idea of universal human brotherhood. It first began to take the hearts of the nations captive in the Middle Ages, giving rise, in its first imperfect stage, to the curious customs and sentiments of chivalry. It has, in our day, greatly advanced beyond this incipient stage. To the ancient Greeks and their contemporaries the world beyond their national limits was peopled by foes and barbarians, with whom no idea of faith or justice needed to be considered. The sole notion of fraternity consisted in allegiance to the race and tribe. Even this was so narrow in Greece that the Hellenes broke up into a multitude of small communities, perpetually jarring with each other. In Rome the modern spirit began to grow, and the great city first conquered and then made citizens of all the civilized and half the savage nations. But the sentiment of fraternity was, even with them, but in its germ, and the cosmopolitan philanthropy of our days would have found no echo in the soul of a Greek or a Roman. Asia, though more barbarous, was, in this respect, in advance of her cultured Hellenic foe. In the writings of her great law-givers we find sentiments which fell blank upon the world, and which even we but faintly appreciate in our actions. The life of Christ stands as the dividing line between the ancient and modern worlds. With His birth antiquity ended and the long reign of the present began.. We give not this as a blank chronological idea, but as a theory based in the nature and development of the human mind, instead of in the superficial movement of history. He first enunciated to a world ready to profit by His words the grand idea of universal brotherhood, a fraternity not alone of the inhabitants of earth but of all the living souls in God's universe. The Roman world, in which we have seen the gradual growth of a phase of mentality within and beyond that animating the Greeks, was ripe to receive these new teachings. The seeds of Christ's moral apothegms fell in fertile soil. They have ever since been growing into a most glorious harvest. They bore their first fruit in the chivalrous sentiment of the Middle Ages. The world is still slowly rising to their level, and assimilating itself to their full depth of meaning, to be only finally reached— "When the war-drums throb no longer and the battle-flags are furled, In the parliament of man, the federation of the world." We are thus fully justified in drawing this new dividing line between the great eras of human development. In Grecian culture we have a culmination of the earlier phases of mentality. It is the finishing epoch of a grand era, that in which the sentiment of appreciation of the physical and devotion to the personal attained its highest limit. The result was the most striking and meritorious that the human race has yet produced, for it is the only finished product of the human mind. Christ, as we have said, enunciated the governing principles of a new era, that in which we still are, and which is, as yet, far from its culmination. But to attain the fullest conception of the artistic energies of the two periods we must consider their literature, and chiefly their poetry, for in the songs of a race are its inmost soul and impelling sentiment most fully displayed. In Greek poetry we have every phase of the Hellenic mind set in the most splendid frames of verse. In Grecian literature not only the characteristics of the Hellenic mentality are displayed, but those of the great previous civilizations from whose labors Greece derived her impetus, and the spirit of whose lost books she has preserved for us. The striking difference between the impelling force of ancient and modern poetry is easily recognizable. The muse of Greece walked upon the earth; or, if she took wing, her flight was to and from the peak of high Olympus, where dwelt the gods of heaven. Her thoughts entered not that land of mist and marvel in which so many mortals habitually dwell. The taste for poetry has changed with the change in its spirit. We now admire Homer only as we admire the Parthenon, for the harmony of his outlines, and the grace and Tennyson's Locksley Hall. "On peut considérer les Grecs, relativement à la littérature, comme le premier peuple qui ait existé.”—De Stael, Littérature, vol. 1, p. 75. VOL. XXVI.-NO. LI. 10 grandeur of his effects. His work is perfect, as the whole Greek civilization was perfect, but it is a lower grade of perfection than that to which we are growing, and fails to arouse the inmost faculties of our minds. Even modern epochs are losing ground with modern readers to the extent that they bind themselves to the forms, and are infiltrated with the spirit of the ancients. The modern world is developing its informing spirit even beyond the level of Chaucer, Milton, Spenser and Dante, and is beginning to read these authors from a sense of duty, not con amore. It is not that our intellects are deteriorating, and that we lack the mental grasp of our ancestors, but that the day of the epic is past, or that olden poetry lacks an element which appeals to the human soul in the strophes of the modern bard. