One may even say that a whole language may fall into one or the other of these two groups, according to the temper of the people which created it. There is the Greek tongue, for instance, and there is the Latin tongue. Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech that runs or soars, the speech of a people which could not help giving winged feet to its god of art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty and concentrated speech which is hammered and pressed and polished into the shape of its perfection, as the ethically-minded Romans believed that the soul also should be wrought. Virgil said that he licked his poems into shape as a she-bear licks her cubs, and Horace, the other supreme literary artist of Rome, compared the writing of poems to working in bronze. No Greek could have said these things. Whether Plato or Aristophanes or even Thucydides, the Greek's feet touched the earth, touched it lovingly, though it might only be with the pressure of a toe, but there were always wings to his feet, he was always the embodiment of all that he symbolised in Hermes. The speech of the Greek flies, but the speech of the Roman sinks. The Roman's word in art, as in life, was still _gravitas_, and he contrived to infuse a shade of contempt into the word _levis_. With the inspired Greek we rise, with the inspired Roman we sink. With the Greek poet, it may be any poet of the Anthology, I am uplifted, I am touched by the breath of rapture. But if it is a Latin poet--Lucretius or Catullus, the quintessential Latin poets--I am hit by something pungent and poignant (they are really the same word, one notes, and that a Latin word) which pierces the flesh and sinks into the heart.
One resents the narrow and defective intelligence of the spirit embodied in Latin, its indifference to Nature, its refusal to hallow the freedom and beauty and gaiety of things, its ever-recurring foretaste of Christianity. But one must not refuse to recognise the superb and eternal morality of that spirit, whether in language or in life. It consecrates struggle, the conquest of brute matter, the perpetual and patient effort after perfection. So Rome is an everlasting challenge to the soul of Man, and the very stones of its city the mightiest of inspirations.