equivalent for the French causerie-must come to a close in a few minutes. So far as there is any coherence in what I have said, I have tried to illustrate, or at any rate to point out, certain resemblances between Greek and American life and character. I have not even attempted to be systematic. After an inordinately long introduction I dwelt or rather lighted, for I have not dwelt on anything I touched on American and Greek surroundings, American and Greek position in time, the common republican basis of the American and Greek state, the assimilative power of both nationalities, the versatility and practicality of Greek and American. But concrete examples would be at once more interesting and convincing than analysis, and analogies are easily made, easily drawn, it may be said, and as easily unmade, as easily wiped out. What one sees in history is often nothing more than the projection of the individuality of the beholder. We peer into the open eye to see our own image. One statesman reads Plato, and gathers from Republic and Laws lessons of momentous importance for the conduct of the commonwealth. Another reads Plato, and vows that he has carried away nothing except Eryximachus' remedy for hiccups, dramatically introduced in the Symposium. And when analogy ventures into the domain of prophecy-we all know how the wise man becomes the wiseacre; and the example of Mr. Freeman, who foresaw the dissolution of the great American commonwealth prefigured in the fate of the Achaean League, is ever before the student of our history. The end has been far other than was dreamed of by the philosophizing historian. The petty states of Greece were swept into the current of the Roman Empire, a current that came from without. The attitude of the Roman to the Greek was that of contemptuous tolerance, not of half-wondering hatred. Consolidation, fusion, domination, these are the American processes of which Greece knew nothing. Greece was, after all, a spiritual power, and the lessons that we are to learn come from Rome, as I have already hinted-Rome, once etymologized as the Greek rhomë, 'strength,' anon as the English 'stream.' And so we come back to the ship of state, which the Greek poet launched so many centuries ago. A mighty stream is this on which you and I are borne as part of a proud fleet. But there were times when the current meant wreckage; and I turn my eyes from the days of danger and distress, too real to me still for indulgence in fanciful historical parallels.

My plea has been for the vitality of the studies to which I have been addicted, and as those studies have been part of my own life

not simply a meros but a melos-I have never disentwined the thews and sinews that have kept me going after a fashion until now. My Greek study has not simply been a marginal note on my American life, and vice versa. My life has been written bustrophedon fashion, and as I turn the furrow, the Greek line can't be distinguished from the American. A Southerner, I shared the fortunes of my people in the Civil War, but whether on the edge of battle in the field or in the vise of penury at home, my thoughts were with those who registered the experiences of the Peloponnesian war, with Thucydides and Aristophanes. But I am sure it will be a relief to this personal tone if I can turn on the phonograph and introduce a new speaker on the subject I have tried to sketch. This time I will call on a modern Greek to tell you what he thinks of Hellenism and Americanism, of the relation of Hellas to Hesperia.

The modern Greek, whatever may be said about his racial affinities with the ancient Greek, commends himself to our affection and regard by his passionate identification of the Hellenes that now are with the Hellenes that once were. It is all living Greece to him. Hellenism is his watchword, and not un-Greek is the eager appropriation of all that modern civilization offers. One is constantly reminded of agencies that were set to work seventy or eighty years ago, such as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, to which we owe Müller's History of Greek Literature-a book that can never become obsolete. A similar society is in active operation in Greece, and one of the prime movers was (I am sorry to say was) my friend, that finest type of the modern Greek, Dimitrios Bikélas, the famous author of Loukis Laras, a novel that has been translated into almost every European tongue. The name of the series may be roughly rendered Library of Useful Knowledge, and as I was meditating the theme of my present lecture, I came across the number that deals with America. I am rather fond of reading books that depict American life from the point of view of foreigners, and I had just been reading a series of articles in which a modern Greek immigrant expresses his astonishment at the cheapness of American viands and the extravagant charges of American bootblacks. So I turned, not without interest, to what our modern Hellene had to say about the modern Hesperia, and I was still more interested to find that the concluding pages of the booklet were given up to a somewhat elaborate parallelism of Hellenism and Americanism. Americanism, the author maintains, is really a revival of Hellenism, and the Americanization of the world, which he

