Torn by the scourge of the storm-wind that smites as a harper smites
on a lyre,
And consumed of the storm as the sacrifice, loved of their God, is
consumed with fire,
And devoured of the darkness as men that are slain in the fires of his
love are devoured,
And deflowered of their lives by the storms as by priests is the spirit
of life deflowered.
And here is neither Hellenic seasonableness and proportion, nor Hebraic fervour, nor truth as it is understood by either Hebrew or Hellene. It is the work of a man who endeavours to lash himself into an intensity which is not of him, and who trifles with a Hebraism which rejects him.
Tennyson is, in point of the adaptation of form to matter, in the absolute justice and delicacy of his diction, in the perfect proportion and symmetry of his images, the completest reproduction among moderns of the Hellenic literary artist. What could be more luminously seen or more luminously expressed than
The curled white of the coming wave,
Glassed in the slippery sand before it breaks?
Hellenic Tennyson is also in his appreciation of all beauty. More important, he is Hellenic in his tranquil open-eyed outlook upon the world. It is in these things that he is his best self. He is least himself when he seeks to pass into the prophetic sphere. He is poeta more than vates, and he is least Tennysonian in a poem like "Maud." The Hebraic element in Tennyson is not innate, it is but what he has gathered from his training in Hebraic morality 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 originalité, a word which comes to mean not so much originality as eccentricity. And in such a connotation of originalité, 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 produce great characters. Homer's heroes, like the eminent figures of Grecian history, are of little moral force. Where the correct state of mind is to have point de zèle, as at Paris and Athens, mankind may avoid the ridiculous, but can scarcely reach the sublime. Where the guiding force is some clear idea, men may rise to some signal effort, like the battle of Salamis or the French Revolution; but intellectual impulse has none of the durability of moral impulse, and the fibre of resolve is soon relaxed into languid discontent. Thus much may be said of Hellenism in excess. Yet its services are immense. The social and material progress of the world requires free play of thought, a certain boldness and open-mindedness of inquiry; and for this we look rather to the spirit of the audax Iapeti genus—the Hellenic spirit—than to the firm-set minds of the sons of Shem. And, on the contrary, whatever may be urged against Hebraism in excess, it is all the better for human life that men should have the capacity for emotional depth and fervour, for tenacious adherence to some high moral purpose. In these days of clamour and dispute we need a diffusion of the Hellenic spirit to enable us to look out on things exactly as they are, and to deliver us from fads and fatuous agitations. But in these same days of weak convictions we need a measure of Hebraic ardour and Hebraic fortitude to make our conduct answer to what we see, and to prevent our seeing from ending in thoughts and words.
What is principally needed is a blending in just proportion of the two spirits. We want Hellenism for knowing and enjoying, Hebraism for acting, loving, and hoping. "Without haste, without rest," should be our maxim for progress. And that is equivalent to saying that neither the Hebraic zeal nor the Hellenic repose can of itself satisfy our needs.
This blending could be obtained, more than we now seek to obtain it. The leopard cannot change his spots, and the human being cannot wholly rid himself of his congenital qualities. Nevertheless culture and habit are second nature. There is scarcely a disposition of mind or manner of sentiment into which we cannot bring ourselves by steadily encouraging it. The faculties of the mind are like the muscles of the body. They shrink to nothing if not exercised; they can be exercised symmetrically; or some can be exercised at the expense of the rest. What we want is a school culture, and a self-culture, which shall bring out all our best powers, not one only of them or some few of them. At present our system is all for knowledge. We seek for understanding of facts, but we do not seek for a systematic view of life, for clear principles of art, or for social many-sidedness. Of the best elements of the Hebraic spirit, we are almost ceasing to seek anything at all. And this is wholly bad. We shall breed up a race not only without what Matthew Arnold calls distinction, but without any common animating soul, unless it be a general selfishness and a general Philistinism.
What we want is a broader, less mechanical culture. We want to be steeped not only in facts, but in stimulating thoughts, religious and poetical. Splendid culture means splendid ideals, and if a nation could acquire the clear thinking of Hellenism combined with the immense moral resolve of Hebraism, that nation, knowing its aims, and making steadily towards them, would afford a spectacle of grandeur and of power such as no nation now presents.