CHARACTER OF THE MODERN GREEKS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3111, 29 October 1913, Page 82

CHARACTER OF THE MODERN GREEKS.

By Edith Seari.k Gkossaiann, M.A.

If a nation resembles individuals in being blessed when all men revile it, then certainly the Modern Greeks ought to bo about the most happy people on the face of the earth. For a century it has been the fashion whenever the Greeks are mentioned to immediately launch out into detraction and abuse. This tone was taken even by Byron, although ho gave up everything to aid the race he affected to despise against the masters he thought that he admired. People who'have never read a page of their recent history nor ever met a single Greek will loudly assert like our Corfiote boatman that the whole race are (unprintable) rogues, “rotters,” tricksters, cowards no good for anything. Their brief record during and after the War of Independence does not justify this sweeping condemnation. It is the story of ar great uprising, with incidents of barbarity, breach of faith, factiousness, panic, but running through them all enthusiasm, persistent energy and heroism. When, after six years’ struggling against overwhelming odds, they were at last freed, they made for themselves on the whole the Y>est record of the larger Balkan States in general progress towards civilisation. They started with heavier odds than Bulgaria or its rivals; it was they who led the way towards freedom, they endured a more exhausting struggle, were left more heavily burdened, and they were originally a less united race, were in fact two distinct races at least (Greeks and Albanians). It is a curious contradiction that the English, as well as the French and Germans, while abusing them, will never leave them to themselves. While politicians have actively injured the Greek cause by restraining Hellenic expansion and preventing the Hellenes on one side of an artificial border from helping their kinsfolk on the other side, it has become a political principle never to allow the Turks (however much extolled) to win back any power they may lose. Several foreigners have given valuable gifts or done valuable services to the country, and they constantly speak and act as if they had spme proprietary interest in it. It is just these cynical strangers who have unearthed its archaeological treasures. What then is the origin of the lofty contempt for Modern Greeks? With the majority of people it is nothing but- a fashion; they think it is the correct attitude, and abuse those of whom they know nothing. Others who do know something are much too prejudiced to form any fair estimate. Men who have travelled amongst them, lived amongst them, refuse to use their own eyes except to pick out any faults that confirm their preconceived ideas—derived from novelists like About, or journalists like-Steevens. But it took a-con-siderable number of people to create this prevailing prejudice. The people responsible for it in the first place are scholars versed in ancient classics, and on another side the ruling official and aristocratic classes of England. It takes some study to understand why it originated amongst them. There are two chief causes. The first is disillusion. The second is respect for a ruling people, however bad their rule, and contempt for those who are subject. Disillusion is the prevailing sentiment amongst classical scholars. Brought up from childhood on liAes and legends of ancient heroes, they exact from the •modern Hellene a glorious and impossible combination of Themistocles, Aristides, Leonidas, Socrates, and Pericles, with something, too, of the legendary prowess of Perseus or Achilles, the genius of Homer, the adventurousness of Jason. The average unscholarly Briton takes from the savants the impression that the Modern Greek vjs a. fraud,, that he has not any right to be the descendant of the “godlike men of old.” Before the liberation for centuries no attention had been paid in England to the Modern Greeks, and tically nothing was known about them. At the close of the eighteeth century began a new Benaissance of classical Greek letters. We find it the prevailing 'influence in Keats, Walter Savage Landor, Shelley, Byron, and onward to the works of Kingsley and of Tennyson. Poets recreated Greece in an ideal, glorified state out of their own imagination. If anyone thought of their modern descendants at all it was as mere wrecks of the ancient world, worthless except to point a moral and to emphasise by contrast the glories..,,, of the past. The sentiment and motive appear in the song he puts into the mouth of the island bard (well known as “The Lsles of Greece”) ending, “A land of slaves shall ne’er be mine ; dash down yon cup of Samian wine.” And elsewhere he mingles his threnody for the glorious dead with gibes at the living, which, however, were meant not to degrade but to rouse their spirit; ’Tis Greece, but living Greece no more. Here is the loveliness in death. Which parts not quite with lingering breath. Spark of that flame, perchance of heavenly birth. Which gilds but warms no more its cherished earth. Clime of the uniorgotten brave. Whose land from plain to mountain cave, Was freedom’s homo or glory’s grave; Shrine of the mighty, can it bo That this is all remains of thee? Approach, thou trembling, crouching slave. Say, is not this Thermopylae? The waters blue that round yon lavo, O servile offspring of tbo free, Pronounce what sea, what shore Is this— Tbo gulf, neck of Salamial