t merely the art of Phidias, of Sophocles, that springs from the
energy aroused by the Persian invasions; the energy which finds
expression in the Empire of Athens is to be traced thither, empire and
art arising from the same exaltation of the State and of the
individual. But they are not related as cause and effect, nor is the
art of Sophocles _caused_ by Marathon; but the _Agamemnon_ and Salamis,
the Parthenon and the _Ajax_, are incarnations in words, in deeds, or
in marble of the divine Idea immanent in the whole race of the
Hellenes. A race capable of empire, the civic form of imperialism,
thus arises simultaneously with its greatest achievements in art.
Similarly in the civic State of mediaeval Florence, the age of Leonardo
and of Savonarola is also the age of Lorenzo, when in politics Florence
competes with Venice and the Borgias for the hegemony of Italy, and the
actual bounds of her civic empire are at their widest. So in Venetian
history empire and art reach their height together, and the age which
succeeds that of Giorgione and of Titian is an end not only to the
painting but to the political greatness of Venice.

As in civic so in national empires. In Spain, Charles V and the
Philips are the tyrants of the greatest single military power and of
the first nation of the earth, and have as their subjects Rojas and
Tirso, Lope and Cervantes, Calderon and Velasquez. Racine and Moliere
serve _le grand Monarque_, as Apelles served Alexander. The mariners
who sketched the bounds of this empire, which is at last attaining to
the full consciousness of its mighty destinies, were the contemporaries
of Marlowe and Webster, of Beaumont and Ford.

Napoleon's fretful impatience that its victories should have as their
literary accompaniments only the wan tragedies of Joseph Chenier and
the unleavened odes of Millevoye was just. An empire so glorious, if
based on the people's will, should not have found in the genius of the
age its sworn antagonist. This stamped his empire as spurious.

But these simultaneous phenomena, these supreme attainments at once in
action and in art, are not connected as cause and effect. For the
roots of their identity we must search deeper. The transcendent deed
and the work of art alike have their origin in the _elan_ of the soul,
the diviner vision or the diviner desire. The will which becomes the
deed, the vision which becomes the poem or the picture, are here as yet
one; and this _el