of Euripides) only paved the way for
that sentimental, idyllic feeling for Nature which dwelt on her quiet
charms for their own sake, as in Theocritus, and, like the modern,
rose to greater intensity in the presence of the amorous passion, as
we see in Kallimachos and the Anthology. It was the outcome of
Hellenism, of which sentimental introspection, the freeing of the ego
from the bonds of race and position, and the discovery of the
individual in all directions of human existence, were marks. And this
feeling developing from Homer to Longos, from unreflecting to
conscious and then to sentimental pleasure in Nature, was expressed
not only in poetry but in painting, although the latter never fully
mastered technique.

The common thoughtless statement, so often supported by quotations
from Schiller, Gervinus, and others, that Greek antiquity was not
alive to the beauty of Nature and her responsiveness to human moods,
and neither painted scenery nor felt the melancholy poetic charm of
ruins and tombs, is therefore a perversion of the truth; but it must
be conceded that the feeling which existed then was but the germ of
our modern one. It was fettered by the specific national beliefs
concerning the world and deities, by the undeveloped state of the
natural sciences, which, except botany, still lay in swaddling-clothes,
by the new influence of Christendom, and by that strict feeling for
style which, very much to its advantage, imposed a moderation that
would have excluded much of our senseless modern rhapsody.

It was not unnatural that Schiller, in distaste for the weak riot of
feeling and the passion for describing Nature which obtained in his
day, was led to overpraise the Homeric naivete and overblame the
sentimentality which he wrongly identified with it.

In all that is called art, the Romans were pupils of the Greek, and
their achievements in the region of beauty cannot be compared with
his. But they advanced the course of general culture, and their
feeling--always more subjective, abstract, self-conscious, and
reflective--has a comparatively familiar, because modern, ring in the
great poets.

The preference for the practical and social-economic is traceable in
their feeling for Nature. Their mythology also lay too much within
the bounds of the intelligible; shewed itself too much in forms and
ceremonies, in a cult; but it had not lost the sense of awe--it still
heard the voices of mysterious powers in the depths