The Classics Are Not Driftwood

OCTOBER 21, 2017 / PALAIOPHRON

Basil Gildersleeve, Hellas and Hesperia:

A detached American is for the most part a pitiful spectacle. But it is precisely
because we stand in our place with our own day here that we cannot dismiss
the past so cavalierly as Whitman has done. To the dead all things are dead. To
him that is alive there is no dead poetry, no dead language. Only those
languages, said Lowell in a famous discourse, only those languages can be
called dead in which nothing living was ever written. There is no need of
crediting the past, as Whitman calls it. The past collects its interest by the
inevitable process of eternal laws. Classical antiquity is not driftwood, as
Whitman intimates, not driftwood out of which to build fires to warm ourselves
and dream by, calling up the figures of Jason and Medea, of Paris and Helen, and
listening to Arion in his singing-robes. The classical caravel is still seaworthy.
No Captain Courageous of Gloucester, Mass., is more popular than Odysseus of
Ithaca. Retell the story of the wanderings of the much-enduring to a popular
audience, if you wish to find out whether Homer is dead, and what Kipling calls
his bloomin lyre has ceased to bloom. No happier hours in my long career can
I recall than those I spent in repeating the tale of Old Audacious to a sympathetic
audience thirty years ago. Tennysons Ulysses I need not mention. Stephen
Phillipss Ulysses I mention merely to protest against his perversion of the only
true story of Odysseus in Hades. It is then precisely because we stand in our
own place here, precisely because we are Americans and Walt Whitman is our
prophet, that we insist on our inheritance of the precious past, on which and by
which we live.