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were the first to break utterly loose from Hellenic fetters, and to launch upon the sea of new developed thought their poetic barks. Infused with the spirit of the modern world, free from that influence of the antique which overshadows the epic, they produced works the true exponent of the new world of thought, as grand and as original as the Gothic cathedral. Homer, the accepted expression of the loftiest poetic ideal of the past, looks at life everywhere from the physical standpoint. In his verse no purely ideal conception enters. His limning is not of the souls of men, but of their brains and bodies; not of the spiritual significance, but of the apparent visage of nature. He truly sings the anger of Achilles and the fall of Troy. His page is animate with angry words and deadly blows. Heroes fall like mown hay. Hector, that spirit nearest approaching the ideal of Bayard of which the past was capable, sinks before the might of invulnerable Achilles. The gods enter the conflict, and are wounded by the iron and ashen weapons of men. It is throughout the apotheosis of the physical. Homer's merit is the merit of the sculptors and architects of his country-grace, harmony, and physical perfection. The smooth and stately flow of his verse, its rich variety of conception, its correct imagery, its skilfully varied circumstance and its pure and lofty diction alone render the Iliad endurable to modern readers. Nowhere does it contain the informing spirit of modern verse. His imagery, that feature of poetry in which the vim of the style most fully resides, is wholly borrowed from visible nature, and is limited to the most apparent of her infinite similitudes. Storm and calm, the labors of the husbandman, the assaults of wild animals, the busy labors of the insect world, the rising and setting of the sun, all the prominent evolutions of nature are applied with an appositeness which shows with what a poetic eye the great bard of antiquity looked upon the world surrounding. Nowhere in his pages do we find a just application of Shakespeare's picture of the poet : "The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Does glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothings A local habitation and a name. Airy nothing has no local habitation on the pages of the Greek bard. His very deities are things of the most substantial character. Homer says: "The Greek army was on the field as thick as flowers in spring." Is not this, to our modern taste, a singular lack of appreciation of the interior sentiment of flowers? Dante would never have dreamed of numbering soldiers by flowers. The Greeks saw in nature only her usefulness. It is her beauty and spiritual significance which appeals to us. Shakespeare's description applies but to the modern poet. The verses of our bards are so instinct with these bodiless imaginings, that to take the fire of super-physical thought from them would be to leave but barren prose. Many of our singers are yet of the earth, earthy, yet it may justly be claimed that the distinctive spirit of modern poetry is this power to open the doors leading into the unseen, and let fall upon the entranced world bright rays of the light within— "The light that never was on sea or land." Far out at sea our poets sail, the shores of the material sink below their horizon, while, like floating islands in their course, rise the realms of the purely ideal. Free from space, time, and all gross circumstance, they onward float "With thoughts like ships that cannot land, Blown by faint winds about a magic coast."* In the words of Ruskin, who most clearly among writers of art has perceived the essential difference in spirit between ancient and modern times, "Keates describes a wave breaking at sea: 'Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar, Homer could not have written nor thought of such words. The wave would have been to him, from beginning to end, but salt water. He will call the waves over-roofed, fullcharged, compact-black, deep-clear, wine-colored. But these but describe mere physical nature. Everything which nods at the brow-rock, house, or wave-is with him over-roofed. Accurate as his words are they never show feeling of anything animated in the ocean. It is always cold salt water only." The same spirit animated all the poets of Greece. Everywhere they excelled in description of the manifest attributes of man and nature; everywhere the fierce vigor of human passions, the wild display of human licentiousness burn on their pages. Nowhere do they express the inner sentiment of the fields and flowers, the spiritual dignity of man, the deep affinities which link all nature into one grand unity, or man's aspiring reach towards the infinite unseen. We may illustrate by some passages taken at random from Greek and modern writers. We will select translations of verses showing their highest ideal of the living force of nature and the feelings with which death infused their minds. From Bion's beautiful "Elegy on Adonis" we extract the following verse: "Ah, Venus! ah! the Loves for thee bewail; *Owen Meredith, vol. 1. |