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The Crest-Wave of Evolution - A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-19 by Kenneth Morris
page 128 of 787 (16%)
wasted: notice had been served to the Spirit to keep off.
Puritanism raised itself as a barrier against the creative force
both in its higher and lower aspects: against art, and against
vice;--probably the best thing that could happen under the
circumstances; and the reason why England recovered so much
sooner than did Italy.--On the other hand, when the influx came
to Holland, it would seem to have found, then, no opportunities
for action in the non-material arts: to have skipped any grand
manifestation in music or poetry: and at once to have hit the
Dutchman 'where he lived' (as they say),--in his paintbox.--But
to return:-

Sculpture, then, came later than poetry to Greece; and in some
ways it was a more sudden and astounding birth. Unluckily nothing
remains--I speak on tenterhooks--of its grandest moment. Progress
in architecture seems to have begun in the reign of Pisistratus;
some time in the next sixty years or so the Soul first impressed
its likeness on carved stone. I once saw a picture--in a lantern
lecture in London--of a pre-Pheidian statue of Athene; dating,
I suppose, from the end of the sixth century B. C. She is
advancing with upraised arm to protect--someone or something. The
figure is, perhaps, stiff and conventional; and you have no doubt
it is the likeness of a Goddess. She is not merely a very fine
and dignified woman; she is a Goddess, with something of
Egyptian sublimity. The artist, if he had not attained perfect
mastery of the human form--if his medium was not quite plastic to
him--knew well what the Soul is like.--The Greek had no feeling,
as the Egyptian had, for the _mystery_ of the Gods; at his very
best (once he had begun to be artistic) he personalized them; he
tried to put into his representations of them, what the Egyptian
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