Everywhere there is the
effect of an awaking, of a child's sleep just disturbed. All these
effects are united in a single instance--the adorante of the museum of
Berlin, a youth who has gained the wrestler's prize, with hands lifted
and open, in praise for the victory. Fresh, unperplexed, it is the image
of man as he springs first from the sleep of nature; his white light
taking no colour from any one-sided experience, characterless, so far as
character involves subjection to the accidental influences of life.
"This sense," says Hegel, "for the consummate modelling of divine and
human forms was pre-eminently at home in Greece. In its poets and
orators, its historians and philosophers, Greece cannot be conceived from
a central point, unless one brings, as a key to the understanding of it,
an insight into the ideal forms of sculpture, and regards the images of
statesmen and philosophers, as well as epic and dramatic heroes, from the
artistic point of view; for those who act, as well as those who create
and think, have, in those beautiful days of Greece, this plastic
character.
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