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.
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