“Minds the most strictly bound in their acts by civil life, in their fancy by the shrivelled look of destiny under scientific speculation, felt on solitary hill or shore those tides of the blood stir again that are ruled by the sun and the moon and travelled as if to tryst where an apparition might take form.  Poets ordained themselves to this vigil, haunters of a desert church, prompters of an elemental theatre, listeners in solitary places for intimations from a spirit in hiding; and painters followed the impulse of Wordsworth.”

We can only see the strength and weakness of Greek sculpture, feel the emotion of which it was the utterance, if we realize clearly this modern spirit of the background.  All great modern, and perhaps even ancient, poets are touched by it.  Drama itself, as Nietzsche showed, “hankers after dissolution into mystery.  Shakespeare would occasionally knock the back out of the stage with a window opening on the ’cloud-capp’d towers.’” But Maeterlinck is the best example, because his genius is less.  He is the embodiment, almost the caricature, of a tendency.

“Maeterlinck sets us figures in the foreground only to launch us into that limbus.  The supers jabbering on the scene are there, children of presentiment and fear, to make us aware of a third, the mysterious one, whose name is not on the bills.  They come to warn us by the nervous check and hurry of their gossip of the approach of that background power.  Omen after omen announces him, the talk starts and drops at his approach, a door shuts and the thrill of his passage is the play."[52]

It is, perhaps, the temperaments that are most allured and terrified by this art of the bogey and the background that most feel the need of and best appreciate the calm and level, rational dignity of Greek naturalism and especially the naturalism of Greek sculpture.

For it is naturalism, not realism, not imitation.  By all manner of renunciations Greek sculpture is what it is.  The material, itself marble, is utterly unlike life, it is perfectly cold and still, it has neither the texture nor the colouring of life.  The story of Pygmalion who fell in love with the statue he had himself sculptured is as false as it is tasteless.  Greek sculpture is the last form of art to incite physical reaction.  It is remote almost to the point of chill abstraction.  The statue in the round renounces not only human life itself, but all the natural background and setting of life.  The statues of the Greek gods are Olympian in spirit as well as subject.  They are like the gods of Epicurus, cut loose alike from the affairs of men, and even the ordered ways of Nature.  So Lucretius[53] pictures them: