αἰ δὲ τεαὶ ξώουσιν ἀηδόνες ᾖσιν ὁ πάντων ἁρπακτὴρ Ἀῒδης οὐκ ἐπὶ χεῖρα βαλεῖ CALLIMACHUS. “Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake, For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.” HELLENISM “Greece” and “Greek” mean different things to different people. To the man in the street, if he exists, they stand for something proverbially remote and obscure, as dead as Queen Anne, as heavy as the British Museum. To the average finished product of Higher Education in England they recall those dog-eared text-books and grammars which he put away with much relief when he left school; they waft back to him the strangely close atmosphere of the classical form-room. The historian, of course, will inform us that all Western civilisation has Greece for its mother and nurse, and that unless we know something about her our knowledge of the past must be built upon sand. That is true: only nobody cares very much what historians say, for they deal with the past, and the past is dead and disgusting. To some cultured folk who have read Swinburne (but not Plato) the notion of the Greeks presents a world of happy pagans, children of nature, without any tiresome ideas of morality or self-control, sometimes making pretty poems and statues, but generally basking in the sun without much on. There are also countless earnest students of the Bible who remember what St. Paul said about those Greeks who thought the Cross foolishness and those Athenians who were always wanting to hear something new. St. Paul forgot that “the Cross” was a typical Stoic paradox. Then there are a vast number of people who do not distinguish between “Greek” and “classical.” By “classics” they understand certain tyrannous conventions and stilted affectations against which every free-minded soul longs to rebel. They distinguish the classical element in Milton and Keats as responsible for all that is dull and far-fetched and unnatural. Classicism repels many people of excellent taste, and Greek art is apt to fall under the same condemnation. It is only in the last generation that scholars have been able to distinguish between the true Greek and the false mist of classicism which surrounds it. Till then everybody had to look at the Greeks through Roman and Renaissance spectacles, confounding Pallas with Minerva and thinking of Greek art as represented by the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön. We are now able, thanks to the labours of scholars and archæologists, to see the Greeks as they were, perfectly direct, simple, natural, and reasonable, quite as antagonistic to classicism as Manet and Debussy themselves.