Their
religion has been represented as a religion of mere cheerfulness, the
worship by an untroubled, unreflecting humanity, conscious of no
deeper needs, of the embodiments of its own joyous activity. It
helped to hide out of their sight those traces of decay and
weariness, of which the Greeks were constitutionally shy, to keep
them from peeping too curiously into certain shadowy places,
appropriate enough to the gloomy imagination of the middle age; and
it hardly proposed to itself to give consolation to people who, in
truth, were never "sick or sorry." But this familiar view of Greek
religion is based on a consideration of a part only of what is known
[111] concerning it, and really involves a misconception, akin to
that which underestimates the influence of the romantic spirit
generally, in Greek poetry and art; as if Greek art had dealt
exclusively with human nature in its sanity, suppressing all motives
of strangeness, all the beauty which is born of difficulty,
permitting nothing but an Olympian, though perhaps somewhat wearisome
calm. In effect, such a conception of Greek art and poetry leaves in
the central expressions of Greek culture none but negative qualities;
and the legend of Demeter and Persephone, perhaps the most popular of
all Greek legends, is sufficient to show that the "worship of sorrow"
was not without its function in Greek religion; their legend is a
legend made by and for sorrowful, wistful, anxious people; while the
most important artistic monuments of that legend sufficiently prove
that the Romantic spirit was really at work in the minds of Greek
artists, extracting by a kind of subtle alchemy, a beauty, not
without the elements of tranquillity, of dignity and order, out of a
matter, at first sight painful and strange.
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