THE LITERARY treatment of the passion of love is one of the matters in which the ancient stands furthest apart from the modern world. Perhaps the result of love in human lives differs but little from one age to another; but the form in which it is expressed (which is all that literature has to do with) was altered in Western Europe in the middle ages, and ever since then we have spoken a different language. And the subject is one in which the feeling is so inextricably mixed up with the expression that a new language practically means a new actual world of things. Of nothing is it so true that emotion is created by expression. The enormous volume of expression developed in modern times by a few great poets and a countless number of prose writers has reacted upon men and women; so certain is it that thought follows language, and life copies art. And so here more than elsewhere, though the rule applies to the whole sphere of human thought and action, we have to expect in Greek literature to find much latent and implicit which since then has become patent and prominent; much intricate psychology not yet evolved; much—as is the truth of everything Greek
—stated so simply and directly, that we, accustomed as we are to more complex and highly organised methods of expression, cannot without some difficulty connect it with actual life, or see its permanent truth. Yet to do so is just the value of studying Greek; for the more simple the forms or ideas of life are, the better are we able to put them in relation with one another, and so to unify life. And this unity is the end which all human thought pursues.
