Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/621

Rh

But precisely for that reason Greek art—the least mysterious we know—is the mystery of art. It is in radical contradiction to the profound principle of art itself, which is to imagine for us a living interior world, exalting itself with an all-powerful illusion and giving us an image which will not be the exact representation of our exterior world. To Greek art all symbolism is foreign. It is naturalistic. And if in its desire for a realizable absolute it makes nature more beautiful, it is always in the narrow sense taught by nature herself. Greek art neither transposes, nor stylizes, nor schematizes; it does not even summarize. It expresses perfectly. It carries the splendour of physical (and of none but physical) life to the limit of the formal indications which life has revealed. It says everything—in such a way that it will never be said better or even as well— but it suggests hardly anything. It is this which makes it incomparable—and arrested. It is anthropomorphic, to be sure, since it sees nothing beyond the human form carried to the point of most rigorous harmony and of adaptation to its function. It is not anthropocentric. Limiting its expression of the world to representation of the object perfected by attentive study, it gives over the search in man himself of the means to enlarge the world and to spiritualize its aspects infinitely and inexhaustibly.

Greek art seems moreover to have turned sharply at the moment when it reached the incomparable height of its naturalist idealism which the genius of Phidias imposed on his followers as a rational and impassable barrier. Apollo, having vanquished Dionysos, was to die of his victory. A vaster rhythm, a musical atmosphere, an appeal to cosmic forces which might have revealed the universal analogy were foreshadowed in the vague doctrines of philosophers and in the equivocal but intoxicating creations of sculptors before the Medic wars and the classic realizations of the Greek genius. Morality and reason brought it in the fifth century, perhaps to the benefit of multitudes, to explore the single road which modern politics and science have at last taken up. But this was at the price of that great intoxication which gives the humblest figure made by an Egyptian, Chinese, or Indian sculptor the privilege of appearing to belong to an invisible ensemble which surpasses and surrounds us. The elements of sensuality and will, of sensibility and intelligence, which give our universe a familiar human character we often re-