Principles of western civilisation

VI THE ASCENDENCY OF THE PRESENT 185

tion, under its most vigorous and most potent expression, art was entirely untrammelled by an influence which it encounters at every turn in the modern world. Probably no modern mind, Professor Gardner has recently insisted, can fully realise the part played by the esthetic emotions in Greece, or the conditions under which the arts were exercised. ‘With the Greeks,” to use this writer’s words, ‘‘it was one of the first necessities of their nature to utter in some visible form, in monument and sculptured group, their strongest emotions. Their surroundings expressed them as clearly as the shell of the snail indicates its species. They were always, so to speak, blossoming in works of art; they thought and felt in stone or marble, or in the great national pictures which adorned all the places of public resort.” *

Now as in the light of the modern doctrine of evolution progress has been made towards understanding the origin and relations, in the development of the race, of those profound esthetic feelings and emotions which, as Professor Gardner insists, it was one of the first necessities of the Greek nature to utter in visible form in the creations of art, a significant fact is brought into prominence. These zsthetic faculties, we are now coming to perceive, are essentially related in their origin and intensity to deep-lying utilities in the past history of the race. The zsthetic emotions with which we are concerned in Greek art have their roots, that is to say, in the experience of the race in that long-

* “ Greek History and Greek Monuments,” by Percy Gardner, Professor of Classic Archzeology, Oxford University, Atlantic Monthly, vol. \xxxiv.