Religious Mentality," in Pangiotis P. Iossif et al., edd., More than Men, Less than Gods: Studies on Royal Cult and Imperial Worship (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), pp. 157-195

We may reflect how much more easily a doctrine of purgatory can be extracted from Virgil than from the Bible.

But there you are, in a free country, it's the man who makes you pay who is free — free to charge you what he likes, and you're forced to pay it. That's what freedom amounts to. They're free to charge, and you are forced to pay.

Epicharmus says that the gods are
winds, water, earth, sun, fire, stars;
but I supposed that useful gods
for us were silver and gold alone.
Set them up in your house        5
and pray for what you want; you'll have everything—
farm, houses, servants, silver plate,
friends, judges, witnesses. Only give;
for you'll have the gods themselves as servants.

ὁ μὲν Ἐπίχαρμος τοὺς θεοὺς εἶναι λέγει
ἀνέμους, ὕδωρ, γῆν, ἥλιον, πῦρ, ἀστέρας·
ἐγὼ δ' ὑπέλαβον χρησίμους εἶναι θεοὺς
τἀργύριον ήμῖν καὶ τὸ χρυσίον μόνους.
ἱδρυσάµενος τούτους γὰρ εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν,        5
εὖξαι τί βούλει· πάντα σοι γενήσεται,
ἀγρός, οἰκίαι, θεράποντες, ἀργυρώµατα,
φίλοι, δικασταί, µάρτυρες. μόνον δίδου·
αυτούς γάρ έξεις τούς θεούς ύπηρέτας.

They sacrifice to sun and moon and earth and fire and water and winds.

θύουσι δὲ ἡλίῳ τε καὶ σελήνῃ καὶ γῇ καὶ πυρὶ καὶ ὕδατι καὶ ἀνέμοισι.

They say that gifts persuade even gods.

πείθειν δῶρα καὶ θεοὺς λόγος.

• In Praise of Money
• Catechism
• The Prayer of the Mammonites
• The Worship of Money
• Greatest and Highest of Gods
• The Goddess We Adore
• I Bow Before the Idol
• The Worship of Mammon

When I write about old-fashioned things, my mind somehow or other becomes old-fashioned.

mihi vetustas res scribenti nescio quo pacto antiquus fit animus.

At the beginning of the Christian era, voices were heard off the coasts of Greece, out to sea, on the Mediterranean, wailing: 'Pan is dead! Great Pan is dead!'

The father of fauns and nymphs, satyrs and dryads and naiads was dead, with only the voices in the air to lament him. Humanity hardly noticed.

But who was he, really? Down the long lanes and overgrown ridings of history we catch odd glimpses of a lurking rustic god with a goat's white lightning in his eyes. A sort of fugitive, hidden among leaves, and laughing with the uncanny derision of one who feels himself defeated by something lesser than himself.

An outlaw, even in the early days of the gods. A sort of Ishmael among the bushes.

Yet always his lingering title: The Great God Pan. As if he was, or had been, the greatest.

Lurking among the leafy recesses, he was almost more demon than god. To be feared, not loved or approached. A man who should see Pan by daylight fell dead, as if blasted by lightning.

Yet you might dimly see him in the night, a dark body within the darkness. And then, it was a vision filling the limbs and the trunk of a man with power, as with new, strong-mounting sap. The Pan-power! You went on your way in the darkness secretly and subtly elated with blind energy, and you could cast a spell, by your mere presence, on women and on men. But particularly on women.

In the woods and the remote places ran the children of Pan, all the nymphs and fauns of the forest and the spring and the river and the rocks. These, too, it was dangerous to see by day. The man who looked up to see the white arms of a nymph flash as she darted behind the thick wild laurels away from him followed helplessly. He was a nympholept. Fascinated by the swift limbs and the wild, fresh sides of the nymph, he followed for ever, for ever, in the endless monotony of his desire. Unless came some wise being who could absolve him from the spell.

But the nymphs, running among the trees and curling to sleep under the bushes, made the myrtles blossom more gaily, and the spring bubble up with greater urge, and the birds splash with a strength of life. And the lithe flanks of the Faun gave life to the oak-groves, the vast trees hummed with energy. And the wheat sprouted like green rain returning out of the ground, in the little fields, and the vine hung its black drops in abundance, urging a secret.

