Wisconsin College of the Air; Freshman forum; The Nature of communication

Ladies and gentlemen of freshman forum last Thursday Professor Walter are a guard of the department of classics opened our semester study on the general theme of the Humanist Manifesto with an introduction to humanism. Today we begin a series of six lectures on the second subtopic namely the nature of human communication. Our speaker is Professor Paul L. McKendrick Professor of Classics and integrated liberal studies professor McKendrick received his A B degree his a.m. degree and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. In his last year of study at Harvard he served as assistant in classics and tutor in the division of ancient languages before joining the University of Wisconsin faculty in one thousand forty six. He served as instructor in Latin at Phillips Academy Andover and later as an instructor in English at Harvard College from 1041 to 1945. He compiled a distinguished war record in the United States Navy a record compiled as assistant U.S. Naval observer at Fort allays Brazil a

member of the staff of the commander of the amphibious force Atlantis fleet and civil liaison officer attached to the staff of the commander of the U.S. Naval forces in the 80s oras. Here at Wisconsin professor McKendrick has come to be known not only as an outstanding educator in classics but also as a first rate scholar. During nine months of 1950 he did research at the American Academy in Rome and took part in the excavation of the Etruscan rooms at Khosa Italy on a Fulbright fellowship in 1957 58. He worked again in Italy on Roman colonization with a goddamn hime fellowship in addition to having served as an officer and many learned professional societies. He is also a professor in charge of the summer session of the school of classical studies of the American Academy in Rome. His bibliography of scholarly publications includes numerous articles and such periodicals as the classical weekly journal of general education.

The American Journal of archaeology and enter America. He is also the coeditor of classics and translation co-author of the ancient world and author of the Roman mind at work. His latest book The mute stones speak was published this past June and I am informed has already exhausted its first printing and is soon scheduled to begin its second Professor McKendrick lecture isn't titled verbal language. It's nature and classical origins. Professor McKendrick. My subject in the series is verbal language. It's nature and classical origins with regard to the subject. The first question that arises is why the term verbal language that seems tautological that is it seems to say the same thing twice. The point in the adjective. The point in

specifying verbal language is that the aim here is to distinguish this kind of language from the language of painting in sculpture and from the language of music. Inly term verbal language however a metaphor is involved and so is an implication. The metaphor and the implication are that a poet plastic artist and musician all have something in common. The desire to communicate now. The hypothesis that you can communicate implies the existence of a community that is a group of people having something in common. If for example you all have not got that something now in common a great university can help you to get it can help you to acquire. If you haven't got it now. Standard of values which you can proudly hold in common with your neighbor.

And that standard of values is bound to involve an appreciation in common of the past and an involvement in common with the future. This university like every great university in the western world is committed to the study of three great fields the humanities the social sciences the natural sciences. All three of these great fields are committed to a belief in the future of tradition. For example the social scientists study of modern democracy in the West is impossible to carry on intelligently without a knowledge of that democracies are regions. In ancient Athens. Again the most advanced research in physics rests ultimately on observations made as physicists know Twenty two hundred years ago by Epicurus in Athens and two thousand years ago by Lucretius in

Rome. So too in the area of the humanities. The modern poet or the modern reader of poetry. Not knowing how the art the art of the poet the art that must be appreciated by the reader. The art of verbal language. Not knowing how that art was exploited by Homer by Sappho by Sophocles by Virgil Horace or Seneca is handicapped retarded remains like anyone who doesn't know what happened before he was born. In some sense always a child. Humanism is particularly concerned with the richness of our heritage from the past. But that concern does not arise out of any antiquarian reason it rises rather out of a desire to ensure the continuity of the best of that heritage it rises rather in the realisation that we find or create new things in any field. Social Sciences natural sciences or humanities

