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Updated: May 28, 2025
"I chattered, I boasted," laughed Leonti bitterly, "and was without understanding. But for this I never should have understood. I thought I loved the ancients, while my whole love was given to the living woman. Yes, Boris, I loved books and my gymnasium, the ancients and the moderns, my scholars, and you, Boris; I loved the street, this hedge, the service tree there, only through my love for her.
He went for his ideals to an imaginary past and what he taught and praised was often totally unsuited to modern conditions. Whistler on the other hand was a modern of the moderns, and a great artist to boot: he had not only assimilated all the newest thought of the day, but with the alchemy of genius had transmuted it and made it his own.
The language of disinterestedness was adapted to the ancient republicans in the purest times of Sparta and Rome. But these ancients were not always disinterested; and the moderns are not always narrow, self-centred and cold.
The warriors preceding the chief carried what the English thought "a sceptre," but what we moderns would call a peace-pipe. The chains in their hands were probably strings of bears' claws, or something like wampum; the "crowns of feathers," plumed head-dresses; the gifts in the rush baskets borne by the women to the rear, maize and tobacco.
Indeed, no one has been so ignorant or unhistorical as to attempt those phrases. But the current phrase "Christianity," used by moderns as identical with the Christian body in the third century, is intellectually the equivalent of "Christianism" or "Christism;" and, I repeat, it connotes a grossly unhistorical idea; it connotes something historically false; something that never existed.
Among the moderns, Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, and others have followed the path of Epicurus, but their doctrine found but few votaries in a world still too much infatuated with fables to listen to reason. In all ages one could not, without imminent danger, lay aside the prejudices which opinion had rendered sacred.
Lycurgus, in Sparta, found it, as he supposed, in stamped leather; but modern wisdom has preferred paper. The degree of success attained by Lycurgus we do not know; but of the success of the moderns we do know, by some one hundred and fifty years of recurring disaster.
Yet still there was a great deal of mauling, vigorous punishing, and an entire intolerance of these two things: Heathenism and Sea-robbery, at least of Sea-robbery in the old style; whether in the style we moderns still practise, and call privateering, I do not quite know.
For if in any particular the moderns have deviated from the methods of the ancients, it is especially in their methods of warfare, wherein not one of those rules formerly so much esteemed is now attended to.
The question is between Lord Bacon and Aristotle, and which of these two thrones and dominions in speculation and practice the moderns are disposed on the whole to give their suffrages to, in this most vital department of human practice, in this most vital common human concern and interest.
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