Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/41

Rh deeply enough impressed by its beauty and power to ask themselves whether the religion of Greece was indeed a rival of the religion of Christ; for the older gods had rehabilitated themselves, and men's allegiance was divided. And the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated everything with which art had to do as a religious object. The restored Greek literature had made it familiar, at least in Plato, with a style of expression about the earlier gods, which had about it much of the warmth and unction of a Christian hymn. It was too familiar with such language to regard mythology as a mere story; and it was too serious to play with a religion.

'Let me briefly remind the reader,' says Heine, in the 'Gods in Exile,' an essay full of that strange blending of sentiment which is characteristic of the traditions of the middle age concerning the pagan religions, 'how the gods of the older world at the time of the definite triumph of Christianity, that is, in the third century, fell into painful embarrassments which greatly resembled certain tragical situations of their earlier life. They now found themselves exposed to the same troublesome necessities to which they had once before been exposed during the primitive ages, in that revolutionary epoch when the Titans broke out of the custody of Orcus, and piling Pelion on