The terms ancient and modern, naive and sentimental, classic and romantic, have been shibboleths of culture from Jean Paul, Schiller, and Hegel, to Vischer.  Jean Paul, in his Vorschule zur Aesthetik, compares the ideally simple Greek poetry, with its objectivity, serenity, and moral grace, with the musical poetry of the romantic period, and speaks of one as the sunlight that pervades our waking hours, the other as the moonlight that gleams fitfully on our dreaming ones.  Schiller’s epoch-making essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, with its rough division into the classic-naive depending on a harmony between nature and mind, and the modern-sentimental depending on a longing for a lost paradise, is constantly quoted to shew that the Greeks took no pleasure in Nature.  This is misleading.  Schiller’s Greek was very limited; in the very year (1795) in which the essay appeared in The Hours, he was asking Humboldt’s advice as to learning Greek, with special reference to Homer and Xenophon.

To him Homer was the Greek par excellence, and who would not agree with him to-day?

As in Greek mythology, that naive poem of Nature, the product of the artistic impulse of the race to stamp its impressions in a beautiful and harmonious form, so in the clear-cut comparisons in Homer, the feeling for Nature is profound; but the Homeric hero had no personal relations with her, no conscious leaning towards her; the descriptions only served to frame human action, in time or space.

But that cheerful, unreflecting youth of mankind, that naive Homeric time, was short in spite of Schiller, who, in the very essay referred to, included Euripides, Virgil, and Horace among the sentimental, and Shakespeare among the naive, poets—­a fact often overlooked.

In line with the general development of culture, Greek feeling for Nature passed through various stages.  These can be clearly traced from objective similes and naive, homely comparisons to poetic personifications, and so on to more extended descriptions, in which scenery was brought into harmony or contrast with man’s inner life; until finally, in Hellenism, Nature was treated for her own sake, and man reduced to the position of supernumerary both in poetry and also—­so approaching the modern—­in landscape-painting.

Greece had her sentimental epoch; she did not, as we have said, long remain naive.  From Sophist days a steady process of decomposition went on—­in other words, a movement towards what we call modern, a movement which to the classic mind led backward; but from the wider standpoint of general development meant advance.  For the path of culture is always the same in the nations; it leads first upward and then downward, and all ripening knowledge, while it enriches the mind, brings with it some unforeseen loss.  Mankind pays heavily for each new gain; it paid for increased subjectivity and inwardness by a loss in public spirit and patriotism which, once the most valued of national possessions, fell away before the increasing individuality, the germ of the modern spirit.  For what is the modern spirit but limitless individuality?