Such forms of art, then, are inadequate to
the matter they clothe; they remain ever below its level.
Something of this kind is true also of oriental art. As in the
middle age from an exaggerated inwardness, so in the East from a
vagueness, a want of definition, in thought, the matter presented
to art is unmanageable, and the forms of sense struggle vainly
with it. The many-headed gods of the East, the orientalised,
many-breasted Diana of Ephesus, like Angelico's fresco, are at
best overcharged symbols, a means of hinting at an idea which art
cannot fitly or completely express, which still remains in the
world of shadows.
But take a work of Greek art,--the Venus of Melos. That is in no
sense a symbol, a suggestion, of anything beyond its own
victorious fairness. The mind begins and ends with the finite
image, yet loses no part of the spiritual motive. [206] That motive
is not lightly and loosely attached to the sensuous form, as its
meaning to an allegory, but saturates and is identical with it. The
Greek mind had advanced to a particular stage of self-reflexion,
but was careful not to pass beyond it. In oriental thought there is
a vague conception of life everywhere, but no true appreciation
of itself by the mind, no knowledge of the distinction of man's
nature: in its consciousness of itself, humanity is still confused
with the fantastic, indeterminate life of the animal and vegetable
world. In Greek thought, on the other hand, the "lordship of the
soul" is recognised; that lordship gives authority and divinity to
human eyes and hands and feet; inanimate nature is thrown into
the background.
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