Note 61 — YOUTH AND AGE (continued 8)

Perhaps these woodcutters would not have entirely appreciated what Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson (The Greek View of Life) says of the Greek divinities. He tells us that the Greek originally felt “bewilderment and terror in the presence of the powers of nature,” but his religion developed “till at last from the womb of the dark enigma that haunted him in the beginning there emerged into the charmed light of a world of ideal grace a pantheon of fair and concrete personalities.” (The italics are mine). The classical enthusiast always pictures the Greeks as living in fairyland: actually the gods and lesser divinities were to them for the most part objects of awe and dread. In this “world of ideal grace” there would be, for example, the horrible Furies who dwelt in their grotto in Athens!