e; but his soul, like that of Plato's
false astronomer, becomes more and more immersed in sense, until nothing
which lacks an appeal to sense has interest for him. How could such an
one ever again endure the greyness of the ideal or spiritual world? The
spiritualist is satisfied in seeing the sensuous elements escape from his
conceptions; his interest grows, as the dyed garment bleaches in the
keener air. But the artist steeps his thought again and again into the
fire of colour. To the Greek this immersion in the sensuous was
indifferent. Greek sensuousness, therefore, does not fever the blood; it
is shameless and childlike. Christian asceticism, on the other hand,
discrediting the slightest touch of sense, has from time to time provoked
into strong emphasis the contrast or antagonism to itself, of the
artistic life, with its inevitable sensuousness.--I did but taste a
little honey with the end of the rod that was in mine hand, and lo, I
must die!--It has sometimes seemed hard to pursue that life without
something of conscious disavowal of a spiritual world; and this imparts
to genuine artistic interests a kind of intoxication. From this
intoxication Winckelmann is free; he fingers those pagan marbles with
unsinged hands, with no sense of shame or loss. That is to deal with the
sensuous side of art in the pagan manner.

The longer we contemplate that Hellenic ideal, in which man is at unity
with himself, with his physical nature, with the outward world, the more
we may be inclined to regret that he should ever have passed beyond it,
to contend for a perfection that makes the blood turbid, and frets the
flesh, and discredits the actual world about us. But if he was to be
saved from the ennui which ever attaches itself to realisation, even the
realisation of perfection, it was necessary that a conflict should come,
and some sharper note grieve the perfect harmony, to the end that the
spirit chafed by it might beat out at last a larger and profounder music.
In Greek tragedy this conflict has begun; man finds himself face to face
with rival claims. Greek tragedy shows how such a conflict may be treated
with serenity, how the evolution of it may be a spectacle of the dignity,
not of the impotence, of the human spirit. But it is not only in tragedy
that the Greek spirit showed itself capable of thus winning joy out of
matter in itself full of discouragements. Theocritus, too, often strikes
a note of romantic sadness. But what