Gradually men moved into cities. And they loved the display of people better than the display of a tree. They liked the glory they got of overpowering one another in war. And, above all, they loved the vainglory of their own words, the pomp of argument and the vanity of ideas.

So Pan became old and grey-bearded and goat-legged, and his passion was degraded with the lust of senility. His power to blast and to brighten dwindled. His nymphs became coarse and vulgar.

Till at last the old Pan died, and was turned into the devil of the Christians. The old god Pan became the Christian devil, with the down hoofs and the horns, the tail, and the laugh of derision. Old Nick, the Old Gentleman who is responsible for all our wickednesses, but especially our sensual excesses — this is all that is left of the Great God Pan.

It is strange. It is a most strange ending for a god with such a name. Pan! All! That which is everything has goat's feet and a tail! With a black face!

This really is curious.

Yet this was all that remained of Pan, except that he acquired brimstone and hell-fire, for many, many centuries. The nymphs turned into the nasty-smelling witches of a Walpurgis night, and the fauns that danced became sorcerers riding the air, or fairies no bigger than your thumb.

But Pan keeps on being reborn, in all kinds of strange shapes. There he was, at the Renaissance. And in the eighteenth century he had quite a vogue. He gave rise to an 'ism', and there were many pantheists, Wordsworth one of the first. They worshipped Nature in her sweet-and-pure aspect, her Lucy Gray aspect.

'Oft have I heard of Lucy Gray,' the school-child began to recite, on examination-day.

'So have I,' interrupted the bored inspector.

Lucy Gray, alas, was the form that William Wordsworth thought fit to give to the Great God Pan.

And then he crossed over to the young United States: I mean Pan did. Suddenly he gets a new name. He becomes the Oversoul, the Allness of everything. To this new Lucifer Gray of a Pan Whitman sings the famous Song of Myself. 'I am All, and All is Me.' That is: 'I am Pan, and Pan is me.'

The old goat-legged gentleman from Greece thoughtfully strokes his beard, and answers: 'All A is B, but all B is not A.' Aristotle did not live for nothing. All Walt is Pan, but all Pan is not Walt.

This, even to Whitman, is incontrovertible. So the new American pantheism collapses.

Then the poets dress up a few fauns and nymphs, to let them run riskily — oh, would there were any risk! — in their private 'grounds'. But, alas, these tame guinea-pigs soon became boring. Change the game.

We still pretend to believe that there is One mysterious Something-or-other back of Everything, ordaining all things for the ultimate good of humanity. It wasn't back of the Germans in 1914, of course, and whether it's back of the bolshevist is still a grave question. But still, it's back of us, so that's all right.

Alas, poor Pan! Is this what you've come to? Legless, hornless, faceless, even smileless, you are less than everything or anything, except a lie.

And yet here, in America, the oldest of all, old Pan is still alive. When Pan was greatest, he was not even Pan. He was nameless and unconceived, mentally. Just as a small baby new from the womb may say Mama! Dada! whereas in the womb it said nothing; so humanity, in the womb of Pan, said nought. But when humanity was born into a separate idea of itself, it said Pan.

In the days before man got too much separated off from the universe, he was Pan, along with all the rest.

As a tree still is. A strong-willed, powerful thing-in-itself, reaching up and reaching down. With a powerful will of its own it thrusts green hands and huge limbs at the light above, and sends huge legs and gripping toes down, down between the earth and rocks, to the earth's middle....

This is the might of Pan, and the power of Pan.

And still, in America, among the Indians, the oldest Pan is alive. But here, also, dying fast.

It is useless to glorify the savage. For he will kill Pan with his own hands, for the sake of a motor-car. And a bored savage, for whom Pan is dead, is the stupefied image of all boredom.

And we cannot return to the primitive life to live in tepees and hunt with bows and arrows.

Yet live we must. And once life has been conquered, it is pretty difficult to live. What are we going to do, with a conquered universe? The Pan relationship, which the world of man once had with all the world, was better than anything man has now. The savage, today, if you give him the chance, will become more mechanical and unliving than any civilized man. But civilized man, having conquered the universe, may as well leave off bossing it. Because, when all is said and done, life itself consists in a live relatedness between man and his universe: sun, moon, stars, earth, trees, flowers, birds, animals, men, everything — and not in a 'conquest' of anything by anything. Even the conquest of the air makes the world smaller, tighter, and more airless.

