The general
impression left on the mind (and this is apt to be a truer one than any
drawn from single examples) is that the duty is one which is owed to
custom, that the passion leads to a breach of some convention settled by
common consent,[201] and accordingly it is an outraged society whose
figure looms in the background, rather than an offended God. At most it
was one god of many, and meanwhile another might be friendly. In the
Greek epic, the gods are partisans, they hold caucuses, they lobby and
log-roll for their candidates. The tacit admission of a revealed code of
morals wrought a great change. The complexity and range of passion is
vastly increased when the offence is at once both crime and sin, a wrong
done against order and against conscience at the same time. The relation
of the Greek Tragedy to the higher powers is chiefly antagonistic,
struggle against an implacable destiny, sublime struggle, and of heroes,
but sure of defeat at last. And that defeat is final. Grand figures are
those it exhibits to us, in some respects unequalled, and in their severe
simplicity they compare with modern poetry as sculpture with painting.
Considered merely as works of art, these products of the Greek
imagination satisfy our highest conception of form. They suggest
inevitably a feeling of perfect completeness, isolation, and
independence, of something rounded and finished in itself.
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