Meanwhile, we cannot cast our eyes upon those sculptures across the Delta without understanding our own spirit better. Look at so many of those mediaeval figures, each so individual and peculiar, chosen by the artist we don't know why, except because he loved it,—the detail first and the ensemble afterwards, but beauty nestling everywhere amid the curiousness. Oddity and redundancy, perhaps, but infinite sincerity,—what is this but our own life in another form greeting us across the ages?
Bacon expressed the Germanic spirit when he wrote: “There is no excellent beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.” The mediterranean or classic spirit has always sought to avoid strangeness, and thereby its works are so wonderfully communicable and urbane. It starts with the notion that a noble ensemble is possible, and works over the raw material by way of elimination and abstraction. But in spite of the intellectuality of classic work, we may still believe in our Germanic spirit as being the more fruitful thing. Its productions are fuller-bodied and less abstract. Something indeed it misses,—universality, simplicity, and purity; but it preserves more turns and shades of truth, and its content is so much the richer for its greater concreteness.
We gain above all a certain loveability in our works. Love goes from one individual to another individual, but individuals are always redundant with their own detail. Love, when once kindled, feeds on every point of peculiarity which its object offers. The Germanic genius loves unique objects, rich in curves and quirks, and points of peculiarity.
The mediterranean genius, more precocious, got historically the earlier right of way in artistic matters, and in that field has usually kept the prestige and authority. A century ago the great literary Germans themselves almost forgot, in their admiration of the classic spirit, what they owed to their own Northern character. It was in the philosophic and scientific field, and in poetry, that the greatness of the German genius first came to be acknowledged. But greatness can afford to bide its time. The whirligig has its revenges. And there is something almost epigrammatic in the fact that one of the very first steps which Harvard takes towards what must eventually be a great illustrative
