root of the English "mind."


17. The minor expressions by the Greeks in word, in symbol, and in
religious service, of this faith, are so many and so beautiful, that I
hope some day to gather at least a few of them into a separate body of
evidence respecting the power of Athena, and of its relations to the
ethical conception of the Homeric poems, or, rather, to their ethical
nature; for they are not conceived didactically, but are didactic in
their essence, as all good art is. There is an increasing insensibility
to this character, and even an open denial of it, among us now which is
one of the most curious errors of modernism,--the peculiar and judicial
blindness of an age which, having long practised art and poetry for the
sake of pleasure only, has become incapable of reading their language
when they were both didactic; and also, having been itself accustomed to
a professedly didactic teaching, which yet, for private interests,
studiously avoids collision with every prevalent vice of its day (and
especially with avarice), has become equally dead to the intensely
ethical conceptions of a race which habitually divided all men into two
broad classes of worthy or worthless,--good, and good for nothing. And
even the celebrated passage of Horace about the Iliad is now misread or
disbelieved, as if it were impossible that the Iliad could be instructive
because it is not like a sermon. Horce does not say that it is like a
sermon, and would have been still less likely to say so if he ever had
had the advantage of hearing a sermon. "I have been reading that story
of Troy again" (thus he writes to a noble youth of Rome whom he cared
for), "quietly at Præneste, while you have been busy at Rome; and truly
I think that what is base and what is noble, and what useful and useless,
may be better learned from that, than from all Chrysippus' and Crantor's
talk put together."* Which is profoundly true, not of the Iliad only,