only to the extent to which we already control the old. The modern creative artist deliberately or accidentally ignorant of what past practitioners have done is stunted crude naive provincial. The modern reader deliberately or accidentally ignorant in the same way lays himself open to exploitation especially by politicians or by advertisers who practise upon him. Perhaps who knows upon you as upon some Yoko the ancient arts of rhetoric which the politicians or the advertisers may know and the recipient of the propaganda may not. So much for verbal language. The next appropriate question it seems to me is what makes the use of verbal language humane to put it another way. What are the humanities. Well

a very funny man Corey Ford wrote a book once with the title How to distinguish your friends from the apes. One way is to notice how they use verbal language. It is the intelligent efficient beautiful use of verbal language that does in fact distinguish men from the apes. The humanities are in short what makes us human. What makes us civil. What make a civil law. Just the humanities are concerned with what men have done as man that is with what they've done with what distinguishes them from the apes namely their brains. What men have done as men in art in learning in poetry in politics in science in philosophy. The humanities help you to deal with human experience to cope with human sorrow to limit. Yes that tool to limit as well as to ennoble human joys they enable us to understand what happens to

us as human beings. They enable us to talk to one another to see the relevance of our present to our past to see the past as prologue to new enterprise. The humanities differ from the social and the natural sciences. In the particular concern they have with making value judgments in political science or in physics objectivity may be a virtue though I doubt it. It seems to me to matter that voters should be able to give a reason for their faith. But physicists should whore the deadliness of the atom bomb. But in literature and especially in poetry. Objectivity is not a virtue. It is the dead hand classical literature especially the literature of Greece and Rome is not an art for art's sake. It is concerned with value judgements. It is often concerned with instruction and it often deals with perennially

unsolved and perhaps insoluble problems and the fact that they are insoluble is not the least fascination. To the classical wielder of verbal language. The basic the fundamental point is that language is order. Verbal language artistically wielded in our world in the western world is well over twenty seven hundred years old. From the very beginning in Homer the artistic principle is order order imposed upon flux but control by the intellect of emotion. This ordering this structuring form came to be called rhetoric rhetoric the art the craft the skill the technique the aim to persuade a hearer or a reader to the speaker's or the writer its point of view. The very nature of Homer's

language and this applies as well as we shall see to Virgil's is orderly logical structured. That is the essence of Latin in Greek is order. The parts of speech in Greek and Latin lend themselves to the orderly use of figures of speech and figures of fun. The very name syntax which is Greek means composed arrangement. Of course rhetoric has its dangers of which the most deadly is the pursuit of form without regard to content. But in our age of gobbledygook federal prose and invertebrate political bombast the present danger of over emphasis on form in language is remote. We would do better to concentrate on a fact which is that rhetoric at its best has produced and if attentively and sensitively

practiced will produce articulate Vertebrata verbal language. Which will make us proud of the Western tradition the Western tradition which produced the funeral oration of para Klees the Western tradition of rhetoric that produced the Gettysburg Address and the stirring wartime speeches of Winston Churchill. So much by way of preface let us next attend to the matter of verbal language as practiced by the Greeks in their poetry. And I want to say a word first about Greek epic and about Homer's Iliad and specifically about a passage from Homer's Iliad from the sixth book the farewell of the Trojan hero Hector to his wife and. The situation is a deeply human one a universal one a man about to go off to risk his life in battle says goodbye

to his wife and to his baby son. How easy it would be to be Mark ish to be sentimental about this. How easy it would be to glorify our hero's death and how firmly here Homer resists the details are precise and telling and dramedy we learn has already lost seven brothers all killed in the war. Her mother has been held for ransom. She foresees slavery for herself. If Hector loses the child too wise to be enthralled by the military military shrinks back in fear from his father's crested helmet Hector like any further prays that his son may prove a better man than he. And ironically which is the more warriors life that can only yield to doom for the sun. As for the further this is the

grimmest irony for Homer's audience knew well that the child star in X is destined to have his brains dest out by the Greek Victor against the rocks of the citadel of Troy. This is earliest so valuing verbal poetic language in the western world is precise intelligent control and it makes a human value judgement. The poet keeping his own personality entirely in the background persuades us his hearers by his verbal poetic language that war is indeed what General Sherman said it was. If we turn from Greek epic to Greek lyric poetry the inevitable choice must be Safa. Again the theme is universal theme of physical love.

