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ASPECTS, AORISTS AND 
 THE CLASSICAL TRIPOS 
 
 BY 
 
 JANE ELLEN HARRISON, LL.D., D.Litt. 
 
 Fellow and Lecturer of Newnham College, Cambridge 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 1919 
 
 Price Two Shillings and Sixpence net 
 
ASPECTS, AORISTS AND 
 THE CLASSICAL TRIPOS 
 
 BY 
 
 JANE ELLEN [hARRISON, LL.D., D.Litt. 
 
 Fellow and Lecturer of Newnham College, Cambridge 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 1919 
 
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 436409 
 
ASPECTS, AORISTS AND THE 
 CLASSICAL TRIPOS 
 
 I^wiCE in my life, only twice, it has happened to me to 
 fall in love with a language. Once, long ago, with Greek, 
 again, only yesterday as it seems to me, with Russian. 
 
 To fall in love with a language is an enchanting experience. 
 You feel as though you were born again, you wonder how you 
 could ever have lived without your new love; life seems 
 growing richer every moment, you pity all the poor heathen 
 who have never found the light. It is well to be off with the 
 old love before you are on with the new. Not so. In the free 
 spaces of the spirit there are no exclusions, no jealousies. 
 People come to me and say ' I hear- you have given up Greek 
 and are devoting yourself to Russian.' As if I could give up 
 Greek. It is part of my body and bones. No, thank heaven, 
 the new love has only given new life to the old. 
 
 First, to clear the ground, to fall in love with a language is 
 not to fall in love with a literature. It is well to note — a fact 
 too often forgotten — that a rich language does not necessarily 
 mean a rich literature. The stock and notable example is 
 drawn from Semitic languages. Arabic is exceedingly rich in 
 vocabulary, its literature well — of great specialist interest but 
 singularly jejune. Hebrew is poor and sparse as a language, 
 but its literature — incomparable. The reason of this distinc- 
 tion is clear enough and for my argument important. Lan- 
 guage is the wwconscious or at least subconscious product of 
 the group, the herd, the race, the nation. Literature is the 
 product more or less conscious of the individual genius, using 
 of course the tools made by the blind herd, but, after the 
 manner of live organisms, shaping these tools even as he uses 
 them. When we love a language as contrasted with a litera- 
 ture, we fall under the spell not of a person, an individual 
 genius, but of a people imaged in the speech they have made. 
 
 ^Vhat was the spell cast by Greek? It was not the spell of 
 Homer or ^Eschylus or Plato, I could not read them. No — if 
 
I may be forgiven a i-'eminiscence important for my point — 
 I fell in love suddenly, hopelessly with the Greek particles 
 fjiev and he and r^ovv and 8' ovv. I remember the hour and the 
 place as though it were yesterday when my fate fell upon me, 
 when the sudden sense came over me, the hot-cold shiver 
 of delight, the sense of a language more sensitive than my 
 own to shades of meaning, more delicate in its balance of 
 clauses, in its setting out of the relations of things, more 
 charged with the magic of well — Intellectual Beauty. I had 
 no choice ; science and philosophy were pulling hard at me 
 but my fate was sealed. Youth is, I believe, contrary to all 
 tradition, the time when Rational Thought dominates and 
 allures. It is because they turned on the world the eager 
 clear-eyed curiosity of a noble child that the Greeks are 
 always young and their language essentially the language of 
 youth. 
 
 In an interval of some thirty years I had to learn for 
 various purposes, in a scrappy and discreditable way, various 
 other languages. But the experience was never repeated. 
 Italian and Spanish appealed to me as somewhat more agree- 
 able forms of the Latin spirit than either Latin or French: 
 Swedish and Norwegian gave me a pleasant shock of ultra- 
 Teutonic crudity and a sense of the spirit of Ibsen, its ugly 
 beauty. Sanskrit spite of its delicious tales of elephants and 
 bathing-places inspired in me something like repulsion. 
 I seemed to touch and shrink from the very soul of Formal 
 Grammar. I had a narrow escape with Hebrew. As a sort of 
 counter-blast to Greek it is so ingenuous, so frankly uncon- 
 scious of logic ; it rested a spirit worn with logical relations. 
 It is the perfect speech of the story-teller and the mere 
 utterer of disjointed lyrical emotion. But after all even 
 in one's dotage one cannot wholly renounce one's logical 
 heritage and become as a little child. 
 
 Then came Russian. 
 
 I began Russian simply to get at the literature. I wanted 
 to read Tolstoy, Chehov, Dostoevsky and the rest in the 
 original. I had the old-fashioned scholar's prejudice against 
 translations as savouring of the guilt, the ignorance, the idle- 
 
[ 7 ] 
 
 ness of 'cribs.' But I had no expectation of finding in the 
 Russian language a new birth and a new Hfe. 
 
 And here may I say in a parenthesis a word that may 
 surprise and even shock some. If you learn Russian for the 
 sake of the literature I am not sure that it is worth while. 
 Ru-ssian is a hard language and unless you are of the bull-dog 
 breed and like to ^^t your teeth into something soHd you may 
 be wise to refrain. I say advisedly I am 'not sure' because 
 I am but a beginner. The genius of the Russian people tends, 
 it has often been noted, to the novel, the least literary of all 
 literary forms. Now take Russian literature — the novel ex- 
 cepted — and set it beside say English literature and it seems 
 to me Russian is simply nowhere. Set Ostrovsky, or even 
 Gogol, by Shakespeare, set Pushkin and Lermontov by Keats, 
 by Shelley, by Wordsworth, by Milton, they are not in the 
 same street. 
 
 Now the novel, because least literary in form, is most 
 translat cable. The profound and shattering psychology of 
 Dostoevsky loses but little in the accurate translations of 
 Mrs Garnett. 
 
 Again with Russian it was language not literature that 
 cast its spell. And again I remember with absolute precision 
 the moment of my new birth. This time it was not the in- 
 tellectual beauty of particles — though Russian is rich in 
 charming and significant particles. It was rather an intimate 
 emotional appeal — the appeal of the far famed, much 
 dreaded Aspects of the Russian verb. The Russian verb is 
 weak in tenses, strong in Aspects. You may learn the tenses 
 of the Russian verb in half an hour — you may learn Russian 
 for years and feel at the end that you are only beginning to 
 feel the full beauty of its aspects. These aspects are in the very 
 blood of the Slav. A Russian moujik may blunder in his cases 
 and his spelling will be phonetic, but in his aspects — I know 
 it from the ilHterate post-cards of Russian war-prisoners 
 — he will blunder never ; they are part of him. These aspects 
 I believe to be of profound psychological significance and this 
 significance has not I think so far been fully understood. 
 
[ 8 ] 
 
 What is an Aspect? 
 
 The word aspect is misleading. It is a translation of the 
 Russian Bmjl.'h appearance and BH^t is itself a translation and 
 a mistranslation of the Latin species 'class,' 'kind/ which 
 had of course no sense of appearance of superficial aspect. 
 Aspect then means simply the kind or quality, the sort of 
 verb. Aspect or quality of verb had, I believe, nothing 
 originally to do with time; aspect in fact cuts clean across 
 time. Aspect in most languages is now at least indicated for 
 the most part by adverbs. I run — quickly; I stand — still; 
 in this sense many verbs have hundreds of aspects. Some 
 languages however alter the actual root of the verb to denote 
 specially important aspects. Thus Hebrew has e.g. shavar 
 15^ to break but shibbir ^3?^ ^^ break violently, to shiver, 
 to break to pieces. This aspect of violent action is known as 
 the intensive. English, to denote an aspect, often uses a quite 
 different verb and hence is difficult to learn. Thus I ' eat ' has 
 for one aspect, its intensive, I 'gobble,' for another I 'munch/ 
 I eat steadily and squarely. 
 
 It is perhaps in watching the use of aspects in our own 
 tongue that we best feel their meaning. The English language 
 like the English people is good at particular emergencies, but 
 hopelessly unsystematic. I have seldom been completely 
 baffled in my attempts to translate Russian aspects but I 
 pity any one who tries to construct a theory as to the mor- 
 phology of English aspects. If you try to teach Enghsh, and 
 I have experimented of late on many a hapless Belgian, Serb, 
 Russian, you soon discover the maddening fact that your 
 rule is usually a seething mass of exceptions. 
 
