started. It enabled him to gratify, as he was by nature endowed almost beyond human limits with the talents required for gratifying, what if not the strongest passion was at all events the most characteristic passion of his race and age. The love of the Athenians for esprit, for wit in the old and proper sense of the word, that is to say, the delicate and subtle manipulation of words and meanings, was their most remarkable gift for good and for evil, the national glory and the national vice. Irony, innuendo, insinuation, the whole class of mental and linguistic faculties which lie on the side of lying, were ingrained in them and in all that they produced. Their very language, their favourite tropes, are of this colour; 'Attic understatement' figures even in the grammars. No people would have perceived more clearly, as no people perhaps is less adapted to perceive than we English are, the element of necessary truth contained in the Frenchman's epigram that 'language is given us to conceal our thoughts', or could more clearly distinguish between the duty of saying what you mean and the equally important but not always compatible duty of saying what you mean to say. In season and out of season they practised their favourite art. They carried it to the bench of justice and to the seats of political debate. The philosophical observer of their assemblies has recorded in vivid and well-known terms the intense apprehension and preternatural quickness of the audience, their eagerness 'to applaud a subtlety before it was out, to catch the sense before it was spoken'.[1] It may easily be imagined with what enthusiastic delight a people, who could not be kept from indulging this temper even where, as many were wise enough to see, it was fraught, at least in its excess, with danger to their interests, would have turned in their hours of relaxation to such art as that of Euripides, to literary works of which it is the very basis and well-understood condition, that there is to be no blurting; that the author, happily for the pleasure of intelligent and cultivated persons, must not be plain if he would, and would not if he might; that the simpler and clearer he seems, the closer you have to watch him, sure that at last his truest and gravest meaning will be found in a corner, or round a corner, so that (thank the gods!) it is worth a man's
- ↑ The imaginary Cleon in Thucydides 3. 38.