Again how easy to lapse into sentiment and into cliche. In which case Sappho would have reached only the low level of the so-called popular song how firmly that temptation to lapse into sentiment and cliche is resisted. How is it resisted by firm intellectual precision which is yet intensely passionately personal. Notice how often in the passage the first personal pronoun appears. Yet this poem. One of the earliest lyrics in the western world is not personal in the sense that it is private. You don't have to know the details of Sappho diary to understand what she's saying. It's about being in love and surely being in love is the most universal of all personal experiences. What's the poet is this aim to portray something that's happened to all of us the impact of physical passion.

How is that aim realized by precisely defining how the beloved object impinges on the lover senses upon his heart his voice his tongue his skin his eyes his ears how the sensation of being in love sets the lover in a cold sweat and causes a pallor overspread his cheeks. In nine lines everyone of the five senses is called into play. Saffo is intellectualized her motions to make a work of art. She is used to rhetorical persuasion in intensely personal expression to convince us that here poetry is what Wordsworth said it was emotion recollected in tranquillity.

We come next to Greek verbal poetic language as used in Greek tragedy and out of the 33 Greek tragedies available to me. I have chosen a famous choral ode from the end to Guinea of Sophocles. In this play and taken to the heroine goes to her death for a principle a tyrant has decreed that the bodies of the city's enemies fallen in battle shall not receive burial among those enemies so decreed by the tyrant as her own brother. She violates deliberately the tyrant's decree she becomes a martyr to the principle of freedom of speech. This play was produced in Paris under the Nazi occupation. The Germans allowed it presumably because they thought it was just a set of Frenchmen being impractical again. It was not.

It was a set of Frenchmen making an immortal and inevitable classical gesture looking to the past for their help in their present time of crisis. Recalling a great heroine who could resist a tyranny. This play first produced probably in four hundred forty one before Christ is a product of the para Cleon renaissance. The first and perhaps the greatest of the long and noble series of European intellectual awakenings. The theme wonders are many. But there is no wonder why older than man is reminiscent of a position taken by another genius in another renaissance. I refer to the passage in Hamlet where Hamlet says what a

piece of work is a man how noble in reason how infinite in faculties in form and moving how Express and admirable in action how like an angel in apprehension how like a god the beauty of the world the paragon of animals. That is the theme in Sophocles and in Shakespeare is a hymn to the essence of the humanities hymn to the fearsome inventiveness of man. Such a hymn might so easily have been vague. Instead as Sophocles treats it it is precise man who makes the winds of winter bury him through the trough of waves that tower about him across the gray wastes of sea. Man who wearies the untiring the immortal earth eldest of the gods has year by year

his plow teams come and go. The carefree bands of birds beasts of the wild tribes of the sea in netted toils he takes the subtle one. Creatures that haunt the hills the desert dwellers his cunning snake as he lays his mastering yoke on the horse's shaggy mane on the tireless mountain bull speech too. And when Swift bought and the soul of the ruler of cities he had learned been taught of any. To shun the better arrows of the roofless Frost the bitter shafts of rain. He knows they all divisor for without device no morrow finds him only against death. He should call for help in vain. Yet many a mortal sickness he hath mastered in plain prose what is Sophocles say man's bold resourceful conquering mankind has caused him to rise from savagery to human civilization.

