We may mean well; all manner of good may happen
to us on the road we go; but we are not on our real right road, the
road we must in the end follow.
That is why, when our hymns betray a false tendency by losing a power
which accompanies the poetical work of our race on our other more
suitable lines, the indication thus given is of great value and
instructiveness for us. One of our main gifts for poetry deserts us
in our hymns, and so gives us a hint as to the one true basis for the
spiritual work of an Indo-European people, which the Germans, who
have not this particular gift of ours, do not and cannot get in this
way, though they may get it in others. It is worth noticing that the
masterpieces of the spiritual work of Indo-Europeans, taking the pure
religious sentiment, and not the imaginative reason, for their basis,
are works like the Imitation, the Dies Irae, the Stabat Mater--works
clothing themselves in the middle-age Latin, the genuine native voice
of no Indo-European nation. The perfection of their kind, but that
kind not perfectly legitimate, they take a language not perfectly
legitimate; as if to show, that when mankind's Semitic age is once
passed, the age which produced the great incomparable monuments of
the pure religious sentiment, the books of Job and Isaiah, the
Psalms,--works truly to be called inspired, because the same divine
power which worked in those who produced them works no longer,--as if
to show us, that, after this primitive age, we Indo-Europeans must
feel these works without attempting to re-make them; and that our
poetry, if it tries to make itself simply the organ of the religious
sentiment, leaves the true course, and must conceal this by not
speaking a living language.
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