It was inevitable that such a frank eulogy of the old gods at the expense of the Christian Demiurgus should give offense. Count Leopold von Stolberg put himself at the head of a vociferous opposition by denouncing the poem in a Leipzig journal as blasphemous, and lamenting that the author of the noble 'Song to Joy' should have fallen so low. The modern reader finds it easy to acquit him on the religious arraignment, since he did not profess to present the claims of monotheism completely. We are quite willing to judge of poetry as poetry and to leave it its ancient privilege of passionate overstatement. Of this privilege Schiller availed himself in the fullest measure, going quite beyond the bounds of sanity in his idealization of the Greeks, Well might the indignant Stolberg ask him if he really believed that the 'eternal bonds of the heart were gentler and holier when Hymen tied them'. Whatever else may be said of them, the amours of the Greeks (gods and men) were not remarkably strong on the side of gentleness, holiness and fidelity. In respect of poetic merit Schiller certainly had the right to his opinion that 'The Gods of Greece' surpassed his earlier efforts. To please Wieland he aimed at Horatian correctness, and he came near hitting the mark. There is no progress toward lightness of touch or melody of phrasing,--Schiller was not the man for tuneful titillation of the ear,--but the poem is tolerably free from the bizarre hyperboles that mar its predecessors. It is intellectual, argumentative, but suffused at the same time with genuine feeling, and the stanzas have a stately impressive swing. Goethe was pleased with the poem, but thought it too long,--a well-founded criticism, since many of the stanzas merely brought fresh illustrations of the same thought. In his revision Schiller reduced the twenty-five stanzas of the original version to sixteen, and at the same time omitted or toned down the lines that had given offense. In its revised form it is in every way a better poem. In 'The Artists' we have a sonorous panegyric of Art as the great teacher and refiner of mankind. The poem shows the influence of Herder's evolutionary speculations, being in reality nothing less than a condensed history of civilization. The old Rousseauite point of view is here completely abandoned. No more girding at the degeneracy of the 'ink-spattering century'! The opening lines glorify the modern man as the 'ripest son of time, free through reason, strong through laws, great through gentleness'. Then the sublime creature is admonished not to forget the goddess who made him what he is: In industry the bee may scorn thy merits, In cleverness a worm thy teacher be; Thy knowledge thou must share with happier spirits, But Art, O Man, is all for thee.[76]