sometimes almost below it. They have grace and charm in a supreme
degree, but the element of awe and reverence is wanting."--We
have an Aphrodite at the bath, a 'sweet young thing' enough, no
doubt; an Apollo Sauroctonos, "a youth leaning against a tree,
and idly striking with an arrow at a lizard." A certain natural
magic has been claimed for Praxiteles and his school and
contemporaries; but if they had it, they mixed unholy elements
with it.--And then came Alexander, and carried the dying impetus
eastward with him, to touch India with it before it quite
expired; and after that Hellenism became Hellenisticism, and what
remained of the Crest-Wave in Greece was nothing to lose one
little wink of sleep over.




VII. THE MAURYAS OF INDIA


"Some talk of Alexander" may be appropriate here; but not much.
He was Aristotle's pupil; and apart from or beyond his terrific
military genius, had ideas. Genius is sometimes, perhaps more
often than we suspect, an ability to concentrate the mind into a
kind of impersonality; almost non-existence, so that you have in
it a channel for the great forces of nature to play through. We
shall find that Mr. Judge's phrase 'the Crest-Wave of Evolution'
is no empty one: words were things, with him and in fact, as he
says; and it is so here. For this Crest-Wave is a force that
actually rolls over the world as a wave over the face of the sea,
raising up splendors in one nation after another in order