Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/214

192 nature; his white light taking no colour from any one-sided experience, characterless so far as character involves subjection to the accidental influences of life. In dealing with youth, Greek art betrays a tendency even to merge distinctions of sex. The Hermaphrodite was a favourite subject from early times. It was wrought out over and over again, with passionate care, from the mystic terminal Hermaphrodite of the British Museum, to the perfect blending of male and female beauty in the Hermaphrodite of the Louvre.

'This sense,' says Hegel, 'for the consummate modelling of divine and human forms was preeminently at home in Greece. In its poets and orators, its historians and philosophers, Greece cannot be conceived from a central point, unless one brings, as a key to the understanding of it, an insight into the ideal forms of sculpture, and regards the images of statesmen and philosophers as well as epic and dramatic heroes from the artistic point of view; for those who act, as well as those who create and think, have in those beautiful days of Greece this plastic character. They are great and free, and have grown up on the soil of their own individuality, creating themselves out of themselves, and moulding them-