Here there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of ineffectual
wholeness of nature, yet with a true beauty and significance of its own.
One result of this temperament is a serenity--Heiterkeit--which
characterises Winckelmann's handling of the sensuous side of Greek art.
This serenity is, perhaps, in great measure, a negative quality; it is
the absence of any sense of want, or corruption, or shame. With the
sensuous element in Greek art he deals in the pagan manner; and what is
implied in that? It has been sometimes said that art is a means of escape
from "the tyranny of the senses." It may be so for the spectator; he may
find that the spectacle of supreme works of art takes from the life of
the senses something of its turbid fever. But this is possible for the
spectator only because the artist, in producing those works, has
gradually sunk his intellectual and spiritual ideas in sensuous form. He
may live, as Keats lived, a pure life; 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.
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