a blithe and steady poise, above
these discouragements, in a clear and sunny stratum of the air!

Into this stage of Greek achievement Winckelmann did not enter. Supreme
as he is where his true interest lay, his insight into the typical unity
and repose of the highest sort of sculpture seems to have involved
limitation in another direction. His conception of art excludes that
bolder type of it which deals confidently and serenely with life,
conflict, evil. Living in a world of exquisite but abstract and
colourless form, he could hardly have conceived of the subtle and
penetrative, but somewhat grotesque art of the modern world. What would
he have thought of Gilliatt, in Victor Hugo's Travailleurs de la Mer, or
of the bleeding mouth of Fantine in the first part of Les Miserables,
penetrated as it is with a sense of beauty, as lively and transparent as
that of a Greek? There is even a sort of preparation for the romantic
temper within the limits of the Greek ideal itself, which Winckelmann
failed to see. For Greek religion has not merely its mournful mysteries
of Adonis, of Hyacinthus, of Demeter, but it is conscious also of the
fall of earlier divine dynasties. Hyperion gives way to Apollo, Oceanus
to Poseidon. Around the feet of that tranquil Olympian family still crowd
the weary shadows of an earlier, more formless, divine world. Even their
still minds are troubled with thoughts of a limit to duration, of
inevitable decay, of dispossession. Again, the supreme and colourless
abstraction of those divine forms, which is the secret of their repose,
is also a premonition of the fleshless, consumptive refinements of the
pale medieval artists. That high indifference to the outward, that
impassivity, has already a touch of the corpse in it; we see already
Angelico and the Master of the Passion in the artistic future. The
crushing of the sensuous, the shutting of the door upon it, the ascetic
interest, is already traceable. Those abstracted gods, "ready to melt out
their essence fine into the winds," who can fold up their flesh as a
garment, and still remain themselves, seem already to feel that bleak
air, in which, like Helen of Troy, they wander as the spectres of the
middle age.

Gradually, as the world came into the church, an artistic interest,
native in the human soul, reasserted its claims. But Christian art was
still dependent on pagan examples, building the shafts of pagan temples
into its churches, perpetuating the f