Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/577

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best-proportioned form, with certainty and completeness of execution, we shall be understood if we always refer to them as a basis and a standard. Let each one be a Grecian in his own way, but let him be one." In that allegorical strain which pervades the Helena, Goethe has not failed to mark that, while the Hellenic idea of beauty is supreme, the Romantic element has also enriched modern life. The gifts are not all from one side. The symmetry, the clear outlines, the cheerful repose of Classical art, are wedded to the sentiment, passion, and variety of the Romantic. The great German poet felt, and has expressed with wonderful subtlety, the truth that no modern can absolutely dissociate the Hellenic influence from the others which have contributed to shape our modern life; no one can now be a pure Hellene, nor, if he could, would it be desirable; but everyone should recognise the special elements with which the Hellenic ideal can ennoble and chasten the modern spirit, and these he should by all means cultivate. To do so successfully, is to educate one's sense of beauty; and to do that aright, is so far to improve one's whole nature. This lesson, taught half-mystically in the second part of Faust, has sometimes been obscured by what Mr Matthew Arnold called the Hebraising tendency. We remember his definition, in Culture and Anarchy, of Hebraism as contrasted with Hellenism. The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism is strictness of conscience; both seek, in the Hebrew Apostle's words, to make us partakers