hings with wonder and delight, in what may be called the
romantic, the poetical spirit.

The mistake that the orator seemed to me to make was that he implied,
or appeared to imply, that the Greek spirit could be attained by the
study of Greek. My own belief is that the essence of the Greek spirit
was its originality, its splendid absence of deference, its disregard
of what was traditional. The Greeks owed nothing to outside influences.
If the dim origins of their art were Egyptian, they strode forward for
themselves, and spent no time in investigating the earlier traditions.
Again, in literature, they wasted no force in attempting to imbibe
culture from outside influences; they merely developed the capacities
of their own sonorous and graceful language; they infused it with their
own vivid and beautiful personality.

Of course, it may be urged that there probably did not exist in the
world at that date treasures of ancient literature and art. The
question is what the Greeks would have done if they had found
themselves in a later world, stocked, and even overstocked, with old
masterpieces and monuments of human intellect and energy and skill. The
doubt is whether the creative impulse would have died away, and whether
the Greeks would have tended to fling themselves into the passionate
study, the eager apprehension, of the beautiful inheritance of the
ages. I cannot myself believe it. They would have had, I believe, an
intense and ardent appreciation of what had been, but the desire to see
and hear some new thing of which St. Paul spoke, the deep-seated desire
for self-expression, would have kept them free from any tame surrender
to tradition, any danger of basing their cultivation on what had been
represented or thought or sung by their human predecessors. I cannot,
for instance, conceive of the Greeks as devoting themselves to
erudition; I cannot imagine their giving themselves up to the same
minute appreciation of ancient forms of expression which we give to the
Greek literature itself.

Moreover, unless we concede to the Greek literature the position of the
high-water mark of human expression, and believe that the intellect of
man had since that day suffered decline and eclipse, we ought not to
allow an ancient literature to overshadow our own energies, or to give
up the hope of creating a vivid literature, at once classical and
romantic, of our own.

And even if we did concede to Greek literature this august supr