And whether we are a store-clerk or a bus-conductor, we can still choose between the living universe of Pan, and the mechanical conquered universe of modern humanity. The machine has no windows. But even the most mechanized human being has only got his windows nailed up, or bricked in.

• They Told Me Pan Was Dead
• You Shall Hear the Note of His Pipe
• Pan Is Not Yet Dead
• A Worshipper at Pan's Shrine
• This Modern World Is Grey and Old
• Poems of a Stockbroker
• The Survival of Pan

We commonly observe those on the edge of a group or community feeling the pride of belonging most keenly, and patriotism is often strongest among those who in one sense or another are at the margins of their country.

Sentiment, as well as anxiety, enlarges the patriotism of frontier zones. Indeed, national heroes have quite often come from the edges, or from beyond the edges, of the countries they have inspired. Napoleon was Italian; Garibaldi, a Savoyard born in Nice, was almost French; De Valera was born in New York, the son of a Spaniard, and escaped execution after the Easter Rising because he was American. Churchill had an American mother, as did Parnell; Lloyd George, the Welsh wizard, was born plain George in Manchester; Dufour, Switzerland's national hero, was born in Germany; Joan of Arc and De Gaulle (that poet of 'la France profonde') were the children of border lands. The two monsters of European nationalism also fit the pattern: the Austrian Hitler and the Georgian Stalin. A similar moral may sometimes be drawn from literature, high and low. Possibly the most eloquent expressions of Englishry in the last century and in this were produced by Americans: Henry James and T.S. Eliot. Conversely, the author of 'God bless America' was a native of Siberia. As for Ireland, it is the Anglo-Saxons who have drifted entranced through the Celtic twilight, while the native Irishry have kept their hard, satiric eye. These phenomena are not deeply surprising: the national feeling is likely to be especially strong among those in whom it is an achieved thing, not mere instinct; who have pondered it, chosen it, perhaps striven for it.

One cannot well drive about England with one's eyes open, without observing indication after indication of the strong, independent individuality of the English character, which may yet prove our best safeguard against that exotic 'Collectivism' of which we hear so much. The very landscape, its shapeless fields, its irregular hedgerows, its winding and wayward roads, its accidental copses, its arbitrariness of form and feature, are a silent but living protest against uniformity and preconceived or mechanical views of life. Who divided these fields? Who marked out these roads? No one did. They divided and marked out themselves just as strong characters divide and sever themselves from others, settle their own boundaries, and define irregularly their own place and position. A square field you will no more find in an English landscape than a round one. They are all informal, swerving and sweeping in and out in a manner unaccountable, which endows each of them with life and a kind of personality. The very lanes meander and zigzag so, you might almost think their course had been decided by the steps of some of our deeply-drinking Saxon ancestors, whose legs were more or less unsteady as they wended homeward after a day's thatching or threshing. That this irregularity of the landscape, so delightful to look on, is accompanied by a good deal of waste, from the economist's point of view, may be true enough. We are a thriftless people. But is not our unthriftiness part of our masculinity, part of the negligent bigness in the national character, which feels it can afford to be heedless of trifles and details, and in any case will on no account be reduced to slavish formality? Like the poet, England was born, not made, and has grown in its own lavish, wide-spreading fashion.

'I shall be taken nowhere, see nothing, and converse with nobody, that is not ancient. I wish to see Old England, or so much of it as is left.'

'Yet,' I ventured to plead, for this particular conversation was between Lamia and me only, 'is there not much in it that is more or less new, well worth seeing, and strongly appealing to the intelligent mind?'

'That may or may not be. Not being myself intelligent, but radically, or should I not rather say conservatively, stupid, I cannot say. But there is one thing I do know, which is known but to few, especially to few women, I know what I want; and I do not want paper-mills with the newest machinery for turning the pages of yesterday's immortal works into fresh paper on which to print the equally enduring works of to-morrow. I can equally dispense with tubular bridges, whatever they may happen to be, the latest thing in motor-cars, model farms, and elementary schools conducted on an entirely novel system, in which everything is taught except the elements of sound morals and good manners, and the rudiments of universal knowledge are instilled, which resolutely refuse to take root in the mind of the bucolic British boy. May I hope, too, that now Peace has happily been restored throughout His Majesty's dominions, we may see no newspapers older than Addison's Spectator?'

