Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/208

186 the high artistic capacity of the Greeks that they apprehended and remained true to these exquisite limitations, yet in spite of them gave to their creations a vital, mobile individuality.

Heiterkeit, blitheness or repose, and Allgemeinheit, generality or breadth, are, then, the supreme characteristics of the Hellenic ideal. But that generality or breadth has nothing in common with the lax observation, the unlearned thought, the flaccid execution which have sometimes claimed superiority in art on the plea of being 'broad' or 'general.' Hellenic breadth and generality come of a culture minute, severe, constantly renewed, rectifying and concentrating its impressions into certain pregnant types. The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited. The range of characters or persons open to them is as various as life itself; no character, however trivial, misshapen, or unlovely, can resist their magic. This is because those arts can accom-