Page:Odes of Pindar (Myers).djvu/25

Rh ought to be the phenomena of the human mind, and this granted, can there be any knowledge more desirable than the knowledge of the most vigorous and sensitive and in some ways also the most fruitful action of human minds that the world has known hitherto?

But again, we are told that the age we seek thus toilsomely to illustrate and realize is too remote to justify the attempt, that our civilisation is of too different a type from the Hellenic, and that a gulf of three-and-twenty centuries is too much for our sight to strain across. But is not the Hellenic life at least less remote now to Western Europe than it has ever been since the Northern invasions? Though the separation in time widens does not the separation in thought decrease? Is not one civilisation more like another than it can be to any barbarism? And shall not this same Physical Science herself by accustoming us to look on men in large masses at once, and on the development of humanity as a process of infinite duration, as a sectional growth included in universal evolution—Science, in whose eyes a thousand years are as a watch in the night—shall she not thereby quicken our sympathies with the most gifted race that has appeared in our short human history, and arouse the same feeling toward it as a family may cherish toward the memory of their best and choicest, who has died young?

Only let us take heed that such regret shall make us not more but less unworthy of those noble forerunners. One symptom of the renewed influence of antiquity on the modern world is doubtless and has been from time to time since the Revival of Letters a tendency to selfish and somewhat sickly theories so-called of life, where sensibility degenerates through self-consciousness into affectation, and efforts to appreciate fully the delightfulness of life and art are overstrained into a wearisome literary voluptuousness, where duty has already disappeared and the human sympathies on which duty is based scarcely linger in a faint aesthetic form soon to leave the would-be exquisiteness to putrify into the vulgarity of egoism. Such tendencies have less in common with the Hellenic prime than with the court of Leo the Tenth, though even that had perhaps an advantage over them as being in some