seems to consider inevitable, is really carrying on the good work begun by Alexander. I wish I had space to give in detail his list of analogues, his vindication of American society, as based on the soundest ethical, hygienic, and economic principles. Some of these analogues I am afraid you would consider fanciful, some that are true in principle are hardly borne out by the actual facts. The ancient Spartans, says our author, used to throw into the ravine called Caiadas all defective infants a proceeding against which the eulogists of Christianity were wont to declaim with intense abhorrence. Analogous to this, he thinks, is the restriction of immigration to those who are physically fit for the work of life. The modern American, he goes on to say, has the Greek passion for physical perfection. The America of to-day, like the Greece of yore, reposes on democratic principles. Each man is master of his own fate, and our modern Greek seems to believe in presidential potentialities as well as presidential possibilities for every American schoolboy. It is indeed very interesting to see how our generous encomiast accepts legislation as realization, how he hails the preachments of divines and lecturers as an assurance of prophecies fulfilled. 'To will perfection,' he seems to think, 'is the norm of man,' and he is not so far wrong. We are as our ideals. Marriage is to be forbidden to those who are physically and mentally unfit for the connubial relation, and the American child is to be the most perfect product of the age. Oddly enough, he does not count the facility of divorce as an evidence of our readiness to multiply experiments in that direction. The crowning glory of Americanism, he declares, is the American woman. The more American women married to Europeans, the better for the European races. The Lacedaemonian women in antiquity were in great demand as nurses. The American woman ought to be in great demand as a wife-quite apart, he takes care to add, from the substantial dowry so many of them bring to the common stock. America makes for life, for progress. The Americanization of Europe is inevitablewe see it in every port, in every capital of Europe-and moving as it does on Hellenic lines, it is a blessing to the world as was the Hellenization of the Orient of old. All this is rather amusing than convincing, and yet there is enough sober truth behind the smiling sophistry to warrant the citation here as an envoi to my own analogies, which, I trust, are at least a little less fanciful than those of my Athenian colleague.

And now as I am about to close this lecture, it occurs to me that I have omitted one striking trait of the Greek character, which is

also a marked feature of our own nationality. Ready wit, audacity, resourcefulness, practicality, all these we have in common with the Greeks. We are versatile as they were, we moralize as they moralized, Franklin is as Theognis, but these are not necessarily amiable ways, and I am going to take refuge in that delightful tolerance for which Matthew Arnold could find no adequate translation, because he thought that epieikeia was a national Greek virtue. He made a shift of rendering it into English by 'sweet reasonableness'; and it is this 'sweet reasonableness'-this readiness to put up with things, this acceptance of the situation, this large allowance for individual failings, this good humor in the crowded mart of life, this epieikeia which some consider the bane of our politics-it is this epieikeia, to which I make my final appeal.

XIX

PAGANISM1

BY ERNEST RENAN

Of all the religions that have been professed by civilized peoples, that of the Greeks is the least precise and the least settled. The Pelasgic cults would seem to have been in general barbarous and uncouth. It is surprising that the people with whom the typical civilization was for the first time completely realized should have long remained, in respect to religion, so far inferior, I do not say merely to the Semitic nations, who were, in antiquity, superior in point of religion to the Indo-European peoples, but to more than one branch of the Indo-Europeans-for example, the Indian, the Persian, and the Phrygian. The very great difficulty encountered in studying Greek mythology arises just from this quality of imperfection in dogma. The ancient Greeks had no well-determined rule of faith, and their religion, charming when taken as poetry, is, when viewed according to our theological ideas, a mere mass of contradictory fables, the true meaning of which it is very hard to unravel. The new school properly refrains from seeking there for anything that resembles profound mysteries and an exalted symbolism. We have to deal with confused memories of an early worship of nature, with traces of primitive sensations which took on bodily form and became personages, these personages being supplied with adventures by means of plays upon words and, if I dare say so, cock-and-bull stories, like those that are hatched in the imagination of a child. A people at once lively, mobile, and forgetful, composed the exquisite framework of these fables, which, embellished by poetry and art, became a sort of mythology for all the peoples of the Graeco-Roman world.

Greece never had a sacred book, nor a symbol, nor councils, nor

[1 Translated from Nouvelles Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse (pp. 14-30). Renan's essay on Paganisme (pp. 13-30) is a review of Alfred Maury's Histoire des Religions de la Grèce Antique, Vol. 1 (1857). A paragraph at the beginning, a part of the fourth, and a part of the closing paragraph have been omitted in translation.-EDITOR.]