WE CONSIDER GREEK CULTURE

My husband was not only a distinguished scholar and a great preacher but he had a brilliant, gallant mind of his own. Let him have it, and God be thanked, was my attitude. Whenever he flared intellectually, I turned out my light and watched with admiration such an aurora borealis of fine, cold, clear thinking as I have never seen in any book or heard from another man. Some radiance of his mind will remain upon the horizon of mine as long as I live. I can never tell how much of it has brightened the edges of the copy I have produced since those days. For I have been a cheerful plagiarist of light whenever I found it.

But if we came to loggerheads in an argument, as frequently happened, on any subject, whether it was religion, philosophy, poetry, or the fatalistic mind of the ancient Greeks, I stepped out with gaffs on the legs of my native wit and met him as an unscrupulous wrestler meets an honest big man. I had all the advantages, because I was never constrained in the exercise of my mind by much real knowledge of the subject or by those precedents which govern a scrupulously trained intellect. I left him to furnish the information. My business was to digest it quick as a flash and use it, then to prove my contention or to reject it for the same reason. I do not know what a casuist is, but he frequently accused me of being one, as if this was a fault of which I should be ashamed. But I never was. This grieved him. I am sure he felt that I would not overcome a certain vulgar insolence of ignorance, because I had no native reverence for learning.

Once when I was belaying the ancient Greeks like a ruffian he assumed the dignified manner of a gentleman and a scholar who must be patient with a Smart Aleck. As near as I can recall, this is the gist of that altercation:

‘You do yourself discredit when you speak disparagingly of an illustrious people,’ he said.

I knew nothing of their civilization, art, or literature. Then he went on to pay a tribute to the Greek intellect. It was symmetrical, dignified, and beautiful as their architecture. Had I ever studied the glory and simplicity of the Parthenon? I admitted that I had not, but I was willing to concede that they had highly developed artistic instincts. Which, I had to infer, was the wrong phrase to use.

‘They had brains, brains!’ he retorted hotly.

‘I would no more revere a man for his brains than for the hair on his head,’ I shot back; ‘the quality and quantity of both are determined by purely physical conditions, the climate, the food they eat, their habits as human beings. I judge the Greeks by what they have produced.’

‘That is precisely what you cannot do intelligently, because you do not know what they produced.’

‘Yes, I know the effects--’

‘You are profoundly ignorant of the effects of Greek culture upon the world,’ he interrupted.

‘Culture’ was one of Lundy’s words, never a favorite with me. I am not denying there is such a thing, but whether it is beneficent depends in my opinion upon the moderation with which you absorb it and balance it with better, sturdier elements of character, like honest bigotry and hard-headed convictions. It is a boastful word with a bad reputation in advanced stages of civilization. It too frequently became the elegance by which the distance between morality and immorality is shortened.

Lundy, however, loved it, with no such barbaric instincts as I had to warn him against it. And I suffered much from the personal uses he made of it during what may be called the Hellenic period of our married life.

This time I made a clean sweep and cut Greek culture to the bone.

‘There was something wrong with their culture,’ I returned, ‘because they did not survive it as a nation. Men are destroyed by their own minds, their systems of thought. What the ancient Greeks produced with all their art and learning and culture are these modern Greeks. I do not think much of them. Neither do you. They have the same hair, the same brains. They are out of the same stock, but virtue has gone out of them. They are no longer sculptors and philosophers. Nobody quotes them or imitates them. The fatalistic mind back of all their culture made slaves and little men of their descendants.’

Lundy regarded me for a moment in regretful silence, as we sometimes measure some one who is dear to us who is determined not to be like us.

‘Corra,’ he said reproachfully, ‘you have an underhanded mind. You deliberately missed my point.’

‘I made my own point, which was better than being run through by yours,’ I laughed.

Then I had to listen to his explanation of how there were now no Greeks of that breed. The Persians had destroyed that great race.

His scholarly indignation frequently rose to the pitch of sarcasm. But I was never abashed. I could not be made to hang my head mentally or to feel what is now called the inferiority complex. If you can finance the outrageous courage of ignorance with a certain secret wisdom of your own, you stand a very good chance of disconcerting a learned man in an argument. I always came out of these intellectual scrimmages exhilarated like a ragged young sparrow that has enjoyed an upward flight upon an eagle’s wings.

One little trait I venture to record by way of illustrating how shrewd a woman’s mind can be at ducking out of sight at the right moment. Lundy was resentful like most learned men--or unlearned for that matter--if it appeared that I was about to get the better of the contention. He felt the trickery of wit at his expense, a petticoated Puck putting Bottom’s head on a wise man’s shoulders. Intellectual rage caused him to blink. Whenever he regarded me with this fluttering blue gaze I cast the argument aside, rushed to him, laid my head upon his knees as these knees were the executioner’s block and invited him to strike in case he desired to make such a disposition of a fool. In such a manner I was always able to restore the equilibrium of love and charity between us without his ever suspecting that this was balm I laid upon his wounded vanity.

I have now a certain misty tinge of time in the colors of my mind, elegant wisps of culture, pseudo evidences of learning obtained from my association with Lundy. I have practically no accurate information on any subject, which is one reason I so rarely burden the reader with a quotation; but I have the sense and feeling of all these things Lundy studied in his lifetime to learn. I walked for years in the rich pastures of his mind.