Pater at all times is his power of
putting himself amid conditions that are not only extinct, but obscure
and elusive; of winding himself back, as it were, into the primitive
Greek consciousness and recovering for the moment the world as the
Greeks saw, or, rather, felt it. It is an easy matter to mass the
facts about any given period; it is a very different and a very
difficult matter to set those facts in vital relations to each other,
to see them in true prospective. And the difficulties are immensely
increased when the period is not only remote, but deficient in
definite registry of thought and feeling; when the record of what it
believed and felt does not exist by itself, but must be deciphered
from those works of art in which is preserved the final form of
thought and feeling, and in which are gathered and merged a great mass
of ideas and emotions.
This is especially true of the more subtle and elusive Greek myths,
which were in no case creations of the individual imagination or of
definite periods of time, but which were fed by many tributaries, very
slowly taking shape out of general but shadowy impressions, widely
diffused but vague ideas, deeply felt but obscure emotions.
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