Note 197.1 — Chapter XI · The Religious Temperament of the Eastern and Western Peoples.

The ecstatic and self-prostrating adoration of divinity which is characteristic of the Babylonian temper might manifest itself at times in that excess of sentiment that we call sentimentality: we catch this tone now and again in the childlike entreaties with which the supplicator appeals to the deity as his father or mother; in the poetic pathos of the hymns to Tammuz, which sometimes remind us of the sentimentality of some of our modern hymns: he is called “Lord of the tender voice and shining eyes”; “he of the dove-like voice.”197.1 Such language may be called “hypokoristic,” to use a Greek phrase; it belongs to the feminine sentiment in religion, and we are familiar with it in our own service. No echo of it is heard in the older Greek religious literature nor in any record of Greek liturgy. We can, indeed, scarcely pronounce on the question as to the tone to which primitive Greek wailing-services were attuned. We have only a few hints of some simple ancient ritual of sorrow: the pre-Homeric Greek may have bewailed Linos and Hyakinthos, as we hear that the Elean women in a later period bewailed Achilles; but if, indeed, the fragment of a Linos-threnody that the Scholiast on Homer has preserved for us is really primitive,197.2 it has some pathos, but much brightness and nothing of the Babylonian sentimentality. The spirit of the Greek religious lyric strikes us as always virile, and as likely to be unsympathetic with the violent and romantic expression of sorrow or with endearing ecstasy of appeal.