long been suggesting themselves. Was their view of the answer to these questions a cheerful one or the reverse?
All that is bright and sunny, all that savours, as it were, of out-of-doors, seems to belong to the Greek, and cheerfulness, or even thoughtlessness, seems to characterise his temper. He loved light and sought it. Yet even out of this very search comes sadness, for there is not light enough in the world for man's needs.[1] The inquirer is baffled at every turn, and from that very brightness of his outward life which makes him love light and seek it, he is only led the more to find in the inner meaning of things darkness and mystery, to think the dealings of heaven inscrutable, and to believe in dreadful deities of dim and unknown, even of cruel, powers. So while on the one hand the Greek believed in gods of daylight, as it were, clad with sunny youth like Apollo, or fair like Venus, or wise and kind like Minerva; on the other hand there were Erinnys and Nemesis and the Furies, who pursued the proud or the impious, and Atè, who clung to a man or to a family in punishment of some half-forgotten crime, and led them into an infatuation under which they should incur new guilt and new vengeance. Hence a dark cloud hung over history: it was but the gloomy record of men raised to success and wealth, then waxing insolent and forgetting to give the gods their due, then by the angry gods abandoned to a reprobate hardihood, in which they began a course of crime whose consequences clung to them and their descendants, till some one holier than the rest, by a long
