about things invisible and spiritual, our highest
hopes, our loftiest admirations, our most exalted
reverences, can all find adequate expression in the beautiful forms of sense ? There may be in man's nature that which transcends the capabilities of expression contained in sensuous form, ideas, emotions, experiences, which matter, however moulded, can
only hint at, or which, from their very nature, are
at war with and make havoc of material grace and
beauty. When the human consciousness has become
receptive of these higher experiences, it is indeed, it
may be granted, at a more advanced stage of its
spiritual career ; but is it not one of the penalties
of such advancement that it has left behind it for
ever that bright and sunny region where it could
make a home of art ? In the year's course the
fruit season may be the most valuable, but when it
has come, the time of gay-tinted blossoms has passed
away. On the other hand, can we conceive the race
as having just reached and not yet passed the point
at which the mind has indeed awakened to a sense
of inward freedom, and feels fermenting in it a
thousand thoughts, desires, ambitions, such as lend
its joyous fervour and hopefulness to the heart of
youth, but has as yet never turned inward to brood
over itself, or felt the shadow of spiritual doubt and
conflict creeping over and marring its light-hearted
enjoyment of the bright world without. It has
become aware of no aims vaster than the finite and
visible can satisfy, of no aspirations after a limitless
perfection. In one word, can we go back in thought
to a time when man's highest ideal neither fell below
nor yet surpassed what lovely forms of human grace
and nobleness, only with the stain of human imper-
fection removed from them, could perfectly express ;
and therefore a time in which the a2sthetic and
religious elements were inextricably interwoven, and
man's deepest spiritual susceptibilities could find vent
in the worship of the beautiful — then must not such
a time have been, beyond all others, in the history
of our race, that whose conditions were most favour-
able to the perfection of art ? Now is it not pre-
cisely such a stage of human development which was
realised at a definite historic period in the life of
ancient Greece ? There, for once in man's history,
art and religion were all but identified. Greek
religion was the worship of the beautiful. In the
conceptions of its poets, in the creations of its
sculptors, in its beautiful temples and shrines, it is
nearly impossible to discriminate between the
aesthetic and the sacred, the poetical and the mytho-
logical. It is the poets and artists of Greece who
are at the same time its prophets, the creators of its
divinities, and the revealers of its theological beliefs :
and that conception of the divine which the genius
of Homer and Hesiod originated found its perfect
embodiment in those sculptured types of human
beauty and nobleness in which the spiritual motive
and the exquisite finite form were indistinguishably
united. Greek thought had reached but not passed
beyond the stage at which in sensuous form, and
especially in that form in which soul and sense are
most closely implicated, the individual human form,
its highest ideal could find adequate expression.
No mystic dreams of an ascetic piety had come to
trouble the tranquillity of its humanistic devotion.
No sense of humiliation before an infinite standard
of rio'ht had darkened the bright horizon of the
present and the finite. The spectral form of an
awful fate dominating all things human and divine
might lurk in the background, but it did not ob- ■
trude itself or mar the fairness and completeness of
that seemly human life in which the spirit found
satisfaction and rest. Sin and sorrow and pain,
the hidden overruling presence of inexorable moral
powers working out in the predestined doom of
mortals the solution of moral conflicts, may consti-
tute the main motive of Greek tragedy ; but it
never interfered with that air of victorious serenity
which art imprinted on brow and face and form of
its beautiful humanised divinities. The Hellenic
ideal is simply that of finite completeness, of a finite
consciousness in harmony with itself and the world.
And for the expression of that ideal the resources of
art were quite sufficient ; in representing it, art
had its congenial function. A felicity untroubled
by internal struggles or outward infirmities, a self-
complacent repose superior to accidents and ills, a
serene fairness unmoved by passion, or want, or care
— what more was needed to express all that, what
was there in it that could not be fitly and fully ex-
pressed by external sensuous symmetry and fairness .
And so, as the modern artist contemplates those
antique forms in which Greek plastic art embodied
its ideal of the divine, as he notes the free and bold
yet deUcate modelling of shape and outline, the
charm of rounded fairness and unworn strength in
feature and limb, the delicate gradation of curves
that melt into each other by insensible transitions, the poise and dignity of attitude, the suppression or the subtle hinting of minor details, and finally, the exquisite art that can suggest, in its colourless purity, a nation free from the vulgarising taint of passion, or from those sad experiences that grave their record deep on mortal face and form — what wonder that these monuments of the genius of the past should be the admiration and the despair of modern art, or that the modern artist should pronounce, to use the words of one of the most famous of the sculptors of our day, that to surpass the best
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44
THE SCOTTISH ART REVIEW