 I was proudly explaining to a Russian pupil that we could 
 and did express the perfective aspect in English. 'We use 
 other words ' I said, for example ' to catch.' ' I catch sight of,' 
 that is finely perfective in the inceptive sense — the act 
 suddenly begun not finished. The Russian brightened sym- 
 pathetically and screwed up his small shining eyes. 
 
[ 9 ] 
 
 'I th'ank you' he said, 'I shall understand/ 
 
 a k'atch sight of.' 
 
 'I k'atch hearing of.' 
 
 'I k'atch seeing of.' 
 
 No, No, No, I said, of course you can't say ' I catch hearing 
 of,' you must say 'All at once I heard.' 
 
 My Russian leant back pained and patient, all the light 
 gone from his eyes. ' Yit yis hard,' he said, 'Ye English. Yit 
 yis impossible,' and in my heart I agreed and I 'thanked the 
 goodness and the grace,' etc. 
 
 This general adverbial character of aspect it is important 
 to note in order to clear the ground, but the meaning of the 
 word aspect in Slavonic languages is more highly specialized. 
 We take Russian as typical. 
 
 In Russian there are two aspects, denoting two special 
 qualities of each and every verb, qualities that are comple- 
 mentary, the imperfective HecOBepmeHHLiH BHfl;'L, the 
 perfective cOBepmeHHblH Bmjj^b. Again the terms are 
 unfortunate because to us perfective and imperfective imply 
 time, and though perfective and imperfective aspects do imply 
 a kind of time it is not the time order to which we are accus- 
 tomed. 
 
 Take the simplest possible example. 
 
 llHCaTb, imperfective 'to write' — the process of writing — 
 to go on writing. 
 
 uaumcdiTh, to write a particular thing and finish it off. 
 
 Now English has not these two infinitives and being a very 
 sensitive language it feels the need and often substitutes for 
 the imperfective infinitive a participle or a substantive. 
 
 H He jiioSjiio nncRTb, 'I do not like to write' — that is 
 foreigner's English. An Englishman would substitute for the 
 Russian imperfective infinitive a gerund — I don't like writing. 
 
 Or again h xony 9Ty KHHry npo^HTdiTh, perfective 
 infinitive, 'I want to read that book.' A sensitive idiomatic 
 speaker would probably say, I want to get that book read, 
 i.e. what I want is the accomplishment of the act of reading 
 that book. 
 
 We said that aspects had primarily nothing to do with 
 
 «5 
 
[ 10 ] 
 
 time order, with the sequence of things. What an aspect de- 
 notes is a kind of internal time. It is often and truly said that 
 the imperfective is like a line, it has duration, continuity, 
 extension so to speak in space, the perfective is like a dot, a 
 moment, as soon as it is begun it is finished. And here it is 
 instructive to note that in Russian a certain form of perfective 
 expresses equally well the beginning and end of an action, 
 the two terminal points, the two ends ; the Russian words for 
 beginning and end, na^aJia and KOB.Qil^"h, with a fine in- 
 stinctive logic derive from the same root. Other illustrations 
 point the same way, the imperfective is the open hand, the 
 perfective the clenched fist, the imperfective is a ^nov^- field, 
 the perfective a snow-ball. Always we find the same notion 
 not of time order but of internal time, the imperfective has 
 internal time but no time order, it may be past, present or 
 future; the perfective has no internal time, no duration, and 
 equally its time order past, present or future is indifferent. 
 
 Now this distinction between imperfective and perfective 
 is in skilled hands a wondrous weapon of expression — take an 
 example. 
 
 Perfective na^O np O cm ^^mI>CH, it's time you said goodbye, 
 got it over and started — it's time you were off. The whole 
 focus of attention is on the result of the goodbyes, i.e. the 
 start; no sentiment intrudes. Next in Ostrovsky's Storm, 
 By^eT'L BaMT) npoi^fa/nbCn, imperfective, 'enough of say- 
 ing goodbye.' The mere use of the imperfective conjures up 
 all the duree of parting, all the process, the drag, the misery, 
 the looking and the longing. English can get the effect by 
 some such turn of phrase as 'saying goodbye,' which gives 
 duration. Durand Greville in his admirable translation gives 
 us 'pas tant d'adieux,' but neither the English nor the French 
 have the direct simplicity nor the poignancy of the Russian. 
 Or again mh^ yMepeTb He CTpaniHO, a CTpaniHO yMH- 
 paTb, it isn't death that frightens me, it's dying^. 
 
 Broadly speaking then the two aspects in Russian express 
 what their name denotes — the perfective is of the accom- 
 
 ^ Both these instances I owe to M. Mazon's Emploi des aspects du 
 verhe Russe. 
 
■[ II ] 
 
 plished act COBepmeHHBlH standing on its apex or vertex, 
 the imperfective is of wow-accomplishment, of process. But 
 there is much more behind and I have come to doubt whether 
 the ideas of completion and non-completion lie at the root of 
 the matter. Why should a language focus so intently on such 
 rather formal notions as completion and non-completion? 
 A witty critic suggests that my friends the Russians when 
 they did get anything really finished were so astonished that 
 they were obliged to invent an aspect to express it, but 
 possibly the psychological roots lie deeper. Some rather pro- 
 found spiritual need must surely have prompted this dis- 
 tinction of aspect which is at once the dominant character- 
 istic and the crowning glory of the Russian language. 
 
 Light came to me suddenly and quite unexpectedly. 
 I chanced for quite another purpose to look up the motto 
 that Tolstoy has chosen for his Anna Karenina. 
 
 Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Loi d. 
 Mni oTM-femeHie h Aai. B03ji,aMi. 
 
 It was important for me to make out exactly the sense of 
 the text so I turned up the Greek of Rom. xii. 19. It stands 
 
 'EyLfcOt 6K8lfC7jcrL<;, iyo) avraTToSooa-co, Xeyei KvpLo^. 
 
 BOS^aMTj in Russian, 'I will repay,' is of course the perfec- 
 tive future, i.e. the perfective of the present used, as invariably 
 in Russian, for the perfective-future. It is translated in Greek 
 by the future avraTroSooaco. I may note in passing that the 
 future is sigmatic and that the stem of the sigmatic future is 
 the same as the stem of the aorist. As to the meaning of the 
 text I was no further. 
 
 Tolstoy's text is a quotation from a quotation. S. Paul, or 
 whoever wrote the Romans, is quoting from Deut. xxxii. 35, 
 from the magnificent song of Moses to the congregation of 
 Israel. Here at last I got what I wanted. The Enghsh is ' to 
 me helongeth vengeance and belongeth recompense,' but 'be- 
 longeth ' was in italics so presumably not in the text. In the 
 ; a 6 
 
[ 12 ] 
 
 Russian of the Deuteronomy version there was no verb of any 
 kind, past, present or future : 
 
 Menfl oTMimenie n B03ji,aiiHie 
 Of me is vengeance and requital. 
 
 To make quite sure about the absence of tense I turned up 
 the original: 
 
 .thm Dpi "S 
 
 •• • : Itt 
 
 Here we have one of those condensed, antiphonal sentences 
 that had need have no tenses for they are utterly out of 
 time. It is not meant that Yahveh had revenged in any par- 
 ticular case (past) or is revenging at this particular moment 
 (present) or will revenge hereafter (future) but that between 
 the idea of Yahveh and vengeance there is an eternal im- 
 mutable non-temporal relation. 
 
 English being a picturesque and vivid language takes an 
 unfair advantage. 'I will repay' is far more ominous, immi- 
 nent and terrifying than any abstract statement of Yahveh's 
 permanent attributes. 
 
 But the interesting thing for us is the Russian perfective 
 future. This perfective stands, it is clear, not for a future, 
 not for a statement that something will happen but for a 
 statement in Hebrew that something permanently is without 
 any reference to time. It was a statement, abstract, pro- 
 verbial and yes, the word came instinctively to mind, it was 
 gnomic ; I was face to face with my old and valued friend the 
 gnomic aorist. 
 
