pudiate when we are not in its presence and are always moved by when we find it again—these elements cannot be united in a more stable equilibrium than that of the art of Phidias. On the other hand it is impossible more completely to forbid our supersensual imagination, presented with the image of such a perfection, to penetrate further into the interior of the spirit and so permit it to create a form—less true in detail, more radiant in the whole—as a symbol and résumé of its most hidden aspirations.
This splendid art, the most rational of all, appears to us for that very reason, to be somehow monstrous—and the only one which is monstrous. We can transport the art of India, China, or even Egypt—all so alive in spirit—into an imaginary world where they would still retain their vitality by their structural rigour. We can transport Dutch or Spanish art into our own world and see, living among us, their realizations which—excepting Rembrandt here, and El Greco and Goya there—limit themselves to achieving the extreme of character and the extreme of verisimilitude. The Greek form, ideally perfect, is impossible anywhere outside of itself and cannot fit in. Involuntarily it exiles itself. Animated and placed in the midst of men, it appears neither familiar nor strange: true, we see there a possible or desirable aspect of ourselves. But our shortcomings, our inadequacies, our almosts and our half-measures are not to be found in it. In an ideal world it would seem immobile, crystallized, too limited and not resolute enough in its strangeness to give us glimpses of the abysses within us. On the contrary, it does its best to conceal them from us. But the eternal man is more complex than that, if not more ambitious. He wants to hold all his possibilities in unremitting readiness. If Christ was what his disciples imagined him to be, then Phidias, if one may say so, is the Christ of the aesthetic order. His kingdom is not of this world, for he refuses to accept man as he is; nor will he transpose him into an arbitrary, but logically conceived, universe, a universe which would renounce objective exactitude to acquire the unlimited, mobile, polyrhythmic form of the spirit itself. But this subjective world is not his province. In the moment of attaining perfection, man would feel effort die in his heart. And from this point of view one may say that Greek art, which never created a monster, is more false than that of Egypt or China, which never ceased to make monsters. It is because the Greek believed in the reality of his falsehood that his perfect humanity takes on this accent of monstrosity.
