Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/46

 28 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. bitter or sad feeling ; Pindar feels fame ; and Sappho pours forth the passion of the vision of beauty. The emotions expressed by these poets are direct and per- sonal, springing from their own desires and relating primarily to the immediate satisfying of them. They are not broad or altruistic ; they do not rise from souls touched by the sadness of others' lives. The intellect predominates in Greek tragedy. With ^schylus and Sophocles the feeling which is expressed is intellectually related to life's ethical proportion- ment. The inheritor of their fame, the supplanter of their popularity, Euripides, certainly understands and perhaps feels human emotion in its varied range and bitterness. After the great period of tragedy, those men whose names make up the roll of Alexandrian literature had personalities too petty for broad feeling, though some of them could express personal passion. The dominance of the intellect is no longer impressive, as with ^schylus and Sophocles, yet no dominance of great emotion succeeds it, but only an uncompensated decline from the power and loftiness of earlier Greek poetry. The story of Sculpture is analogous. Formal strength predominates with Polycletus, the living power of animal life with Miron, intellectuality with Phidias, and all things physical in harmony therewith. The later artists, Scopas and Praxiteles, and many lesser sculptors after them, express more clearly life's subtile passions. But it was not theirs to realize the breadth of life. The development of human capacity for emotion was continuing; but a greater age was needed, with greater men ; an age which should hold