ace: or, that the most entrancing
singers, graceful dancers, and exquisite musicians, are sons and
daughters of Israel: though this were much. But these brilliant
accessories are forgotten in the sublimer claim.

It seems that the only means by which in these modern times we
are permitted to develop the beautiful is music. It would appear
definitively settled that excellence in the plastic arts is the
privilege of the earlier ages of the world. All that is now produced
in this respect is mimetic, and, at the best, the skilful adaptation
of traditional methods. The creative faculty of modern man seems by an
irresistible law at work on the virgin soil of science, daily increasing
by its inventions our command over nature, and multiplying the material
happiness of man. But the happiness of man is not merely material. Were
it not for music, we might in these days say, the beautiful is dead.
Music seems to be the only means of creating the beautiful, in which we
not only equal, but in all probability greatly excel, the ancients. The
music of modern Europe ranks with the transcendent creations of human
genius; the poetry, the statues, the temples, of Greece. It produces and
represents as they did whatever is most beautiful in the spirit of
man and often expresses what is most profound. And who are the great
composers, who hereafter will rank with Homer, with Sophocles, with
Praxiteles, or with Phidias? They are the descendants of those Arabian
tribes who conquered Canaan, and who by favour of the Most High have
done more with less means even than the Athenians.

Forty years ago--not a longer period than the children of Israel were
wandering in the desert--the two most dishonoured races in Europe were
the Attic and the Hebrew, and they were the two races that had done most
for mankind. Their fortunes had some similarity: their countries were
the two smallest in the world, equally barren and equally famous; they
both divided themselves into tribes: both built a most famous temple on
an acropolis; and both produced a literature which all European nations
have accepted with reverence and admiration. Athens has been sacked
oftener than Jerusalem, and oftener razed to the ground; but the
Athenians have escaped expatriation, which is purely an Oriental custom.
The sufferings of the Jews, however, have been infinitely more prolonged
and varied than those of the Athenians. The Greek nevertheless appears
exhausted. The creative genius