GREEK AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE GREEKS 157 



the spontaneity and mobility of the genius of the Hellenic race. 

 This is not due solely to the fact that, in proportion as the inflections 

 of a language are well developed, the arrangement of the words is 

 freer and the need of emphasis on logical relations is therefore less 

 pronounced. There is, too, the national quality of mind. 



Thus it may not be overbold to discover in the rigid arrangement 

 of subject, object, and predicate in French an aspect of the Gallic 

 mind, which here, as elsewhere, is controlled by the centralizing 

 tendency of society, by convention, by linguistic etiquette, and 

 above all by its insistence on absolute perspicuity. " La clarte" est la 

 base e"ternelle de notre langue," says Rivarol; and Condillac remarks 

 that French is perhaps the only language which has no synonyms, 

 signifying thereby words absolutely identical in meaning. Above 

 all other tongues the Gallo-Roman demands elegance, propriety, 

 and mathematical exactness. This absolute precision is indeed 

 foreign to the Greek, who gives freer play to his fancy, to his per- 

 sonality, and thus reproduces the shifting charm of nature. Greek 

 does not recognize such rigid distinctions in meaning as appear in 

 Latin carmen malum and malum carmen, partus secundae and se- 

 cundae partus, homo urbanus and urbanus homo. Nor does the im- 

 periousness of logic dominate Greek as it dominates Latin. 



When Greek prose had attained perfection it fell into a strange 

 captivity that marks the peril of supersensitiveness to form. The 

 moderns can have no adequate understanding of the passion to 

 avoid hiatus in prose and to modify thje freer movement of prose 

 by the rhythms of poetry. Held in check, as in Demosthenes, the 

 opposition to hiatus evinces the delicacy of Greek perception; 

 autocratic in its demands, as in Polybius, it reduced art to the bond- 

 age of the letter. So long as both tendencies remained under control 

 they indeed limited the free disposition of the members of clauses and 

 sentences; but that limitation the Greek was willing to accept in 

 order to gain a more finished utterance. 



Metaphors 



Metaphors are the sparks of the mind; metaphors illuminate the 

 recesses of feeling. The attitude of a man to life, his external activity, 

 his innermost thought, the attractions and repulsions of his person- 

 ality, are embodied in the figurative language he naturally employs. 

 Many metaphors are purely personal; and yet it is possible to dis- 

 cover affinities which pass beyond the sphere of the individual and 

 indicate unconsciously the national mind and character. Change 

 in metaphor is a capital index to change in social conditions and in 

 morals. Every language marks its progress by the creation of new 

 modes of figurative thought. Every age brings its contribution to 

 metaphorical expression: those of the distant past we often find 



