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know what course Fate has drawn for us to follow by day or in the night season.'

'*

For as according to the Jewish account God created man in His own image, so it may be said that the Greeks created their gods in the image of man not only in written but in visible form and showed the value they set upon life. The art of the Periclean age, whether it presents gods or men, presents them in complete harmony of body and mind without the slightest trace of nervousness about the goodness or the meaning of life. There is no sign of trouble or doubt, no sense of withdrawal into themselves or renouncement of the external world to be seen on their faces. Nor, on the other hand, is there any suggestion of inertness or blindness to reality; the eyes of gods and men look forth openly and courageously upon their world. The Apollo at Olympia and the men and youths and maidens on the frieze of the Parthenon are intent upon the action of the particular moment without reservation or criticism, nor can we detect in their serenity the mental effort of having to conquer fears or doubts born of disillusionment.

The gods and men of the Parthenon are no less masters over life than the heroes and heroines of Sophocles' plays. In order to solace the feelings of pity and fear aroused by the course of the world the dramatist presents in his tragedies men and women involved in, yet manifestly able to endure, and to triumph over, the circumstances of life. In sculpture their artists produced figures whose great seriousness implied full consciousness of the meaning of life and raised them far above the easy sensual life of the Homeric Olympians. Those figures express the reality of the world as it is conceived by a vigorous people building their own house of life, unhampered by ideals or ruins from the past. Their belief in the desirability of life triumphs over the misfortunes and weaknesses of individual lives. 'Sorrow and joy come round to all as the Bear moves in his circling path.' But the balance of life accepted under such conditions is no less delicate than the refinements of the art which springs from it, and when the force of adversity swept too long and strongly in one direction † men found that reality was * 'Nemean,' VI.

† In the Peloponnesian War, 431-404.

after all too strong for them, and that they could no longer face it with unaided courage.

The peculiar nature of the Greek view of life can be best understood in the Parthenon. The Parthenon is the perfect realisation in artistic form of that belief in necessary limits in the practical world upon which the life of Periclean Athens rested. As the City-State of the Funeral Oration claimed to assure the possibilities of life more completely than any other form of state, so in the Parthenon the artist, working with far more complete control over his material, has evolved a form able to satisfy completely the eye and mind of the spectator of like nature with himself, by the clear articulation and co-ordination and perfect reasonableness of its structure. There, in a form into which no element of the unknown or infinite intruded, whose limits were entirely defined and imposed by itself, the mind recognised something entirely good and fair, in which it could rest satisfied, freed from the accidents and incalculable forces by which actual life was disturbed. The Parthenon is supreme in beauty and divinity for those whose final reality lies within the limits of this life, whose delights are with the sons of men.' It is preeminently the house built with hands. There are no places in this house of God where sight is swallowed up in mystery and the eye follows soaring lines into dimness or is overpowered by space and light beneath great domes. No one has expressed the sense of mystery in modern building, so different from the Greek attitude, better than Wordsworth, who speaks of the builder of King's College Chapel in Cambridge as

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'the man who fashioned for the sense
These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells,
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
Lingering and wandering on as loth to die;
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality '—

and of St Paul's:

'That younger Pile whose sky-like dome
Hath typified by reach of daring art
Infinity's embrace.'

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Everywhere in Europe, except on the Acropolis, the great buildings fall short of perfection. Cathedral is contrasted with cathedral, inferiorities and superiorities are admitted; here a west front, there the loftiness of nave or chancel is held to be unsurpassed. But no competent critic has ever felt justified in censuring this or that detail in the Parthenon as faulty, or in maintaining that a broader front or a thicker or more slender column would have made it more perfect. Renan relates in his 'Souvenirs' that he came to Athens convinced that perfection does not belong to this world and averse to believe in the miraculous. On the Acropolis he was overwhelmed by 'le miracle Grec. L'impression que me fit Athènes est de beaucoup la plus forte que j'aie jamais ressentie. Il y a un lieu où la perfection existe; il n'y en a pas deux : c'est celui là. . . . C'était l'idéal cristallisé en marbre pentélique.' But to the contemporary Greeks the Parthenon was no miracle. The architects and masons and workmen knew very well the relationship of each part and detail to the whole, and how each stone had come into its proper place. They had complete control over the marble in which they worked, and what could not be realised entirely in the less plastic material of human nature exposed to incalculable influences, was realised exactly in their art. The result corresponded to their intentions, because those intentions were completely reasonable and limited. The Parthenon seems a miracle-and that only in an equivocal sense-to those whose reality is no longer the forms of finite existence but a spiritual and infinite God whose power and presence they are ever striving to express in visible and therefore limited form, and so there arises that contradiction and inadequacy in expression which is nearly always felt in European art since the fifth century B.C.

It is only by comparison with subsequent works that the perfection of the Parthenon is acknowledged, and with that acknowledgment came the certainty that one form of the world, as Hegel would say, had grown old. As the Parthenon is the perfection of limited form in architecture, so it marks the point where the finite ceases to satisfy the spirit of man. In the art of the following century we notice the presence of new qualities, pathos and aloofness of expression suggesting the

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Art. 9.-THE JULY REVOLT IN VIENNA.

THE outside world was probably much surprised at the terrible happenings which took place last July in Vienna; no one could have dreamed of such an outbreak of wild destructive rage on the part of the 'good-humoured,' amiable and worthy Viennese. The accounts of the startling excesses must for outsiders have seemed like a thunderbolt from a clear sky; for the trial to which events at Schattendorf had given rise, and which furnished the occasion, were probably regarded as quite a local and unimportant Austrian affair. That the sky out of which this dangerous flash came was in reality not so unclouded as appeared from afar; that for some considerable time menacing thunder-clouds had been gathering; and that the political atmosphere in Austria, especially in Vienna, had long been surcharged with poisonous and dangerous gases ready to explode: of all this the outside world for the most part knew and could know nothing, because the Vienna Commune shortly before had arranged a series of festivities, the object of which was to bring before the eyes of the numerous foreign visitors to Vienna the increasing prosperity of the city under the Social Democratic government of the Council, and in particular of the Burgomaster, Herr C. Seitz. With this object in view an exhibition, 'Vienna and the Viennese,' had been arranged to illustrate that progress, contrasting the brilliant Vienna of to-day with all the products of invention and culture, and the modest Vienna of former years in all its backwardness; a manœuvre as bold as it was clumsy, for it was an absurd pretension to place the general progress of our times to the credit of the Social Democrats; but, nevertheless, their object must have been achieved with many of the visitors to the Exhibition, who unquestionably left Vienna with the conviction that under the beneficent guidance of the Social Democratic Commune the city had become a Utopia in which every day is a holiday and where the people pass their existence in the full enjoyment of life, with music and dancing, plentiful food and drink. . . . Suddenly the glare of the burning Palace of Justice and the howls of the mob destroyed this beautiful illusion, and showed that the Vienna, celebrating the

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