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was useful, and it was innocent. Accordingly, it lived a 

 stunted life, while the sister arts were slumbering in the torpor 

 of suspended energy. 



The Scandinavians and Teutons, who now had to be 

 absorbed into the fellowship of nations and to be educated by 

 the Church, brought with them nothing which could constitute 

 a new condition for the sense of natural beauty. Like the 

 Greeks, they looked at the world from the point of view of 

 mythology. The cosmic forces were personified in their 

 religious legends as ideal men and women. Stupendous 

 remnants of their pagan imagination survive in Eddie 

 literature. But the study of these sources shows that Norse 

 poetry was ill-adapted to fostering that sympathy with nature 

 qua nature, which had begun to germinate in the later stages 

 of Graeco-Roman culture. Such as it was, the dominant 

 civilising energy, that of the Latin Church, laid it under a 

 strict interdict. 



Renan observes that the most important product of the 

 Middle Ages was a sentiment of the infinite. This remark, 

 vague as it seems, bears strongly on the subject we are now 

 discussing. Classical polytheism interpolated a multitude 

 of ideal personalities between the mind and nature. All 

 these were swept away, discredited, consigned to oblivion, 

 transmuted into devils, during the ascendency of mediaeval 

 Christianity. The soul was left face to face with God, while 

 men and women continued daily to be born and die upon 

 our planet. Thus a vacuum, vast as the universe, arose 

 through the dispeopling of all that intermediate region which 

 had been agreeably filled by gods and goddesses of various 

 degrees. There was the self-conscious spirit of man ; there 

 was the transcendent reality of God ; there was the earth on 

 which man dwelt, and the heavens to cover it as with a 

 canopy. Instead of a Pantheon or Olympus, swarming with 

 deities in lieu of a comfortable world inhabited by semi- 

 human personalities infinity and fact environed human con- 

 sciousness. Infinity, the vague, incalculable, all-embracing 

 sphere, which God in ways unrealised by mortal fancy filled. 

 Fact, the hard, stern, brutal fabric of man's dwelling-place, 