 Long before I had ever heard of Russian aspects the 
 gnomic aorist of Greek grammar had always allured and 
 intrigued me. Partly I admit because it was so easy; it was 
 a tight clear little instance of the manifold uses of the aorist ; 
 one could make no mistake about it, use it safely on occasion 
 in one's prose, and that, in the welter of tenses and moods that 
 awaits one in the early stages of composition, was in itself 
 comforting. But also, though it was in a sense so tight and 
 fast, so easy to use, it was hard to understand, and to my 
 frequent questions as to its meaning and origin I could get 
 no clear answer. I have had a suspicion all my life that in 
 
[ 13 ] 
 
 the current dictionaries and grammars often the real ex- 
 planation and origin of a word or grammatical form is to be 
 found in something that comes in just at the end as a 'de- 
 rived ' form or ' exceptional ' use. This I believe to be the case 
 with the aorist ; the true primitive essential aorist I believe 
 to be the gnomic, the temporal aorist a later derivative, in 
 fact the aorist I believe to be primarily not a tense at all but 
 an aspect^. 
 
 The gnomic aorist is thrice familiar to all but I give a 
 couple of instances, taken straight from that enchanting book, 
 Monro's Homeric Grammar. 
 
 Death cometh alike to the man who toileth not and to him that 
 hath toiled long. //. 9. 320. 
 
 KarOav o/jLOty^ 6 r depyof; dvrjp, o re iroWa iopyco^. 
 
 That is purely gnomic. 
 
 And next the gnomic aorist of similes. 
 
 Even as a lion is glad when he lighteth upon a great carcase, a 
 horned stag or a wild goat that he hath found. //. 3. 23, 
 
 (Lare Xecov e'^ap?;, 
 
 I need go no further. 
 
 The aorist here is not historical. Homer does not mean to 
 say that in the past a certain particular lion found a certain 
 particular horned stag and that that particular lion was glad. 
 What he means is that at any time, irrespective of tense, a 
 lion, given that he is hungry and that he finds a horned stag, 
 will be glad in his lion heart. It is the permanent attribute 
 of lionness — purely gnomic ; the lion, the hunger, the horned 
 stag, the gladness, are all in relation but out of time. Dr 
 Monro with his usual acuteness and profundity notes this. 
 *When an assertion is made irrespective of time either the 
 aorist, or in particular cases the present is used.' These 
 particular cases as not affecting my argument I pass by. 
 
 1 The best discussion of the Greek aorist known to me is in an 
 old and elementary book, Ernst Curtius' Elucidations of the Student's 
 Greek Grammar, 1875, chapter xx. Curtius still regards the aorist 
 as a tense but his discussion of the ' triple kind of time ' and of the 
 'ingressive and effective aorist' marks a great advance in under- 
 standing. 
 
[ 14 ] 
 
 Dr Monro knows quite well that the aorist is out of time but 
 with deplorable conventionality he leaves it stranded among 
 the tenses, a source of perennial confusion. 
 
 What do the other languages do when they want to be. 
 gnomic? 
 
 English usually uses the present — ' even as a lion is glad ' — 
 but when we say ' even as a lion is glad ' we are assuredly not 
 thinking of any particular lion rejoicing in the Zoo at the 
 moment. 
 
 Greek then uses the aorist, a supposed past, English the 
 present and Russian a future which is no future at all but a 
 perfective present. 
 
 And Hebrew? 
 
 He that findeth a wife, findeth a good thing. 
 Gnomic present in English. 
 
 And in Hebrew : 
 
 ♦nto N!^D r\m k^!: 
 
 XT T • T T 
 
 Is K^^ past, present or future? 
 
 It is neither, it is no tense at all. For the best of reasons. 
 Hebrew is a language which has no tenses at all, it has only 
 aspects. I should not venture to base this statement on my 
 own knowledge of Hebrew, which is slender. I base it rather 
 on the sound scholarship of Professor Kennett. No one knows 
 better than this accomplished scholar and no one could say 
 more plainly that all the supposed futures in 'prophecies' 
 have nothing to do with the future at all. Oh what burning 
 controversies might have been saved had only theologians 
 known a little more grammar ! Hear what Professor Kennett 
 says : 
 
 The name ' tenses ' is misleading. The so-called Hebrew tenses do not 
 express the time but merely the state of the action. The ancient 
 Hebrews never thought of an action as past, present or future but 
 simply as perfect, i.e. complete, or imperfective, i.e. as in course of 
 development. . .the time of an action the Hebrews did not attempt 
 to express by any verbal form. 
 
 My debt to Professor Kennett is deep; I owe to him all my 
 too scanty knowledge of Hebrew; and yet I owe him a personal 
 
[ 15 ] 
 
 grudge. Knowing and clearly stating that Hebrew has no 
 tenses, only aspects, he yet, hke Dr Monro, is incorrigibly 
 conventional. From sheer traditionahsm he calls his admir- 
 able book on the Hebrew aspects by the misleading title The 
 Hebrew Tenses ; so is the clock of scholarship set or rather 
 kept back. My grudge is personal because had his book had 
 a fitting title I must long ago have seen the affinity between 
 Russian and Hebrew aspects. Further, knowing how primi- 
 tive in many respects, how little abstract, how uncontamin- 
 ated by logic and logical structure Hebrew is, it would surely 
 have occurred to me to ask, is not aspect wherever and when- 
 ever it occurs a thing more primitive, more psychologically 
 fundamental than time order, than tense ? Was there not a 
 time in the development of language when primitive man 
 focussed his attention not on time order but on something 
 else expressed by aspect, and what was this something? 
 
 To answer this question we must go back for a moment to 
 the beginnings of language. All language is in a sense an 
 abstraction; it is a feeling after class, it is the putting of a 
 shiftable adjustable label for a live uninterchangeable thing. 
 The more primitive a language is the less it abstracts. As is 
 well known some primitive languages have e.g. no general 
 class name for 'bird.' They have cockatoo, flamingo and so 
 on. It is a terrific mental effort to see the common qualities 
 of birdness. So with verbs. They have no common verb 
 *to fly,' a pheasant flies, a swallow flies, but the act is not the 
 same so it has a different verb. As the language with its people 
 advances in civilization it classifies, i.e. abstracts and simplifies 
 more and more ; it sees common qualities and drops out those 
 distinctions that do not subserve hfe. A similar process may 
 be observed in the formation of what we call Parts of 
 Speech. 
 
 It used to be thought that language began with names, the 
 names of things to which later were added qualifjdng adjec- 
 tives. Still later, it was held these separate nouns were 
 joined by verbs expressing relations between subject and 
 object and these again were qualified by adverbs. 
 
 r^' 
 
[ i6 ] 
 
 Modern linguistic based on savage facts tells us a very 
 different and for psychology a very instructive tale. Lan- 
 guage, after the purely emotional interjection, began with 
 whole sentences, holophrases, utterances of a relation in 
 which subject and object have not yet got their heads above 
 water, but are still submerged in a situation. A holophrase 
 utters a holopsychosis. Out of these holophrases emerge our 
 familiar ' Parts of Speech ' rightly so called for speech was 
 before its partition. A simple instance will make this clear^. 
 
 The Fuegians have a word or rather holophrase mamik- 
 lapinatapai which means ' looking-at-each-other,-hoping-that- 
 either-will-offer-to-do-something-which-both-parties-desire- 
 but-are-un willing-to-do.' This holophrase is quite unanalys- 
 able, it contains no nouns and no verbs, it simply expresses 
 an intense relation not unknown to some of us. Uneducated 
 and impulsive people even to-day tend to show a certain holo- 
 phrastic savagery. They not infrequently plunge into a state- 
 ment of relations before they tell you who they are talking 
 about. As civilization advances, the holophrase, over- 
 charged, disintegrates and bit by bit subject, object, verb 
 and the other Parts of Speech are abstracted from the stream 
 of warm, full, human consciousness — in which they were at 
 first submerged. The holophrase shows us man entangled as 
 it were in his own activities, he and his human environment 
 utterly involved. Traces of this involution survive in Russian 
 speech. If a Russian wants to say You and I, he does not say 
 ' You and 1' H H Bbi, that is too cold and hard and analytic 
 for him; he says Mh CL Brmh * We with you,' a thing much 
 more intime and sympathetic, but apt to drive a logical 
 Frenchman crazy. It is right emotionally though wrong 
 grammatically. A Russian would appreciate the fact that, 
 as observed to me by Mr J. A. K. Thomson, Pictus acu 
 tunicam is a psychological unit, it is not = tunicam gerens acu 
 pictam. 
 
