Principles of western civilisation

188 WESTERN CIVILISATION * ‘CHAP.

a deep-seated principle of our social evolution from the fact, that is to say, that in an epoch in which the ascendency of the present is being slowly overlaid by a higher master-principle of the evolutionary process, the esthetic feelings and emotions, which in their intensest expression are related to the epoch of the ascendency of the present, are no longer free to utter themselves as under the unrestrained and culminating conditions in which Greek art flourished. The wide interval which, in such circumstances, separates the modern world from the conditions which governed the expression of the esthetic emotions in Greece, may be estimated from many points of view. Of all the master minds of the Greeks that of Plato was probably most influenced by those ideas of the infinite and the universal destined to play so great a part in the subsequent development of the world. Nevertheless, when we see Plato, in one of the Dialogues,* attempting to interpret conceptions of this kind through forms of esthetic expression related to the unrestrained standards of his time, the result, although producing no sense of the unseemly in the Greek mind, is to us so inexpressible that the real meaning of the images used is never openly discussed in modern literature. In the epoch of Greek art it was, in short, a canon in keeping with every fundamental principle upon which society was constructed, that to the artist it should be ‘‘one of the first necessities of his nature to utter in some visible form his strongest emotions.” It was the natural and legitimate effort, according to the standards of the time in every other direction, for 1 Phedrus.