

The English Lyric 1 1 



the shining heaven, lording it over all, — daylight and zestful action 

 everywhere. We may surmise dim genealogies of monster deities 

 from the picturesque Sileni and Satyri whose final function is but 

 to emphasize the wholesome humanity of the regnant gods; but 

 the grim and raw reality of their being is rigorously repressed. 



The sociableness, the intense humanness of Greek religion is 

 thus due to the fact that it is, in its palpable aspects, an expurgated 

 religion ; and, with no less truth, that brightness which makes 

 Greek literature the model of humanism is due to the fact that it 

 is spiritually an expurgated literature : the darker, the more mon- 

 strous, the more distempered phases of experience are eliminated 

 as by an instinct more careful than care ; so that we gather from 

 it an impression only of lambent and generous sunlight. 



This is our first impression, but we have to acknowledge too a 

 sense of power — elastic as in Homer, terse and willful as in 

 Aeschylus, broad and gracious as in Plato. And a momentary 

 reflection tells us that this powerfulness of the literature is due 

 to the same cause as its impression of light: to the fact of 

 repression. We feel the substructure implicit in the revealed 

 thought ; we keep only in the " white light " but we are never 

 left without some consciousness of Cimmerian shades, of the 

 cosmic envelop of the soul. 



Art and conduct, ethics and aesthetics, are only two manners 

 of manifesting the same under-dominating character. And if we 

 look into Greek ethics we find at once the parallel to this power- 

 through-repression which is manifested in the literary, as indeed 

 in all Greek art. The clue to it is to be found in the conception of 

 virtue, apertj, which Aristotle defined as a mean, a mean relative 

 to ourselves, as human beings gifted with judgment and choice, 

 avoiding on the one hand the distemper of passion, on the other 

 the spiritual malformation of ascetic denial. The ready maxim, 

 ixrjhev ayav ' Nothing too much,' and the ever-praised aoxppocrvvrj, 

 ' Temperance,' show how much the Greeks feared excess, how 

 ardently they admired restraint, in the conduct of men ; and no 

 less is this shown in their constant dread of vfipis, that insolence 

 of mortal pride which is the very essence of impiety. 



" The things of mortals best befit mortality." sang Pindar; and 



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