 Is the savage then with his holophrases impersonal ? Does 
 
 ^ See my Themis, p. 473 ; my illustrations are taken from Mr E. J. 
 Payne's sections on language in his History of the New World, 1899, 
 vol. IT, p. 114 ff. 
 
17 
 
 he tend to employ only generalized abstract terms denoting 
 that indefinable though wholly palpable thing 'relation'? 
 Far from it, he is intensely personal — only he is all personal 
 experience, he cannot cut himself loose from his activities. 
 Language again is the best evidence. A New Caledonian^ 
 expressing the fact that some fruit was not high enough for 
 the native palate, said not ' it-not-yet-eatable ' but ' we-not- 
 yet-eatable.' Egotism could scarcely go further. Now — and 
 this is my point — if we were asked what was the aspect of 
 the savage holophrase, we should answer without a moment's 
 hesitation, it is imperfective — it is the very incarnation of the 
 imperfective, it expresses actual duration, or as I should prefer 
 to call it actual, personal experience. The imperfective lies 
 at the very beginning of things 2. 
 
 But what comes next? Primitive man, however closely 
 entangled in actual experience, in the imperfective, remembers 
 something. We are men, Bergson tells us, because we remem- 
 ber. He remembers something, or he hopes something, or he 
 fancies something, he dreams something. Darkly he feels 
 that all this remembering, hoping, imagining, is not quite the 
 same as his actual experiences at the moment, and by some 
 other and perhaps fainter holophrase, by some modifica- 
 tion of his complex howl he utters this other something and 
 steps out of actuality into the aspect of non-experience, the 
 perfective. I admit tha t here I am speculating, I cannot 
 produce a ^oioplirastic^ erf ective . but I am convinced such 
 must have existed and are perhaps still only waiting to be 
 looked for. The step out of the actual into the remembered 
 and the hoped for is really a leap of tremendous genius, it is 
 the beginning of all generalization, of all imagination, all 
 
 ^ Crawley, Idea of the Soul, p. 35. 
 
 2 By the kindness of Mr Seth-Smith I learn that Maori, a language 
 that knows little of inflections — gender, number, case, mood, tense, 
 person being determined by context not change of form — yet takes 
 cognizance of aspect which it expresses by particles. For example 
 the form e-ana may indicate present, past or future. It is a form that 
 contemplates the action as going on whether in past, present or future. 
 It is in fact a formulary for the imperfective. 
 
 a 9 
 
[ i8 ] 
 
 science, all art^, all religion, all philosophy. It is the first 
 impersonal move, man's first attempt to stand outside him- 
 self and view the world undebauched by immediate reaction. 
 
 Abstraction then rather than achievement is — if I am right 
 — from the outset the very pith and marrow of the perfective.y^ 
 But it is easy to see how achievement comes in. While you 
 are involved in the action, actually experiencing it you can- 
 not look at it from the outside. It is only when the action is 
 accomplished, done with, that you look at it at all. That is 
 why the perfective shuns the present. Its happy hunting 
 grounds are necessarily the shadowy past and the still 
 dimmer future. The perfective is the aorist, not indefinite, 
 ill-defined in time but out of time, remote from duree as 
 Bergson would say, free from the hot intimacy of personal 
 experience. 
 
 To resume then. In their ultimate analysis our two aspects 
 are 
 
 (i) The imperfective, the aspect of actual experience with 
 affinity in time-order for the present. 
 
 (2) The perfective, the aspect of ;^ow-experience, of the 
 concept, whose affinities are with the past and the future. 
 
 Both these aspects are primarily out of time but liable to 
 be contaminated by it. If we like to figure them spatially as 
 a line the imperfective is the duration of the line, the per- 
 fective its terminal dots at the beginning and end. Thus 
 
 past |. Vr^f^l I future 
 ^ I (imperlectivej 1 
 
 \perf ective / 
 We think of the future as in front of us. Homer thought 
 of it as behind (ott/o-o-o)) ; the future was the laggard in time 
 that had not yet come up. 
 
 But though, as we see, aspects have certain natural affinities 
 
 1 Elsewhere, Themis, pp. 42-47, on the psychology of the bpw^fvov, 
 and Art and Ritual, Home University Series, chapter v. I have tried 
 to show how art develops from action by way of hope and remem- 
 brance, the future and the past. 
 
[ 19 ] 
 
 in time-order they are yet clearly distinguishable from tenses. 
 The imperfective has affinity for the present but it can trans- 
 port itself into the past and future. We can live into the 
 future and the past. Only for the perfective the present 
 tense is tahu. 
 
 We have seen that Hebrew had no verbal tense-forms, only 
 aspects. Indo-European had, it would seem, both aspects and 
 tenses. In surveying present Indo-European languages two 
 significant facts are noticeable. Aspect on the whole has 
 tended to disappear, and within the domain of aspect, on the 
 whole the perfective has tended to develop, the imperfective 
 to decline. But with one significant exception. The Slavonic 
 branch of Indo-European has maintained and even enhanced 
 its aspectival system while its tense system has sensibly 
 weakened in comparison with Old Slavonic. These are surely 
 facts that must have psychological significance. 
 
 Before we pass to this significance let us very briefly survey 
 the survivals of aspect. Greek we have seen has the perfective 
 in its aorist, but the time tendency seems always pulling at it 
 to drag it down to a mere tense. Nevertheless it survives as 
 aspect not only in the gnomic aorist which we have examined 
 but also in the significant fact that the Greek infinitive, which 
 is necessarily out of time, has its imperfective (present) and 
 its perfective (aorist) form. Moreover Greek has two aspects 
 for its imperative — so I am told has Persian, e.g. Bi-dihid 
 give generally, Mi-dihid give me now. 
 
 Indo-Iranian generally and Armenian have also an aorist — 
 and use it with great strictness, but in these fields I am not 
 sufficiently at home to pronounce whether this aorist is 
 aspectivaP. 
 
 Latin, much concerned with time-order, has no definite 
 aspectival apparatus, but it retains the sense of aspect. 
 Sir Frederick Pollock points out to me the elegant perfective 
 use of the perfect vigui in Horace, Carm. iii. 9, Persarum 
 vigui rege beatior, not ' in those days I was as happy as a king ' 
 
 1 See Delbriick, Vergleichende Syntax, 11. 1-255, ^^^ Brugmann, 
 Kurze Vergl. Grammatik, p. 480 ig. 
 
[ 20 ] 
 
 which would be the imperfect, but 'such is my happy state 
 now done for.' There is assuredly here no reason to suppose 
 the perfect is metri gratia. Madvig notes the use and calls it 
 the perfect 'absolute.' Quite recently M. Barbelenet^ in his 
 Questions d' aspect has noted that there exists in Latin as in 
 Slav and Gothic a category of what he calls verhes ponctuels ou 
 perfectifs, that is expressing an action without any notion of 
 duration. These verbs, if such exist, should have in the 
 nature of the case no imperfect (outside of paradigms) . These 
 perfective verbs are usually verbs compounded with a pre- 
 position of very weak prepositional force. An examination of 
 such verbs in the one selected author, Terence, shows them to 
 lack the imperfect. 
 
 Old Slavonic has of course a complete aspectival apparatus 
 and as already noted a much richer supply of tenses than that 
 possessed by any modern Slavonic tongue. It has only the 
 present future, the periphrastic imperfective future is a com- 
 paratively modern development in East and West Slavonic. 
 It is interesting to note that in the Old Slavonic gospels 
 presents in the Greek appear uniformly as imperfectives, 
 aorists as perfectives. 
 
 Gothic is in some respects nearest in the matter of aspects 
 to Slavonic. It usually — like Slavonic — forms its perfective 
 by a colourless preposition ga, and its perfective like the 
 Slavonic is terminal, i.e. either ingressive or egressive. Thus 
 Luke viii. lo 'that seeing they might not see, ei saikandans 
 ni gasaihaina, ha ^\e7rovT€<; /jlt) ^Xeircoaov.' Moreover it has 
 like Slavonic a few simple perfects, i.e. perfects which have 
 no preposition but which are so to speak incurably per- 
 fective 2. 
 
