movement. The art of sculpture records the
first naive, unperplexed recognition of man by himself; and it is a proof
of 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 and 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. That is because those arts can accomplish their function in
the choice and development of some special situation, which lifts or
glorifies a character, in itself not poetical. To realise this situation,
to define in a chill and empty atmosphere, the focus where rays, in
themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to burn, the artist has to
employ the most cunning detail, to complicate and refine upon thought and
passion a thousand-fold. The poems of Robert Browning supply brilliant
examples of this power. His poetry is pre-eminently the poetry of
situations. The characters themselves are always of secondary importance;
often they are characters in themselves of little interest; they seem to
come to him by strange accidents from the ends of the world. His gift is
shown by the way in which he accepts such a character, and throws it into
some situation, or apprehends it in some delicate pause of life, in which
for a moment it becomes ideal. Take an instance from Dramatis Personae.
In the