Greek literature, and make a centre of growing warmth and light in its
Periclean period--when the conception of human nature for the first
time takes definite shape--have no less of Religion in them than
underlay the 'creed outworn'. To think otherwise would be an error of
the same kind as that 'abuse of the word Atheism' against which the
author of the work above alluded to protests so forcibly.

Religion, in the sense here indicated, is the mainspring and vital
principle of Tragedy. The efforts of Aeschylus and Sophocles were
sustained by it, and its inevitable decay through the scepticism which
preceded Socrates was the chief hindrance to the tragic genius of
Euripides. Yet the inequality of which we have consequently to
complain in him is redeemed by pregnant hints of something yet 'more
deeply interfused,' which in him, as in his two great predecessors, is
sometimes felt as 'modern,' because it is not of an age but for all
time. The most valuable part of every literature is something which
transcends the period and nation out of which it springs.

On the other hand, much that at first sight seems primitive in Greek
tragedy belongs more to the subject than to the mode of handling. The
age of Pericles was in advance of that in which the legends were first
Hellenized and humanized, just as this must have been already far
removed from the earliest stages of mythopoeic imagination. The reader
of Aeschylus or Sophocles should therefore be warned against
attributing to the poet's invention that which is given in the fable.

An educated student of Italian painting knows how to discriminate--say
in an Assumption by Botticelli--between the traditional conventions,
the contemporary ideas, and the refinements of the artist's own fancy.
The same indulgence must be extended to dramatic art. The tragedy of