 Turning to modern languages the traces of the perfective 
 aspect in German are familiar. German like Slav expresses 
 its perfective by a machinery of prefix-particles which are 
 probably worn-out prepositions. Thus ' he looked out of the 
 window for ever such a time, at last he caught sight of me,' 
 
 1 In Melanges Lingnistiques ojferts a M. Antoine Meillet, 1902. 
 
 2 For aspects in Gothic (Aktionsarlen) see Dr Wilhelm Streitberg, 
 Gotisches Elementarhuch , igo6, p. 184. 
 
[ 21 ] 
 
 would be in German *Er blickte (imperfective) lange zum 
 Fenster hinaus, endlich erblickte (perfective) er mich/ Often 
 the perfective is used in German rather deHcately when the 
 end is not actually accomplished, only envisaged, thus : 
 
 Es gingen drei Jager wohl auf die Birsch, 
 Sie wollten erjagen den weissen Hirsch. 
 
 Here it is not stated that the stag was caught but the hunters 
 were thinking of the catching. Whether the stag was caught 
 or not in the end you could not say, 'sie erjagten den Hirsch 
 den ganzen Tag,' nor could you say 'wir ersteigen den 
 Berg Stunden lang,' even though you got to the top in the 
 end. 
 
 From the Teutonic we pass to the Latin group. French, 
 Italian, Spanish have lost their imperfective apparatus save 
 for the imperfect. This is instructive ; the sense of aspect has 
 been obscured by the sense of time order. Only in the past 
 does French observe the distinction between perfective and 
 imperfective, between passe defini and imparfait. This dis- 
 tinction scrupulously observed by classical French writers, 
 les jeunes I am told tend more and more to obscure. In his 
 interesting and subtle paper Traces d' aspect en Frangais^, 
 Monsieur Barbelenet has further observed that French ex- 
 presses in certain cases the ingressive perfective by a pre- 
 position, prefixed, and has selected for this function the 
 preposition re. It will be remembered that in Gothic and 
 Slavonic the perfective is often terminal, i.e. of the beginning 
 or end of an action to the exclusion of the middle. In Latin 
 and Greek it is often terminal, of the end or accomplishment 
 of an action — ire, to go (imperfective), transire, to cross (per- 
 fective), ^aiveiv, to go (imperfective), hiajBaivetv, to cross 
 (perfective) . In Lithuanian this perfective is very fitly called 
 the resultative. In French as sometimes in Latin re marks 
 the beginning of one act that succeeds to another — to quote 
 M. Barbelenet, rescisco 'je fais succeder la connaissance a 
 I'ignorance, j'apprends; reveiller quelqu'un (perfective), c'est 
 
 ^ Melanges Linguistiques, Meillet, 1902, p. 14. 
 
[ 22 ] 
 
 faire qu'il ne dorme plus, qu'il veille, eveiller (imperf ective) , 
 c'est le tirer peu a peu du sommeiL' 
 
 Another survival of aspect machinery is the frequently 
 perfective force of the pronominal verb. ' La langue populaire 
 distingue "ce train arrete (imperfective) une heure a Douai" 
 et "ce train s'arrete a Lille (perfective), il ne va plus loin."' 
 Essentially perfective, and full of the bustle of a ' start ' are 
 such argot verbs as se trotter, se defiler, se carapatter. Some- 
 times again the aspect is exhibited merely by intonation, 
 * Vous avez laisse tomber un livre. En le rattrapant vous dites 
 **Je rtiens," "Got it." L'idee est assurement tout autre que 
 celle qu'on exprimerait en repondant Je le tiens (Yes I have 
 it) a la question As-tu ton livre?' The first is essentially per- 
 fective, the second imperfective. 
 
 But in summing up his results, M. Barbelenet admits that 
 traces of aspect in French are but 'phenomenes isoles, en 
 partie subjectifs.' He realizes that to the Latin mind intent 
 on time-order aspect is antipathetic — the phenomena he 
 notes are ' nuances de signification qui au premier abord peu- 
 vent sembler absolument etrangeres a leur esprit.' 
 
 It is to a Frenchman^ that we owe our best study and 
 appreciation both of the morphology and the semantics of 
 aspect. But though individual Frenchmen may and are 
 interested in methodizing aspects the fact remains that the 
 average French mind resents the intrusion of aspect, tends 
 to feel it either slightly barbarous or at best superfluous. 
 Some twenty years ago in France the question was seriously 
 mooted whether it might not be well to teach Russian ' with- 
 out aspects.' This remarkable project needless to say was not 
 carried out. But a certain antipathy is still not dead. After 
 listening in the early days of my Russian pupillage to an 
 admirably lucid discussion, by Monsieur Paul Boyer, of the 
 function of aspect, I rashly turned to the lady by my side, a 
 lady of great intelligence, one who knew far more Russian 
 than I did myself, and I broke into enthusiasm as to Russian 
 in general and the beauty of aspects in particular. She 
 
 ^ Andre Mazon, Morphologie des Aspects, iqo8; Emploi des Aspects 
 du verbe Russe, 191 4. 
 
[ 23 ] 
 
 answered ' Mais oiii, c'est sans doute une langue tres interes- 
 sante, excessivement riche, mais quant a ses aspects, je 
 I'avoue franchement, je puis tres bien m'en passer.' 
 
 In striking contrast to French and indeed to all the Latin 
 group — Teutonic languages seem to stand midway — comes 
 Slavonic. The Frenchman may feel, or at all events think, 
 aspect to be superfluous, the Slav soul — of which we have 
 lately heard so much — needs it and will have it. Slavonic 
 languages have not only preserved the complex apparatus of 
 aspect, they have even developed it ; the need is alive to-day. 
 The Slav is not much interested in order whether of space or 
 time ; hence his winning habit if he comes to call on you of 
 staying to talk till the small hours of the next morning, time 
 is for slaves not for Slavs ; he is interested in something im- 
 measurably more important, in quality of action and in 
 sympathy with action. He does not care to stand outside an 
 action to register, to analyse, to judge, he wants to live into 
 it, he craves 'knowledge by experience.' Hence though it 
 would seem his temperament is inherently imperfective, he 
 is also very sensitive to the perfective attitude. That the need 
 for aspect and especially imperfective aspect is still living is 
 shown by two facts (i) the evergrowing development of imper- 
 fectives with the comparatively new suffix uea and (2) the 
 durative or periphrastic future with dydy. This durative 
 future is unknown to Old Slavonic. It has attained its 
 greatest development in the lugo-Slav group, i.e. Serbo- 
 Croat and Bulgarian, where, in principal propositions it has 
 supplanted the perfective future. In the W. Slav tongues, 
 i.e. Polish and Chech and in Russian, the perfective future 
 is rigorously preserved, but side by side the periphrastic future 
 has developed freely. 
 
 It is no part of my present plan to discuss the morphology 
 of the aspects nor even in detail their semantics. One general 
 remark however must be made. The use of aspect depends 
 on the psychology of the speaker and therefore for the most 
 part delightfully defies rules. There is perhaps only one safe 
 rule which can be supplied to the student, i.e. that the peri- 
 phrastic future demands the imperfective infinitive; that 
 
[ 24 ] 
 
 does not carry us far. The idle mind, which demands rules, 
 i.e. recipes for making correct sentences, and shirks the subtler 
 task of understanding the speaker's point of view and living 
 into his emotion will never either use or understand aspects 
 aright. If the speaker is living into the action, sympathizing 
 with it, he will use the imperfective, if he stands outside and 
 merely states a fact or a judgment he will instinctively use 
 the perfective. This same subjectivity characterizes other 
 Russian forms of speech. The Russian language is rich in 
 diminutives. Diminutives in English and German are apt to 
 be rather unpleasantly what a friend of mine calls 'heating,' 
 they make us feel embarrassed. When a husband addresses 
 his wife as ' wifikins ' we all look the other way. But in Russian 
 the diminutive is used not only to express smallness, though 
 translators persist in rendering SaTlOlllKa as 'little father' — 
 but also to show a certain sympathy and warmth in the 
 speaker's mind. Thus, as Mr Neville Forbes aptly observes, 
 the train ticket-collector will ask for your 611RQTKU', he does 
 not thereby imply that the tickets are of small size but simply 
 that he is not averse to the friendly relation of receiving a tip. 
 Ordinarily a peasant will speak of his priest as SaTloniKa 
 but if the priest has had a little too much he will be SaTbKa-'^ 
 — which is about equivalent to a friendly shrug. 
 
