Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/211

Rh stracting from it. All that is accidental, that distracts the simple effect of the supreme types of humanity, all traces in them of the commonness of the world, it gradually purges away.

Works of art produced under this law, and only these, are really characterised by Hellenic generality or breadth. In every direction it is a law of limitation; it keeps passion always below that degree of intensity at which it is necessarily transitory, never winding up the features to one note of anger, or desire, or surprise. In the allegorical designs of the middle ages, we find isolated qualities portrayed as by so many masks; its religious art has familiarised us with faces fixed obdurately into blank types of religious sentiment; and men and women, in the hurry of life, often wear the sharp impress of one absorbing motive, from which it is said death sets their features free. All such instances may be ranged under the 'grotesque'; and the Hellenic ideal has nothing in common with the 'grotesque.' It lets passion play lightly over the surface of the individual form, which loses by it nothing of its central impassivity, its depth and repose. To all but the highest culture, the reserved faces of the gods will ever have something of insipidity. Again, in the best Greek sculpture, the archaic immobility has been thawed, its forms are in motion; but it is a motion