ality and the sentiment which
comes of it. "His strength was as the strength of ten, because his heart
was pure" is not a sentiment natural to a pagan Greek, but it is natural
enough to a christianised Hellene whose Hellenic temperament is
otherwise quite unchanged.

But we must not let ourselves be lured on by specimen after specimen
over the wide field of literature. Rather let us return to some
practical bearing of this whole question. For a practical bearing it
has. It is this. Life consists of knowing, acting, admiring, loving, and
hoping. The ideal man would be at the same time sage, poet, artist, man
of virtue, and man of deeds. The perfect man would have all his
faculties of thinking, feeling, and doing wholesomely blended. Now
neither Hebraism nor Hellenism could produce the ideal man or
harmoniously develop all his best powers. Each had its defects. The
Hebrew, along with his intense spirituality and his moral strenuousness,
lacked intellectual justness, sense of proportion, social
appreciativeness, artistic truth and sobriety. The Hellene, along with
his lucidity of intellect, his justness of perception in art, and his
social aptitudes, lacked that sustained zeal for some moral principle
which leads either to the doing of great things or to the attainment of
sublime character. The dangers of Hebraism lay in excess of absorption,
in a proneness to fanaticism, in an obstinacy which might become
rabidness, in a certain misplaced loudness and disregard of dignity. The
dangers of Hellenism lay in proneness to sacrifice character to talent,
and deeds to thought. Hebraism tended towards asceticism and bigotry;
Hellenism towards indifference and self-indulgence. The narrow Puritans
of the seventeenth century revealed some of the dangers of excessive
Hebraism; some of the dangers of excessive Hellenism have appeared in
France. The modern French are in many things, though by no means in all
things, a copy of the ancient Greeks. They are so in their passion for
clear ideas. France is the land of the _philosophes_ and the critics.
The French are Hellenic in their dislike of _emphase_ and of
_originalite_, a word which comes to mean not so much originality as
eccentricity. And in such a connotation of _originalite_, there betrays
itself an important fact--that France is hardly the best country for the
production of great characters. "The great Frenchmen," it has been said,
"are apt to be Italians." Greece, too, failed to