Let the field exult, and all that is therein;

Then shall all the trees of the wood sing for joy
Before the Lord; for He cometh ;

For He cometh to judge the earth;

He shall judge the world with righteousness,

And the peoples with His truth." (Psalm xcvi. 11-13.)

And in our happier moods, be it remarked, and especially in our happier religious moods, we are peculiarly receptive of impressions from the beautiful. And so, as a preparation for joy in nature, there could be nothing better for us perhaps than a careful and devoutly contemplative reading of the Psalms.

But there is something more to be observed in connection with Hebrew poetry. The Hebrews, it has been remarked, have given us something apart "a lyric so different in kind from all other lyrics as to stand in a class by itself. As it is equal in importance to the Great Drama of Shakespeare, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, we may perhaps be allowed to call it the 'Great Lyric.' The Great Lyric must be religious, it must, it would seem, be an out-pouring of the soul, not towards man but towards God, like that of the Godintoxicated prophets and psalmists of Scripture. Even the lyric fire of Pindar owes much to the fact that he had a childlike belief in the myths to which so many of his contemporaries had begun to give a languid assent. But there is nothing in Pindar, or indeed elsewhere in Greek poetry, like the rapturous song, combining unconscious power with unconscious grace, which we have called the Great Lyric. It might perhaps be said that the Great Lyric is purely Hebrew."1 It will not do, then, when speaking of the Hebrews as the educators of the religious emotions, to leave

166
"Poetry," by Theodore Watts, Ency. Brit., 9th edition.

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them out of account so far as the history of aesthetics is concerned; for, though they have given us no new ideas in the plastic arts, they have helped, through their sense of sublimity and their ideas of God, to lead us to the enjoyment of nature's grandeur and the love of all that God has made. "The modern world, nursed upon the grand utterances of Hebrew bards, has imbibed the sense of the sublime almost with its mother's milk, nay, one may say, before it. For everyone of us is now born into the world with a hereditary capacity for that mingled feeling of awe and security which constitutes the essence of the sublime,' or rather, we should say, which constitutes the emotion of the sublime-the sublimity itself being as different from the sentiment or emotion produced by it as the sky is from our feelings about it.

1 Grant Allen, Mind, July, 1878.

CHAPTER III.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF TASTE IN RELATION ESPECIALLY TO THE BEAUTIFUL IN NATURE: THE GREEKS.

THE Greeks lie next to the Hebrews in the line of the development of thought and taste in modern times; and, as everyone knows, we owe much to them in many ways,-ways which we need not attempt to enumerate. They were pre-eminently the children of the light-the children of the sun. "Sweet is this light of heaven," they said, "sweet is this light"; and they shrank from the "shadow feared of man," mainly because in death they went, as they thought, to dreary realms which "the sun never cheered."

"Yet while some breath

Of life remains,, she wishes to behold

The radiance of the sun ('tis her last view),

As never more to see his golden orb." (Euripides' Alcestis.) And as children of the sun they lived in the open air and sunshine, and played and danced and sang, and told their tales of their gods, of heroes, and of love. They had a wonderful sense of the physical beauty of the human frame, and, in general, of fitness, of proportion, of symmetry, and of rhythm. It found expression constantly in temple and pillar and statue, and in literary expression and composition. "And, of all the beautiful things which they created, their own language was the first and the most wonderful." They

PLACE OF greeks IN EDUCATION.

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have given us epic and dramatic poetry in almost full perfection, we might say. They carried architecture to a higher degree of perfection in some respects than they had found it, leaving us their "orders" as models for imitation. And in sculpture proper and statuary they have never been surpassed-some would say, and some have said, they never will be, and never can be, surpassed.1 To them too, perhaps, we owe, the first beginnings of painting as a separate art; and from Socrates and Plato start our gropings after a philosophy of aesthetics. For these, and for other reasons, it may be said that "to Greece especially was entrusted the cultivation of the reason and the taste."

But we owe them more than that, and more, perhaps, than, with all our appreciation of their varied attainments, we usually give them credit for. The Hebrews have had the credit of being the educators of the conscience, as the Greeks of the reason and the taste; and that may in the main be a true and convenient distinction in the parts they have respectively played in the evolution of the world's life. But, through their literature and philosophy, the Greeks too have had a share in the discipline of the conscience as well as Hebrew poets and prophets; for, if the Hebrews have given us illustrations in abundance in life and literature of the "religious sublime," the Greeks have not been wanting in examples of what may in distinction be called the "moral sublime." The results of crime are portrayed, as we shall find, with terrible power by Aeschylus and Sophocles. But on that we do not in the meantime dwell. Nor do we dwell on the patriotic ardour of the Greeks, and their readiness at times

1 For an opposite view, however, see Véron's Supériorité des Arts Modernes sur les Arts Anciens.

(cowardly though they have been said to be) to sacrifice themselves for the good of their state and country; nor shall we speak of Socrates dying as a martyr to his warning daemon. We now rather refer to such representations of self-sacrificing devotion and determination as we have in the great tragedians. In Prometheus daring the wrath of the gods for the good of mankind, and preserving his secret in spite of direst threats of further punishment, and till swept into the abyss amid hurricane and earthquake and lightning's blazing wreaths"; in Antigone nursing her her poor, blind father in all his wanderings and disgrace with tenderest care, and preferring a tomb alive to violating, by the neglect of her brother slain, "the unwritten laws of God that know not change"; in Alcestis dying in her husband's stead while glorying in the light of life; and in Medea staining her hands with the blood of her sons, whom she loved, for vengeance on her guilty husband, their father, and mocking his agony when he hears of their fate-in these we have illustrations of a grandeur in devotion to a person or a cause unsurpassed, with One Great Exception, in the annals of history, and which prove that the heart in its deepest instincts has an ethics ahead of that of the reason in practice, but which is one with it in its highest and latest determinations, and that "the spirit of philosophy can hardly flatter itself that it can discover anything which has not already been vaguely perceived by sentiment and revealed by poetry." In the case of Medea, of course, the aim of her devotion was a vile and unworthy one; but the strength of will -of free determination--exhibited in her vengeance, taken with her tenderness as a mother, raises her

1 Schiller's Essays Aesthetical and Philosophical, "On Grace and Dignity."