We had got down to gather a hedge posy, and at this point of the conversation Veronica and the Poet, who had been similarly employed not far off, joined us; when Lamia, not changing the theme, but somewhat altering its tone, continued:

'I confess I crave for the urbanity of the Past, for feminine serviceableness, for washing-days, home-made jams, lavender bags, recitation of Gray's Elegy, and morning and evening prayers. One is offered, in place of them, ungraceful hurry and worry, perpetual postman's knocks, an intermittent shower of telegrams, reply not paid, dithyrambic vulgarity or life-not-worth-living lamentations, and individual infallibility accompanied by universal incredulity. Look round at this rustic old-world scene. Work is going on everywhere, but how quietly, how undemonstratively! Tell me, Veronica, we shall stay nowhere except at old inns, shall we, or with old people, and give utterance to none but the very oldest and most out-of-fashion ideas.'

Surely I think that he and all natives of Italian towns have two fatherlands, one by nature and the other by citizenship. Cato, for example, though born in Tusculum, received citizenship in Rome, and so, as he was a Tusculan by birth and a Roman by citizenship, had one fatherland which was the place of his birth, and another by law; just as the people of your beloved Attica, before Theseus commanded them all to leave the country and move into the city (the astu, as it is called), were at the same time citizens of their own towns and of Attica, so we consider both the place where we were born our fatherland, and also the city into which we have been adopted. But that fatherland must stand first in our affection in which the name of republic signifies the common citizenship of all of us. For her it is our duty to die, to her to give ourselves entirely, to place on her altar, and, as it were, to dedicate to her service, all that we possess. But the fatherland which was our parent is not much less dear to us than the one which adopted us.

ego mehercule et illi et omnibus municipibus duas esse censeo patrias, unam naturae, alteram civitatis, ut ille Cato, cum esset Tusculi natus, in populi Romani civitatem susceptus est; ita, cum ortu Tusculanus esset, civitate Romanus, habuit alteram loci patriam, alteram iuris; ut vestri Attici, prius quam Theseus eos demigrare ex agris et in astu, quod appellatur, omnis se conferre iussit, et sui erant iidem et Attici, sic nos et eam patriam ducimus, ubi nati, et illam, a qua excepti sumus. sed necesse est caritate eam praestare, qua rei publicae nomen universae civitatis est; pro qua mori et cui nos totos dedere et in qua nostra omnia ponere et quasi consecrare debemus. dulcis autem non multo secus est ea, quae genuit, quam illa, quae excepit.

Winter in a solitary house in the country, without society, is tolerable, nay, even enjoyable and delightful, given certain conditions; but these are not the conditions which attach to the life of a professional man who drops down into such a place by mere accident. They were present to the lives of Winterborne, Melbury, and Grace; but not to the doctor's. They are old association—an almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate and inanimate, within the observer's horizon. He must know all about those invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have traversed the fields which look so grey from his windows; recall whose creaking plough has turned those sods from time to time; whose hands planted the trees that form a crest to the opposite hill; whose horses and hounds have torn through that underwood; what birds affect that particular brake; what bygone domestic dramas of love, jealousy, revenge, or disappointment have been enacted in the cottages, the mansion, the street or on the green. The spot may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience; but if it lack memories it will ultimately pall upon him who settles there without opportunity of intercourse with his kind.

[T]heology depends on a double standard. One set of standards is employed for reading and interpreting one's own tradition and its texts; another, for the texts and traditions of all other. Here, one is committed not only to make sense of everything but to make everything come out superior, profound, and beautiful; there, one is not averse to finding fault and even emphasizing all that is inferior to one's own tradition.

Theology is antithetic not only to the Sermon on the Mount but to the most elementary standards of fairness. It involves a deliberate blindness to most points of view other than one's own, a refusal to see others as they see themselves and to see oneself as one appears to others—a radical insistence on applying different standards to oneself and others.