a true appreciation of their dramatic
art, by losing almost utterly not only the laws of their melody and
harmony, but even the true metric time of their odes! music and metre,
which must have surely been as noble as their poetry, their sculpture,
their architecture, possessed by the same exquisite sense of form and of
proportion. One thing we can understand--how this musical form of the
drama, which still remains to us in lower shapes, in the oratorio, in the
opera, must have helped to raise their tragedies into that ideal sphere
in which they all, like the _Antigone_, live and move. So ideal and yet
so human; nay rather, truly ideal, because truly human. The gods, the
heroes, the kings, the princesses of Greek tragedy were dear to the
hearts of Greek republicans, not merely as the founders of their states,
not merely as the tutelary deities, many of them, of their country: but
as men and women like themselves, only more vast; with mightier wills,
mightier virtues, mightier sorrows, and often mightier crimes; their
inward free-will battling, as Schlegel has well seen, against outward
circumstance and overruling fate, as every man should battle, unless he
sink to be a brute. 'In tragedy,' says Schlegel--uttering thus a deep
and momentous truth--'the gods themselves either come forward as the
servants of destiny and mediate executors of its decrees, or approve
themselves godlike only by asserting their liberty of action and entering
upon the same struggles with fate which man himself has to encounter.'
And I believe this, that this Greek tragedy, with its godlike men and
manlike gods, and heroes who had become gods by the very vastness of
their humanity, was a preparation, and it may be a necessary preparation,
for the true Christian faith in a Son of man, who is at once utterly
human and utterly divine. Man is made in the likeness of God--is the
root-idea, only half-conscious, only half-expressed, but instinctive,
without which neither the Greek Tragedies, nor the Homeric Poems, six
hundred years before them, could have been composed. Doubtless the idea
that man was like a god degenerated too often into the idea that the gods
were like men, and as wicked. But that travestie of a great truth is not
confined to those old Greeks. Some so-called Christian theories--as I
hold--have sinned in that direction as deeply as the Athenians of old.

Meanwhile, I say, that this long acquiescence in the conception of
godlike s