Man's mind has tamed the sea the earth the birds of the air. Here are some of the four elements to give structure to give categorical structure to the form. Man's mind has learned to domesticate animals to wield the arts of rhetoric and of politics to build houses to treat disease. But the rhetoric is used to persuade the hearer to note the truth of a peculiarly Greek value judgment whose theme appropriately enough has been put in our own time by that great and humane scientist Robert Oppenheimer who says and I quote what a man gets too smart he gets into trouble. The chorus means to apply that generalization to and take ANY the tyrant defying heroine. But in the end ironically she triumphs in the death to which the tyrant sentences her while he the tyrant loses

son wife and the power he lives for. To turn from verbal language in Greek poetry to verbal language in Roman poetry. What is Roman poetry. It's Greek rhetoric preserved refreshed transmitted. When you stop to think of it that's our job. It's the humanist job always to preserve to refresh to transmit the wisdom the order the beauty of the past for the use the instruction the enjoyment of the present and the future. As with Greek so now with Latin poetry let me take first epic. And for us though there are minor figures

that survived a Roman epic means Virgil. When I choose a passage from the second book of Virgil's George IX. We have seen how Greek poetry deals with universals like the horror of war. The passion of love the equivocal power for good or for evil of the human man. Now as I turned around in three other passages let's consider three other rhetorical retreated value judged themes the theme of the George X in this passage is love of country love of the land and the author is a farmer a poet a dirt farmer who knew his business. But since he's a poet who invests that business with that magic the magic comes in part out of planned precision.

But not the groves of media wealth and nor lovely Ganges nor the golden streams of Libya match Italy in praise not India Afghanistan nor isles of Arab A with incense bearing sands no fiery bulls plowed Italy's black soil to sow a crop of giant dragon's teeth. No human warrior spring full armed from her fields but teeming fruit and wine of the campaign year filled our Italian fields fat herds and olives found their place in Italy's rich land. Hence the charger prancing in the plane hence white sheep and sacrificial ball so often plunged in embryos sacred streams preceding our Roman triumphs to the temples here spring persists and summer makes their way through fire and months the flocks bear twice a year and twice the useful tree yields up or apples. No raving Tigers savage lion cubs. No poison

wolfsbane fools the poor Herb gatherer has no scaly reptile hustles huge corals across the ground or stops and winds his train in spirals. See our noble cities labors crown bill breathlessly upon steep mountainsides deep rivers flowing under ancient walls. Italian soil has bred a race of heroes Marcion's Saibai and toughened generations from the West Coast and tribes of all skins handy with the spear. Great family names come Elice Decimus Marius Scipio and chief of all Octavian a Caesar who triumphs now on his farthest shore and defends the hills of Rome from the timid for all hail so attorney in land our honored mother for the broach these themes of ancient art and dare disclose the sacred springs of verse singing Hesiod song through Roman towns.

Analysis will reveal the precision of this passage. First the contrast between Italy and the rich but sinister East. Here in Italy no river is poured out in gold but neither do bulls his far here Greek myth is contrasted with a tad in reality. And there's something symbolic about each culture here. Here no snakes his phantom. Could he have been thinking of Cleopatra The Serpent of the now here in Italy. No tigers no lions but rich crops of wheat and grain and olives and fruitful herds and pedigreed horses and pedigreed cities and pedigreed men cities hyperextend aged old. And here the greatest crop of all the crop of men heroes of the past and of

present for Virgil the past is prologue. The evidence. He names not only the old heroes of the past the George Washington's and the Thomas Jeffersons of the Roman Republic but he names a living figure in the hope of the world is set. Caesar Augustus carrying on the great tradition and Virgil his poet during the same with themes of ancient glory creatively borrowed from the Greeks. Here again is a poet making a value judgment politically involved for the theme of the George acts. The magic the beauty of the Italian land is a theme close to Augustus's heart. The resettlement of his own veterans to recreate the firm economy of a war torn Italy. This poet is making value judgments. He is politically involved and because he uses Hesiod's Works and Days as his model he is finding a future in tradition

here again. Shakespeare imitates Virgil creatively as Virgil himself imitated Hesiod. I'm thinking of that famous passage from John the gantt speech in Shakespeare's Richard the Second. This royal throne of Kings this sceptered isle this earth of majesty the seat of Mars. This other Eden Demi paradise this fortress built by nature for herself against infection and the hand of war. This happy breed of men this little world this precious stone set in a silver sea which serves it in the office of a wall or as a moat defensive to a house against the envy of less happier lands this blessid plot this earth this realm this England. It's a traditional and humanistic theme and part of the humanists job

