“Heaven forbid!  They seem to be flying about in the air with other germs, and have found a sort of nidus among my melancholy fancies.  Nobody really holds them.  They bear the same relation to real belief as walking on the head for a show does to running away from an explosion or walking fast to catch the train.”

XVIII.

THE MODERN HEP!  HEP!  HEP!

To discern likeness amidst diversity, it is well known, does not require so fine a mental edge as the discerning of diversity amidst general sameness.  The primary rough classification depends on the prominent resemblances of things:  the progress is towards finer and finer discrimination according to minute differences.  Yet even at this stage of European culture one’s attention is continually drawn to the prevalence of that grosser mental sloth which makes people dull to the most ordinary prompting of comparison—­the bringing things together because of their likeness.  The same motives, the same ideas, the same practices, are alternately admired and abhorred, lauded and denounced, according to their association with superficial differences, historical or actually social:  even learned writers treating of great subjects often show an attitude of mind not greatly superior in its logic to that of the frivolous fine lady who is indignant at the frivolity of her maid.

To take only the subject of the Jews:  it would be difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about them which has not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print; but the neglect of resemblances is a common property of dulness which unites all the various points of view—­the prejudiced, the puerile, the spiteful, and the abysmally ignorant.

That the preservation of national memories is an element and a means of national greatness, that their revival is a sign of reviving nationality, that every heroic defender, every patriotic restorer, has been inspired by such memories and has made them his watchword, that even such a corporate existence as that of a Roman legion or an English regiment has been made valorous by memorial standards,—­these are the glorious commonplaces of historic teaching at our public schools and universities, being happily ingrained in Greek and Latin classics.  They have also been impressed on the world by conspicuous modern instances.  That there is a free modern Greece is due—­through all infiltration of other than Greek blood—­to the presence of ancient Greece in the consciousness of European men; and every speaker would feel his point safe if he were to praise Byron’s devotion to a cause made glorious by ideal identification with the past; hardly so, if he were to insist that the Greeks were not to be helped further because their history shows that they were anciently unsurpassed in treachery and lying, and that many modern Greeks are highly disreputable characters, while others are