They, with their own experiences and traditions of constitutional struggles, cannot but feel the strongest attraction towards similar passages in the life of the Greeks, so that even the professional scholar in his study feels the excitement of the contested election, the glow of the public debate, when he finds them distracting Athens or Ægion. The practical insight of a Grote or a Freeman leads him to interpret facts which may be inexplicable or misleading to a foreign student. Even with Grote before him, Ernst Curtius or Duruy is sometimes unable to grasp the true political situation.
who have themselves lived in practical politics.
I say this in the higher and more delicate sense; for of course many recent histories give an adequate account of the large political changes to the general student. Perhaps, indeed, the remoteness of foreign writers from political conflicts such as ours gives them a calmness and fairness which is of advantage, while the English writer can hardly avoid a certain amount of partisanship, however carefully he may strive to be scrupulously impartial. For in all these things we are compelled unconsciously to reflect not only our century, but our nation, and colour the acts and the motives of other days with the hues our imagination has taken from surrounding circumstances.
Not so in artistic or literary history,
where the French and Germans are superior;
§ 92. When we come to the literary and artistic side, the foreign historians have a decided advantage. The philosophical side of Greek literature has indeed been treated by Grote and other English
writers with a fulness and clearness that leave little to be desired; but on the poetry and the artistic prose of the Greeks, foreign scholars write with a freshness and a knowledge to which few of us attain. Of course a Frenchman, with the systematic and careful training which he gets in composition, must have an inestimable advantage over people, like us, who merely write as they list, and have no rules to guide their taste or form their style. And the German, if as regards style he is even less happily circumstanced than the Englishman, whose language has at least been moulded by centuries of literature, has yet on the side of archæology and art enjoyed a training which is only just now becoming possible in England or America.
especially in art.
Hence it is that the earlier part of Curtius' history has such a charm,—though we must not detract from the individual genius of the man, which is manifest enough if we compare him with the solid but prosaic Duncker. However complete and well articulated the bones of fact may lie before us, it requires a rare imagination to clothe them with flesh and with skin, nay, with bloom upon the skin, and expression in the features, if we are to have a living figure, and not a dry and repulsive skeleton.
Importance of studying Greek art.