is not to let patriotism degenerate into chauvinism. As we did with Greek let's turn from Epic to lyric and in some sense at any rate for the present that I want to stress in this like the Roman lyric poet is Horace Horace of the seventh of the fourth book here in the passage before you translated as rarely by a poet by either Housman the theme is spring and death. The snows are fled away leaves on the shores and grasses in the media renew their birth. The river to the river bed withdraws and altered as the fashion of the earth. The nymphs and graces three put off their fear and I'm apparelled in the woodland play the swift

hour of the brief Prime of the year. I say to the so far west not born for a thaw follows frost. Hard on the heels of spring tread some are sure to die for hard on hers comes autumn with his apple scattering then back to winter a tad where nothing steers but oh what air the sky led seasons from our moon the pan moon rebuilds it with her beams. Come we wear it tell us where uncle are and goodness we are dust and dreams torquatus. If the gods in heaven still ere the morrow to the day what Thomas told feast then by heart. For what I heart is had the fingers of no air will ever hold. When thou descend assts once the shades among the sternest size and equal judgment or not by a long lineage know thy golden tongue. No nor thy right to Sinestro friend the more. Night

holds the apologists the purest stain. Diana's dead seem nothing. He must stay and use loose leaves period threw us in the chain. The love of comrades cannot take away spring and death rhetoric dealing precisely and pathetically with a conventional theme the theme that nature immortally rebuilds. But man is mortal dust and dreams. The theme is saved from cliche as always in classical poetry by precision by the application of the classical ideal of form which is to express what oft was said but near is so well expressed as by this poet upon this particular occasion. The precision. The steadiness of nature. Describe with reference to

the Four Seasons. The theme exemplified by precisely three examples each from Roman history and from Greek mythology. Classical 2 is the content not merely eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. But realistic even pessimistic in the mood of the Parisian poet who said the moving finger writes and having writ moves on nor all piety all-I wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line. Consider how differently our romantic poet will handle a theme of this kind. This poem of ours is about spring and death reminds one inevitably of Shelley's ode to the west wind. See how differently the mutability of nature affects this romantic poet make

me that I live so Shelley to the wind even as the forest is what if my leaves are falling like its own. The tumult of the mighty harmonies will take from both a deep autumnal tone sweet low in sadness be the spirit fierce my spirit be thou me impetuous one drive my dead thoughts over the universe like withered leaves to quicken a new birth. And by the incantation of the spirits scatter as from an extinguished hearth ashes and sparks my words among mankind be through my lips to an awakened earth the trumpet of a prophecy. O wind if winter comes can spring me for it. The force of nature here is taken as a symbol of the force of verbal language. The winter death is the earnest of spring

rebirth beautifully as that is put I think Horace would say that it is nonsense. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Death closes all its inevitable like taxes. What needs doing is to face it with courage and even with good humor and to go on playing the game in the face of that inevitability. The essence of classicism is in this my final example. In Roman poetry as in Greek it comes from tragedy from a play by. Seneca the younger who was a philosopher as well as a playwright with the STC. What I have chosen is another course as a parallel with my contrast to Sophocles chorus. From the end beginning.

Wealth can never produce a king. Robes of purple will not avail nor broad by those of a kingly caste. No great gates with a gleam of gold. Nothing dug from a Western mine nothing dredged from the yellow flood take its holds in its Lucent bed or whatever from harvest fields boiling Libya threshers out. King is he who has lost all fear all ill thoughts of an angry heart whom no lawless ambition moves nor that ever fickle applause of masked men when their headlong haste he who stands upon solid ground sees within his own soul all things meets his fate with a cheerful mind. No complains when it's time to die. Let him have powers proud Haller will fly so high on a slippery peak that sweet peace be enough for me. But my life in the silence flown quite unheeded by fellow man. So when all

