y of the romantic
period, and speaks of one as the sunlight that pervades our waking
hours, the other as the moonlight that gleams fitfully on our
dreaming ones. Schiller's epoch-making essay _On Naive and
Sentimental Poetry_, with its rough division into the classic-naive
depending on a harmony between nature and mind, and the
modern-sentimental depending on a longing for a lost paradise, is
constantly quoted to shew that the Greeks took no pleasure in Nature.
This is misleading. Schiller's Greek was very limited; in the very
year (1795) in which the essay appeared in _The Hours_, he was asking
Humboldt's advice as to learning Greek, with special reference to
Homer and Xenophon.

To him Homer was the Greek _par excellence_, and who would not agree
with him to-day?

As in Greek mythology, that naive poem of Nature, the product of the
artistic impulse of the race to stamp its impressions in a beautiful
and harmonious form, so in the clear-cut comparisons in Homer, the
feeling for Nature is profound; but the Homeric hero had no personal
relations with her, no conscious leaning towards her; the
descriptions only served to frame human action, in time or space.

But that cheerful, unreflecting youth of mankind, that naive Homeric
time, was short in spite of Schiller, who, in the very essay referred
to, included Euripides, Virgil, and Horace among the sentimental, and
Shakespeare among the naive, poets--a fact often overlooked.

In line with the general development of culture, Greek feeling for
Nature passed through various stages. These can be clearly traced
from objective similes and naive, homely comparisons to poetic
personifications, and so on to more extended descriptions, in which
scenery was brought into harmony or contrast with man's inner life;
until finally, in Hellenism, Nature was treated for her own sake, and
man reduced to the position of supernumerary both in poetry and
also--so approaching the modern--in landscape-painting.

Greece had her sentimental epoch; she did not, as we have said, long
remain naive. From Sophist days a steady process of decomposition
went on--in other words, a movement towards what we call modern, a
movement which to the classic mind led backward; but from the wider
standpoint of general development meant advance. For the path of
culture is always the same in the nations; it leads first upward and
then downward, and all ripening knowledge, while it enriches the
mind, brings with