 Last — and this again follows from the subjective character 
 of aspect — the imperfective has often been compared to a 
 line, the perfective to a point. But this comparison only 
 brings out one quality of the imperfective, its duration, the 
 analogy obscures another and equally important quality, its 
 complexity. Thus 'nop a me H O^iBaTbCH (imperfective) 
 — CKaeaJlT) HaKOneili'L Cauia^.' 'It is time I was getting 
 dressed' — or ' it is time I was dressing.' Here the context shows 
 that as the undressing has been described in great detail, 
 similarly the dressing is envisaged not in its result but in all 
 the complexity and picturesqueness of process. But 'iiopa 
 BaMl> O^iTbCH' (perfective) 'it's time you were dressed' 
 looks only to the simple net result and takes no heed of com- 
 
 ' Jarintzov, The Russians and their language, p. 207. 
 
 ^ Me-iKirr 6i}C'i> xii, cited by Mazon, Emploi des Aspects, p. 4. 
 
[ 25 ] 
 
 plexity. So in the instance already cited it is not merely that 
 npomaTbCH expresses length of time; it brings up all the 
 complex processes of parting: npOCTHTBCH would register 
 merely the bald fact that two people parted. Surely aspects 
 lend to a language a singular warmth and life. After long 
 reading of and living into a language rich in aspects like 
 Russian to turn to Latin languages which have no imper- 
 fective save for the past, is to feel them oddly thin and 
 chilling. 
 
 Going back to the primitive holophrase we have so far 
 tried to seize the significance of aspect in language. We have 
 seen Slavonic peoples specialize in aspects and emphasize 
 more and more the imperfective. We turn now to literature ; 
 can we trace here a like ' imperfectiveness ' ? If we can we 
 may perhaps be justified in writing down 'imperfectiveness' 
 as a characteristic of Russian psychology. 
 
 The Imperfective in Literature. 
 
 A brilliant French critic, a critic as sympathetic as brilliant, 
 has characterized the Russian novel as the Roman d' Aventure^ 
 — to us English a title most misleading. M. Jacques Riviere 
 appears to know no Russian and says no word of 'aspects,' 
 but what he explains as his meaning is simply this, that the 
 Russian novel is written in the imperfective, written from 
 within not without, lived not thought about. This modern 
 Russian method is to M. Riviere the exact opposite of sym- 
 bolist work, where everything is known beforehand, every- 
 thing achieved and then thought or felt about from outside 
 and above. In Dostoevsky the action is never complete, we 
 have no statement of results, no moral judgment, all the 
 people are still alive and may do anything any time, that is 
 what is so exciting. Hence our sense of aventure not ' adven- 
 ture,' but 'what is to come,' what is in-process-of-going-to-be. 
 Hence the immense objectivity of Dostoevsky's novels. We 
 
 ^ Jacques Riviere, Le Roman d' Aventure, La Nouvelle Revue 
 Fran9aise, Mai, Juin, Juillet, 1913, and see my former pamphlet, 
 Russia and the Russian verbs, 1915, p. 10. 
 
[ 26 ] 
 
 are almost too much in the action to feel about it till a sudden 
 ache in our personal hearts reminds us that we are ourselves 
 not the hero. It is this living into things that a new generation 
 demands, and it is this, because she is young among the 
 nations, that Russia has to offer. 
 
 It is a common criticism of Dostoevsky to say that he 
 abstains from moral judgment; instead of judging the sinner 
 he sympathizes with him. It is not that he approves crime 
 but that he is not concerned either to approve or disprove, he 
 has not got there yet, he is busy living into, understanding 
 through feeling. Father Zossima is made to say 'no one can 
 judge a criminal until he recognizes that he himself is just 
 such a criminal.' This sense of sympathy and solidarity, of 
 common responsibility and therefore common need for 
 purification through suffering is fundamental in Dostoevsky's 
 psychological outlook. He makes Mitya say 'we are all re- 
 sponsible for all.' 
 
 I had meant to take as my main instance of imperfective- 
 ness in literature Dostoevsky himself, whose books I could 
 assume had been read by every one. I changed my mind 
 owing to the publication of Mr Middleton Murry's Fyodor 
 Dostoevsky. Mr Murry lays before us a quite new and very 
 striking theory as to the rise and development of Dostoevsky's 
 thought. One point in this theory — the main one, I will 
 mention. Mr Murry thinks that what makes the terror, the 
 frighteningness of Dostoevsky's greatest characters is that, 
 living though they are, terribly alive, they are not primarily 
 individuals, they are incarnate ideas, abstractions made to 
 live by sheer imaginative genius. 
 
 This might seem to militate against my view that the 
 method of Dostoevsky is imperfective. If these characters 
 are abstractions then ipso facto they are perfective. In reality 
 the theory is my strongest support. The characters are ab- 
 stractions, but by sheer force of the sympathy, the imper- 
 fectiveness of Dostoevsky's mind they become incarnate. It 
 is the last word for the imperfective, 
 
 Dostoevsky is however a writer of genius so overwhelming 
 that he transcends nationality. It seems fairer to select as 
 
[ 27 ] 
 
 typical a lesser man, Goncharov. The Oblomov of Goncharov 
 appeared in 1858 just before the liberation of the serfs. 
 Though parts of it have been translated^ it is a book but little 
 known in England. Perhaps never in the history of literature 
 did a book on its appearance create so great a sensation. 
 Russians went crazy over it — and yet — it is a piece of very 
 fine work, deservedly still a classic. 
 
 Oblomov is a man's name but this name has passed into 
 the Russian language in the form Oblomovchina — the con- 
 dition of being like Oblomov, Oblomovdom ; the word is to 
 be found now in any Russian dictionary and it means the 
 imperfective state incarnate. Suddenly the Russian world 
 woke up to find itself charged with and what is more convicted 
 of Oblomovdom. Each and every Russian owned himself an 
 Oblomov, a non-accomplisher, what we should call an in- 
 curable 'slacker.' Oblomov on the physical side is the in- 
 carnation of what the Russian calls XaJiaTHOCTb the 
 quality of dressing-gownness. Oblomov's dressing-gown is 
 described with loving, appreciative detail. It is a big, soft, 
 roomy Asiatic dressing-gown, easy to get into, almost im- 
 possible to get out of. It haunts the book like an Ibsen symbol. 
 It stands for the impossibility of being 'well groomed' 
 physically, mentally. 
 
 Oblomov's story — a moving one — is briefly this — and to 
 shorten it just ruins it, for you lose the sense of its epic 
 leisure, its dream-like duree. 
 
 When the story opens we are in a faded dusty flat in Peters- 
 burg. Oblomov is in bed. The hero of four thickish volumes 
 is almost always in bed. He is waited on literally hand and 
 foot by a delightful old body-servant, Zakhar, who never 
 dusts and lets the place go to rack and ruin. Zakhar is im- 
 pudent and incredibly dirty but he understands and adores 
 his master. He is in peasant form another Oblomov whom 
 harsh fate only has prevented from blossoming into the 
 perfect inertia of his master. 
 
 ^ By C. J. Hogarth — Allen and Unwin. Neither translator nor pub- 
 lisher states that the English version is rather a resume than a trans- 
 lation. 
 
[ 28 ] 
 
 Oblomov's friends come in one after the other, talk to him, 
 try to rouse him, bother him to come out and lunch at a 
 restaurant, go a drive, pay some calls. A steward brings in a 
 report from his property. It is all no use ; Oblomov has seen 
 through it all long ago, all the busy pretence of doing, all the 
 boredom of the social mill and he won't begin it all over again. 
 At last they go ; he falls asleep and dreams, the famous dream 
 of Oblomov. 
 
 It is a beauteous thing that dream, a wonderful bit of art. 
 In his dream Oblomov goes back to his childhood's home 
 which is a very palace of sleep. I have read the 'dream' 
 many times to see if it was possible to condense it or to give 
 extracts, but no, one must read the whole. 
 
 Oblomov's home is a land of peace and plenty far from the 
 sea which moans and makes man think and ache in his soul, 
 a land where even the desolate moon looks full and round and 
 cheery, not pale and passion-haunted. There was no night- 
 ingale to lament poignantly, only flocks of prosperous fatted 
 quails. It was a land where it was 'always afternoon' save 
 for two strenuous hours when all the world was up and doing 
 to cook the huge midday meal. The serfs to cook it, the masters 
 to look on with keen interest and constant suggestion, each 
 one, down to the aged aunt, eagerly pleading for her one 
 special dainty. 
 
