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44 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