gnominious blackmail." And Mr. Lang justly
says: "The picture of a phantom who is not only a phantom, but wretched,
stooping to pay blackmail which is not only blackmail, but ignominious,
may divert the reader." The Greeks were neither deceived nor diverted by
such bad art; their sympathies were chilled, and they called the thing
"frigid." Meanwhile the special art of the Hebrews is, perhaps, the art
of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, music which is so often joined to
profound emotional susceptibility. They had no statuary, their
architecture does not remain for us to criticise it, their literature
alone supplies us with material for comparison, and even in this there
is not that diversity of epic, dramatic, and lyric matter, of history,
oratory and philosophy, which we have from Greece. Nevertheless, so far
as material offers itself, we find in Hebrew art just those qualities we
might expect from Hebraism.

The Hebrews had none of the Hellenic instinct for simplicity and grace
and directness. They delighted in deep symbolism and parable, in thunder
and lightning of diction and imagery, in pomp and state and grandeur.
They felt no scruples about going beyond the golden mean. With them all
art of writing or creating was but means to an end, and not an end in
itself. Let any one read the Bible and observe its unqualified figures
of speech--how the hills skip and the floods clap their hands--and then
let them ponder this Hellenic criticism of Longinus: "AEschylus, with a
strange violence of language, represents the palace of Lycurgus as
'possessed' at the appearance of Dionysus: '_The hills with rapture
thrill, the roof's inspired._' Here Euripides, in borrowing the image,
softens its extravagance: _and all the mountain felt the God_.'"

The Hellene, you observe, is not to let his intellect lose control over
his imagination; the Hebrew wholly abandons his imagination to his
master passion.

This, you may say, is merely the difference between being inspired and
not being inspired; and it may be urged that Plato himself puts the
Greek conception otherwise:

"All good poets compose their beautiful poems, not as works of art, but
because they are inspired and possessed ... for the poet is a light and
winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has
been inspired. When he has not attained to this state he is powerless
and unable to utter his oracles. Many are the noble words in which poets
speak of the action