 And then, when the huge deliberate dinner was done, came 
 sleep; sleep for every one each in his favourite corner. You 
 feel yourself dozing off. And then, as the cool comes the 
 waking up, the coming of the samovar, the drowsy, drawling, 
 endless talk, the peace of it all, the content, the safety, the 
 utter endless lethargy. For the masters no work to be done, 
 no decision to be made; for the countless serfs as little as 
 may be. 
 
 From the dream Oblomov is suddenly waked by the entry of 
 Stoltz, his German friend who had always done Oblomov's 
 lessons for him in the elder Stoltz's excellent German school. 
 
 Stoltz is the typical German, the H'feMeu.'b aKKypaTHLlll 
 at whom Pushkin and every true Russian pokes gentle genial 
 fun. aKKypaTHblH means not so much 'accurate' in our 
 
[ 29 ] 
 
 sense as punctual, 'on the spot,' up to time, regular, efficient. 
 Stoltz is the embodiment of energy, of successful vivid life 
 and this sort of vivid effectiveness always appears to the 
 Russian as slightly ridiculous and irrelevant to the real inner 
 life. Stoltz is the perfective incarnate, he is for getting a 
 thing put through. 
 
 Stoltz has come to take Oblomov abroad. It must be done 
 now or never, 'we will start to-morrow.' 
 
 * Now or never.' Somehow the words sounded like a sort of 
 threat. Oblomov came up to his dusty writing table. He took 
 up a pen. There was no ink, not a scrap of writing-paper. 
 Mechanically, as if by chance, he wrote some letters in the 
 thick dust with his finger — Ohlomov china. He rubbed it out 
 with a quick movement of his sleeve and sat down. 
 
 Now or never. To be or not to be. Oblomov got up from 
 his chair but — failing at once to put his foot into his slipper, 
 he sat down again. A fortnight later Stoltz started alone for 
 England. 
 
 You think Oblomov is lost. But no! suddenly a change 
 comes. He brightens up, the dressing-gown is put away, 
 there is a look of adventure, almost of assurance in his eye. 
 Oblomov has fallen in love. Stoltz has told a girl friend, Olga, 
 all about Oblomov. She is to save him. Women are always 
 ready for rescue work. 
 
 You think you are well in for a tract with an obvious moral 
 and a comfortable ending. The fresh young girl brings new 
 life to the jaded man. They marry and are happy ever after. 
 That isn't the Russian's way; he seems constitutionally in- 
 capable of pointing a moral, he is too busy living inside 
 things. 
 
 Oblomov after his kind loves Olga, but bit by bit he begins 
 to be afraid of her. The Russian woman is apt to be more 
 perfective, more accomplishing, than the Russian man. And, 
 still more, is Oblomov afraid of marriage. The Russians have 
 a true sad proverb, }KeHHTbCH nepeM'feHHTbCH, ' Once y're 
 married all is changed.' Once y're married — but the process 
 of marriage, marriage in the imperfective is so tedious and 
 trying ! There are all the dreadful arrangements to be made. 
 
[ 30 ] 
 
 the congratulations, the people to be seen, the things to be 
 done. No he can't face it. Then there is Olga herself, she is 
 so terrifyingly intelligent and alive, she will discuss things 
 and try to get at the bottom of them, she will drag him out to 
 picture-shows and parties, force him back into life. Her very 
 intensity, the demands she makes of him frighten him, and, 
 bit by bit, he fades away from her, in positive fear. And she, 
 poor thing, feels it in her sensitive Russian fashion and 
 it all but breaks her heart. But she sees it won't do, she 
 breaks with Oblomov and in a recoil marries the punctual 
 Stoltz. 
 
 Well to cut a long story short, and thereby again to spoil 
 it, Oblomov sinks lower and lower into lethargy, gets stouter 
 and stouter, over-eats himself worse and worse. Russian 
 realism is pitiless. At last he marries his landlady, just that 
 she may keep him in bodily ease, has a fit of apoplexy, 
 dies. 
 
 It is all as it should be, a terrible warning against the fate 
 of the upper class sluggard, a moral tale to upraise the 
 sleeping landlordism of Russia. But is it? 
 
 The astonishing thing in the book is that Goncharov un- 
 doubtedly meant to write a tract and failed. We know that 
 he, like Tourgenev looked to Western influence to raise 
 Russia from her lethargy. His book was intended as a tract 
 against Oblomovdom. But so incurably Russian, so hope- 
 lessly imperfective is he that he cannot stand outside to 
 judge and condemn. From start to finish, spite of his obvious 
 shortcomings, we are in the subtlest way attracted to Oblo- 
 mov, we 'take to' him, we like to hear him talk, he has 
 pleasant ways, we feel the perfect gentleness, the gentility 
 of his inner soul. We feel too that, though he is doomed to 
 die of his dreaming, his dreaming is better worth while, in 
 the name of spiritual values, than all Stoltz's wide-awake 
 excellence. And — supreme touch of all — Olga, 'happily 
 married' to Stoltz, is in external ways wholly prosperous yet 
 not quite happy. There is a little dull ache for Oblomov and 
 his dreams. Man does not live by bread alone, not even by 
 the most wholesome bread punctually served. There is 
 
[ 31 ] 
 
 dream-stuff as well as bread-stuff. Sometimes man's strength 
 is to sit still. 
 
 The book might all have been so easily banal, even nasty 
 and yet moral. It is so delicate yet so real. Even Stoltz is 
 never caricatured. He is a good man, a fine man after his 
 kind and he has a sort of redeeming hero-worship for Oblomov 
 as made of finer clay. Stoltz understands his wife and helps 
 her all he can and very nobly. It is not his fault that he is no 
 dreamer. Shutting the book we feel ourselves the richer not 
 by a ready-made moral applied, but by a bit of real life felt, 
 lived into, made known to us imperfectively. 
 
 The Russian does not judge, does not moralize, nor does he 
 sentimentalize. In his imperfective way he lives into his 
 subject till he almost ceases to be artist — so intense is his 
 realization. He feels the thing so closely, so fully, that he has 
 no need to pump up emotion and relive it in imagination just 
 for the * sake of sensation.' To instance this I will take another 
 bit of imperfective work, a short poem by Nekrasov (1821- 
 1876), not perhaps a man of genius, but an essential Russian. 
 Nekrasov said of himself, perhaps too severely, *I do not 
 flatter myself my verse will endure, there is no flash of poetry 
 in my fierce clumsy lines, no touch of creative genius.' 
 
 The little folk-poem is called 'SeJieHHBlH ElyMt,' a title 
 quite untranslat cable. The ' new-green rustle ' or buzz. The 
 word ' Shum ' needs no translation, it explains itself. 3eJieH- 
 HLIH means the new green that comes in spring. 3eJTeHHblH 
 UlyMt. ' So nennt das Volk das Erwachen der Natur im 
 Friihling.' Well and good, but it does not help one to a trans- 
 lation. 
 
 The two first words of the poem, equally untranslateable, are 
 Hfl,eTb ry^GTB, * there goes, ' ' there hums. ' The words are in the 
 imperfective and hyphened. Hj];eTB, there goes, has a sense 
 of going well, advancing, vorwarts, ' es geht schon.' ry^GTb 
 is said of a samovar — a kettle singing, insects humming. 
 
 'There goes, there hums.' 
 
 My German commentator says of ' there goes — there hums,' 
 'an asyndeton,' a thing not bound together — that abhorred 
 monster a loose construction. The German grammarian and 
 
[ 32 J 
 
 equally the French wants a construction ' the green noise goes 
 well, AND it hums.' Then his grammatical soul is at peace. 
 
 The grammarian may want it, the Russian doesn't. It is 
 just what he doesn't want. The two things which the gram- 
 marian says are asyndeta, 'not bound together,' are to him so 
 closely bound that no grammarian with his conjunctions may 
 loose them. 
 
 It is part of the great spiritual riches of the Russian that, 
 because he sees or rather feels things living from the inside 
 (imperfective) he sees or rather feels things whole (asyndeta). 
 It is a corollary from his living into things, for life is duree 
 unanalysed, undistributed. These asyndeta, these bits of life 
 so closely bound together that they refuse conjunctions, are 
 countless in Russian, specially in epic and peasant Russian. 
 
