Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/78

68 consistent whole, what was but the imperfect reflex of the spiritual life of many nations not harmonized. This high influence of toleration came from the Dorians, who were pre-eminently the genius of Greece.

To that large multitude, whose idea of Dorians is derived from Plutarch's life of Lycurgus (a personage whom the researches of Müller make to be rather shadowy, certainly mythological), it will be a new idea that they were not mainly a military race, nor at all of a conquering spirit, like the Romans. Yet their forcible occupation of Peloponnesus in the age after the Trojan war, and the military attitude of Sparta during the period of recorded history, seem to have given a natural basis to such a view. The truth is, we have looked at Greece too much with eyes and minds that the Romans have pre-occupied. It is necessary to understand distinctly, that Greece, at least Dorian Greece, was, in most important respects, very different from Rome. Both nations had organic genius, but the Greeks only the artistic-organic. The Romans organized brute force, together with the moral force of the Sabines, the cunning of the commercial colonies of Magna Græcia, and the formal stateliness of a sacerdotal Etruria; forming a compound whole, which expressed one element of human nature,—that which commands and obeys. On the other hand, the Greeks organized the harvest of their sensibilities into ideal forms. It was not strength merely or mainly which they sought as the highest good, but beauty, order, which might be expressed by a building, a statue, a painting, a procession, a festival, and, more fully still, by the body politic.

But what is order? It surely is not mere subjection. It means subordination according to a true, which is ever, if largely enough apprehended, a beautiful idea. It is an arrangement around a centre. It is a disposition of elements, such that the weak may borrow of the strong, and the strong be adorned. Thus their aim in politics was far other than to exhibit the right of the strongest. It was to have a society perfectly organized to express the beauty of the most beautiful.

The genesis of the Dorians is yet undiscovered. Like