best are but shadows, and that, for the highest purposes which history
serves, the idea is the fact; the impression produced on us, the
heightening and ennobling influence of a life, ideal or actual, akin
to and yet different from ours, is the one thing which primarily
matters. And so it may be questioned whether so far as this, the vital
part of human culture, is concerned, modern scholarship has helped men
beyond the point already reached by the more imperfect knowledge and
more vivid intuitions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; for if
the effect produced on them, in the way of heightening and ennobling
life, was more than the effect now and here produced on us, we have,
so far as the Greek world is concerned, lost and not gained.
Compensations indeed there are; a vast experience has enlarged our
horizon and deepened our emotion, and it would be absurd to say now,
as was once truly and plausibly said, that Greek means culture. Yet
even now we could ill do without it; nor does there seem any reason
beyond the dulness of our imagination and the imperfection of our
teaching why it should not be as true and as living a help as ever in
our lives.

At the present day the risk is not of Greek art and literature being
too little studied, but of their being studied in too contracted and
formal a spirit. Less time is spent on the corruptions of medieval
texts, and on the imbecilities of the decadence; but all the more is
labour wasted and insight obscured by the new pedantry; the research
into unimportant origins which the Greeks themselves wisely left
covered in a mist of mythology. The destruction dealt on the Athenian
acropolis, under the name of scholarship, is a type of modern
practice. The history of two thousand years has so far as possible
been swept carelessly away in the futile attempt to lay bare an
isolated picture of the age of Pericles; now archaeologists find that