of my days have passed undisturbed by the world's loud noise let me as a plain old man. Death comes hard for the man who lives alone too well do his fellow man still unknown to himself in death. That chorus like the one in the end to get me is supposed to be the voice of orthodoxy again as with the ending and the plot of the play and the historical background of its author are both important. The king in the play is to put it mildly and some to some considerable way from the ideal of chivalry is a truce. The father of that Agamemnon who led the Greeks to Troy. A truce served to his brother at a grisly banquet. The flash of his brother's own CERN's to be sure of this theme of guts and gore attracted Seneca as later it was to attract Shakespeare and other Elizabeth

and Sue knew that part of the playwrights job was to make the audiences flesh creep. But there's more to it than that. This is not a play about cannibalism. This is a play about the plight of the intellectual in a world gone mad. Seneca is an intellectual and a Stoic philosopher. That is a man who is dedicated to an intellectual resignation. In the face of a wicked and imperfect world this man this intellectual this stoic this philosopher lives in a court the court of Nero. Which Hollywood at any rate has made a bad word for excesses in four or a GS of court which certainly had worse vices than Atrios is cannibalism. So the plays of Seneca and this one not least are conceived as a mirror for princes and especially for Nero who we know was Seneca's pupil. And so this play like so

many classical dramas contains its message. It's not wealth and notice how there are specific geographical examples of where wealth comes from. Just as there were in Virgil's Georgia. It's not wealth that makes a king it's virtue. It is in fact controlled passions. I was Stoic sage and incidentally in this connection notice how the Stoics age Seneca himself. Putting his own notions into the mouth of a chorus leader shows that typical classical score and which is not part of the best of the classical tradition in my opinion but typical classical score and of the fickle and hasty mob. The line let me die as a plain old man. It's not the chorus leader speaking. It is Seneca the intellectual desolate and alone the myth the Unchained passions of the court

of Nero. What is stoicism. It's not unlike modern existentialism Seneca in Nero's court John Paul Sartre in Paris there are more likenesses and there are differences. The intellectual face to all the world gone mad is faced with a descent into hell and out of that bitter experience comes the conclusion that the passions unleashed are not God inspired. As a theologian might say but instinctive in the human animal. To recognise this that both intelligence and uncontrolled passions are characteristic of the human animal is a deeply humane and humanistic recognition. This is verbal language you used to make tragedy not guards. That's the theologians business. But man's. That's the humanists business. This is verbal language used to express the intellectuals desperate awareness that

man is born to evil. Shakespeare had the same experience. Shakespeare was Confound it was profoundly convinced of the same great truth. And this I think is the real reason why Shakespeare was attracted to Seneca not because he couldn't get at the Greek originals but because Seneca spoke directly to him as a man who had had the same experience in both Shakespeare and Seneca. The rhetoric and the artifice are functional. They are used as devices as devices for psychological and for artistic penetration. For me six examples. What are we to conclude. Roman verbal language like Greek is precise value judging politically involved realistically

pessimistic deeply concerned with the human condition. Roman verbal language creatively borrowed from the Greek tradition Roman verbal language is in turn borrowed by some of the greatest masters of verbal language in English by Shakespeare by Shelley and on a lower point by the translator of Horace the poet professor Housman. Indeed without the vitality of this Greek o Roman this classical tradition English literature. The artistic wielding that is of verbal language in English would be infinitely poorer than it is. To recognise this is a perk of the Humanist Manifesto which this course is designed to deliver

that manifesto says that we are interested in the past but not for any antiquarian reason. We are interested in the past because the past is prologue because the past is a part of the future. A part of the future of tradition in English poetry. The Humanist Manifesto says further that the poem should be precise that it should be intellectualized that it should be serious. But it should be deeply involved with human with humane and with humanistic concerns. That is that the poet should deliberately involve himself in questions of politics the philosophy of the very nature of man the Humanist Manifesto says that a poem should not merely be barbaric yawp

that the poem should not merely come from the emotions but that the poem should represent emotion certainly emotion responsibly reflected in the trend quality of a perfect art.