Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/117

Rh speak not now of the motive, the inspiration, of the symphonic masterpiece; it is still a mortal creation, though maintaining an impersonality so absolute as to confirm our sense of mystery and awe.

It has been said of the Hebrew language that its every word is a poem; and there are books of the Old Testament, neither lyrical nor prophetic, so exquisite in kind that I call them models of impersonal art. Considered thus, the purely narrative idyls of Esther and Ruth have so much significance that I shall have occasion to recur to them with reference to poetic beauty and construction.

Turning from Semitic literature to the Aryan in its Hellenic development, we at once Greece. enter a naturally artistic atmosphere. Until after his Attic prime, the Greek, with no trick of introspection, concerned himself very little about his individual pathology, being far too much absorbed with an inborn sense of beauty, and with his office of imaginative creation. His great lyrical The lyrists. poets—Alcæus, Simonides, Pindar—rehearsed, as I have said, the spirit of a people rather than of themselves. As with the Hebrews, but conversely, the few exceptions to this usage were very notable, else they could not have arisen at all. One extremity of passion for which, in their sunlit life, they found expression compulsive, was that of love; and among those who sang its delights, or lamented its incompleteness, we have the world's accepted type in