it some unforeseen loss. Mankind pays heavily for
each new gain; it paid for increased subjectivity and inwardness by a
loss in public spirit and patriotism which, once the most valued of
national possessions, fell away before the increasing individuality,
the germ of the modern spirit. For what is the modern spirit but
limitless individuality?

The greater the knowledge of self, the richer the inner life. Man
becomes his own chief problem--he begins to watch the lightest
flutter of his own feelings, to grasp and reflect upon them, to look
upon himself in fact as in a mirror; and it is in this doubling of
the ego, so to speak, that sentimentality in the modern sense
consists. It leads to love of solitude, the fittest state for the
growth of a conscious love of Nature, for, as Rousseau said 'all
noble passions are formed in solitude,' 'tis there that one
recognizes one's own heart as 'the rarest and most valuable of all
possessions.' 'Oh, what a fatal gift of Heaven is a feeling heart!'
and elsewhere he said: 'Hearts that are warmed by a divine fire find
a pure delight in their own feelings which is independent of fate and
of the whole world.' Euripides, too, loved solitude, and avoided the
noise of town life by retiring to a grotto at Salamis which he had
arranged for himself with a view of the sea; for which reason, his
biographer tells us, most of his similes are drawn from the sea. He,
rather than Petrarch or Rousseau, was the father of sentimentality.
His morbidly sensitive Hippolytos cries 'Alas! would it were possible
that I should see myself standing face to face, in which case I
should have wept for the sorrows that we suffer'; and in the chorus
of _The Suppliants_ we have: 'This insatiate joy of mourning leads me
on like as the liquid drop flowing from the sun-trodden rock, ever
increasing of groans.' In Euripides we have the first loosening of
that ingenuous bond between Nature and the human spirit, as the
Sophists laid the axe to the root of the old Hellenic ideas and
beliefs. Subjectivity had already gained in strength from the birth
of the lyric, that most individual of all expressions of feeling; and
since the lyric cannot dispense with the external world, classic song
now shewed the tender subjective feeling for Nature which we see in
Sappho, Pindar, and Simonides. Yet Euripides (and Aristophanes, whose
painful mad laugh, as Doysen says, expresses the same distraction and
despair as the deep melancholy