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.
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