io Hartley Burr Alexander 



ing to the sentiments of his critic. He is a phantom, too, as 

 unreal as those marble palaces in which he habitually takes his 

 ease. . . . There is more flesh and blood in the Greek of the 

 anthropologist, the foster-brother of Kaffirs and Hairy Ainos. 

 He is at least human and simple and emotional, and free from 

 irrelevant trappings. His fault, of course, is that he is not the 

 man we want, but only the raw material out of which that man 

 was formed : a Hellene without the beauty, without the spiritual 

 life, without the Hellenism." 



The " raw material out of which the man was formed " is much 

 the same for Greek and Saxon and Celt, yet each of these is 

 formed, and formed into his own kind of man in a unique and 

 individual sense. 



And what, then, is the uniqueness of the Hellene? or, to put 

 the question in a less ambitious and more apposite form, what is 

 the distinctive quality of the Hellenic mode, the classical spirit, 

 in literature? We have dissented from Arnold's dictum that it 

 is mere light, mere luminousness, — rather it is a special degree of 

 light, steady and pervasive like the light of day, restricted in its 

 avoidance of the prismatic play of shadows, the still and constant 

 " white light " of Professor Woodberry. 



In her brilliant Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion 

 Jane Harrison forcefully brings home " the fact that Greek reli- 

 gion for all its superficial serenity had within it and beneath it 

 elements of a darker and deeper significance " — pallor and trem- 

 bling in the presence of dark underworld powers and that sickness 

 of soul which arises invisibly from the miasma of superstition. 

 Behind the brilliant cults of the civic gods and goddesses — 

 Wardens and Warriors of the Hellenic states, — hung a sombre 

 array of Chthonian deities, whose rites were done at night in 

 caves and dens, the one wish of the worshippers being to avert 

 the malignancy of powers ever unconquered though ever held 

 suppressed. 



In Greek literature there is little explicit reference to this sup- 

 pressed chapter of mythology, — a chapter having to do with 

 mysteries and obscure rites and things only darkly to be hinted. 

 On the surface are the bright and friendly Olympians, with Zeus, 



352 



