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%)
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 |
|