PREFATORY NOTE TO THE
EDITION OF 1883


I. The Hellenic spirit has been repeatedly characterized as simple
Nature-worship. Even the Higher Paganism has been described as 'in
other words the purified worship of natural forms.'[1] One might
suppose, in reading some modern writers, that the Nymphs and Fauns,
the River-Gods and Pan, were at least as prominent in all Greek poetry
as Zeus, Apollo, and Athena, or that Apollo was only the sweet singer
and not also the prophet of retribution.

The fresh and unimpaired enjoyment of the Beautiful is certainly the
aspect of ancient life and literature which most attracted the
humanists of the sixteenth century, and still most impresses those
amongst ourselves who for various reasons desire to point the contrast
between Paganism and Judaism. The two great groups of forces vaguely
known as the Renaissance and the Revolution have both contributed to
this result. Men who were weary of conventionality and of the weight
of custom 'heavy as frost and deep almost as life,' have longed for
the vision of 'Oread or Dryad glancing through the shade,' or to 'hear
old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.' Meanwhile, that in which the
Greeks most resembled us, 'the human heart by which we live,' for the
very reason that it lies so near to us, is too apt to be lost from our
conception of them. Another cause of this one-sided view is the
illusion produced by the contemplation of statuary, together with the
unapproachable perfection of form which every relic of Greek antiquity
indisputably possesses.