 Take the common Russian exclamation TBI rope-5ora- 
 TBipt, rope == disaster, 6oraTbipi> =- splendid, prosperous 
 hero, richly endowed. Thou art disaster — splendid hero. The 
 epithet thrown at a man carries with it a world of sympathy 
 and loving amusement for the doer of some reckless, feck- 
 less, beautiful action. We have no word. A Spaniard might 
 say 'O you Don Quixote.' 
 
 The poem of Nekrasov is as untranslateable, as a whole, as 
 the title — though I have tried a rough rendering of the last 
 two verses. The story is this. 
 
 It is winter in the peasant's isba. The husband is away in 
 Petersburg, the wife falls in love with another man. She 
 tells her husband how it has been. He almost curses her for 
 telling him. The bitter shaggy winter makes him fierce and 
 relentless. It howled in his ear ' Kill them, kill them ! You'll 
 have no peace. The neighbours will point at you.' His heart 
 is hard as the winter. He sharpens his knife. 
 
 Then comes springtime, springtime that is in Russia so 
 sudden, so magical. ' Like milk outpoured was the whiteness 
 of the cherry orchards and softly the leaves rustled, warm 
 with the sunshine, the pine woods rustled. The rush by the 
 river rustled.' 
 
 The whole world went a-murmuring, 
 The world is new, the world is spring. 
 
[ 33 1 
 
 And then, suddenly, the black ice in his heart melted ; the 
 spring has conquered. There is another spirit abroad in the 
 world not vengeance, not judgment. 
 
 My savage soul went soft and weak, 
 
 The knife fell from my hand, 
 One only song I heard men sing, 
 
 'To the wood — to the new spring-land; 
 Love while you may — Bear while you can ; 
 
 Forgive and bear no grudge; 
 Love while you may — Bear what you can. 
 
 And God — Be He your judge. 
 The whole world went a-murmuring. 
 
 The world is new, the world is spring.' 
 Hji.eT'b ryji,eTb sejieHtiS Ulyjit 
 3ejieHHfi IIIyM-L, BeceHHHH UlyMi.. 
 This is something deeper, warmer, than the Frenchman's 
 tout comprendre cest tout par donner. The one is perfective, the 
 other imperfective. 
 
 The imperfective then dominates Russian language and 
 Russian literature ; shall we be far wrong if we conclude that 
 the imperfective is the leading note in general Russian psy- 
 chology, and that it is this imperfectiveness that the modern 
 world both needs and desires? 
 
 Let a Russian critic speak. 
 
 'The world,' says Shestov^ — and it is a typically modern 
 utterance — 'has long been weary of universal truth — we 
 want not so much a science as an art of life.' 
 
 Ideas are only a pis-aller, the last word is not in philosophy. 
 
 Shestov gives more practical counsel. 
 
 'Men do not need a truth ready made.' 
 
 'When you talk do not trouble to be consistent.' 
 
 'When you speak with a man do not listen too much to 
 what he says. His words must needs be cliches — freedom is 
 already enslaved by grammatical forms and words. Look 
 at his face and see what the whole of him means.' 
 
 This aversion to the abstract and generalized, this love of 
 living into the live individual fact is I think at the bottom 
 Anion Shestov and other Essays, translated by S. Koteliansky and 
 J. M. Murry, 1916. 
 
[ 34 ] 
 
 of all the well-known, just now too well-known, Russian 
 characteristics. The Russian has a horror of abstractions, 
 while no Teuton, we are told, can resist a generalization. The 
 real Slav is out of place in modern war, not because he is a 
 pacifist — he is always ready for an individual scrap — but 
 because he will not be standardized and straightened out and 
 ticketed. ' The powers that are occupied in cutting men to a 
 pattern, as in modern war cut they must be, will find,' says 
 Shestov, 'tough material in Russia.' The Slav has little love 
 of the state, i.e. for man's collective order imposed on the 
 individual, hence his incapacity for discipline, efficiency, 
 collective progress. For him the wonder of the world is the 
 individual not the class, the complexity of life not its simpli- 
 fication, least of all its abstraction. This, his imperfectiveness, 
 appeals straight to a generation nurtured like the present on 
 the generalizations of science, full fed with abstractions. Life 
 to the Slav and especially the Russian is felt not as a forward 
 march but as a ballet, not as an inevitable evolution but as a 
 kaleidoscope phantasmagoria. Time is not a corridor leading 
 to a judgment hall but like space an inextricable labyrinth^. 
 Instead of the hope of a future life we have the faith in an 
 eternal actualized present. 
 
 Immediately what we get from Russia, is the impulse to 
 live in the living fact, rather than outside it, to look to pro- 
 cess, duree, rather than to achievement. Specially I think we 
 need this in morals. We plume ourselves as moralists and 
 have by more dispassionate critics been dubbed hypocrites. 
 Morality is I think the vice of the perfective; it is the judging 
 of an act by its results. A governing people will always empha- 
 size results. Results can be tabulated, they are the basis of 
 statistics, the stuff of which codes and ' strong government ' 
 are maiie. Such perfective morality has its uses, great uses, 
 but it is not an end in itself and its value is easily over- 
 estimated. It has its subtle dangers. As soon as you judge, 
 if even you plead in the criminal's favour, you begin to move 
 away. 
 
 1 I think this was said by Mr Stephen Graham, but I cannot verify 
 the quotation. 
 
[ 35 ] . 
 
 As the French critic says : 
 
 On ne pensait aiix autres que pour revendiquer en leur f aveur : ce qui 
 6tait un excellent moyen de ne pas les aimer pour eux-memes. On 
 reclamait pour eux la justice, la liberte, un tas d'autres choses; ainsi 
 se trouvait-on dispense de s'attacher a chacun selon lui-meme et de le 
 prendre tout en tier avec ses vertus et ses vices et de charger sa 
 memoire de cet dtre a jamais different de tons les autres^. 
 
 If I may sum up in a sentence — the Greek felt most keenly 
 the values of distinction, of analysis, of clear-eyed reason and 
 * intellectual beauty ' — whether in art or science. 
 
 The Russian stands for the complexity and concreteness of 
 life felt whole, unanalysed, unjudged, lived into; in literature 
 as in language he is more holophrastic. Scarcely does he 
 stand enough outside his work to make of it an art. 
 
 Fully to enjoy our humanity we need both spirits. We 
 have Greek — let us keep it — though not in the Little-go. Shall 
 we add Russian? 
 
 And finally shall we not break down the ancient barrier 
 between new and old? Our classical tripos is a garden en- 
 closed and thereby in constant peril of becoming a hortus 
 siccus. May we not some of us live to see old and new join 
 hands, to see the student of language allowed to choose his 
 two tongues be they ancient or modern? He will be well 
 advised if he choose one ancient and one modern : he will not 
 repent if his choice fall on Greek and Russian. 
 
 And this for reasons that can only be most briefly indicated. 
 Russian civilization is based in large measure on Greek be- 
 cause the Russian Church like the Russian alphabet is derived 
 from Greece. State and Church are in Russia more closely 
 unified throughout history than in any western nation. To 
 study Russian civilization without studying the history of 
 the Russian Church is time wasted. But, as this paper has 
 tried to show, it is in its contrasts with Greek rather than its 
 analogies that Russian has its prime educational value. The 
 same is true of Russian civilization generally as contrasted 
 with Greek. In studying Russia as a sequel to Greece we are 
 transplanted to a land where every geographical condition is 
 utterly alien to Greece. Russia is a land of vast plains and 
 1 Rividre, op. cit. p. 764. 
 
[ 36 ] 
 
 a land of river civilizations, the very antipodes to mountain- 
 ous riverless Greece. The geographical contrast is necessarily 
 reflected in history, in the successive rise and dominance of 
 the three great river- civilizations, of Kiev on the Dnieper, 
 Moscow on the Volga system, Petrograd on the Neva. Nor 
 is the contrast less striking in literature. To take a single and 
 salient instance, to study the folk-epos of Russia, alive in the 
 mouths of the people up to and beyond the time of Peter the 
 Great, is to look at Homer with new and wider opened eyes. 
 An accurate knowledge of the Greek and Russian languages 
 together with an intimate understanding of the two civiliza- 
 tions should furnish a humanistic education at once broad 
 and thorough. 
 
 Jane E. Harrison. 
 
 Cambridge : Printed at the University Press. 
 
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