material, lies much nearer than do the plastic arts to the Spirit
on its descending course; and therefore receives the impulse of
its descent much sooner. Perhaps music lies higher again; which
is why music was the first of the arts to blossom at all in this
nascent civilization of ours at Point Loma. Let me diverge a
little, and take a glance round.--At any such time, the seeds
of music may not be present in strength or in a form to be
quickenable into a separately manifesting art; and this may be
true of poetry too; yet where poetry is, you may say music has
been; for every real poem is born out of a pre-existing music of
its own, and is the _inverbation_ of it. The Greek Melic poets
(the lyricists) were all musicians first, with an intricate
musical science, on the forms of which they arranged their
language; I do not know whether they wrote their music apart
from the words. After the Greek, the Italian illumination was the
greatest in western history; there the influx, beginning in the
thirteenth century, produced first its chief poetic splendor in
Dante before that century had passed; not raising an equal
greatness in painting and sculpture until the fifteenth. In
England, the Breath that kindled Shakespeare never blew down so
far as to light up a great moment in the plastic arts: there
were some few figures of the second rank in painting presently;
in sculpture, nothing at all (to speak of). Painting, you see,
works in a little less material medium than sculpture does.
Dante's Italy had not quite plunged into that orgy of vice,
characteristic of the great creative ages, which we find in the
Italy of the Cinquecento. But England, even in Shakespeare's
day, was admiring and tending to imitate Italian wickedness.
James I's reign was as corrupt as may be; and though the Puritan
reaction followed, the creative force had already been largely