function of the imagination in Greek sculpture really was, in its handling of divine persons.

That Zeus is, in earliest, original, primitive intention, the open sky, across which the thunder sometimes sounds, and from which the rain descends—is a fact which not only explains the various stories related concerning him, but determines also the expression which he retained in the work of Pheidias, so far as it is possible to recall it, long after the growth of those later stories had obscured, for the minds of his worshippers, his primary signification. If men felt, as Arrian tells us, that it was a calamity to die without having seen the Zeus of Olympia; that was because they experienced the impress there of that which the eye and the whole being of man love to find above him; and the genius of Pheidias had availed to shed, upon the gold and ivory of the physical form, the blandness, the breadth, the smile of the open sky; the mild [31] heat of it still coming and going, in the face of the father of all the children of sunshine and shower; as if one of the great white clouds had composed itself into it, and looked down upon them thus, out of the midsummer noonday: so that those things might be felt as warm, and fresh, and blue, by the young and the old, the weak and the strong, who came to sun themselves in the god's presence, as procession and hymn rolled on, in the fragrant and tranquil courts of the great Olympian temple; while all the time those people consciously apprehended in the carved image of Zeus none but the personal, and really human, characteristics.

Or think, again, of the Zeus of Dodona. The oracle of Dodona, with its dim grove of oaks, and sounding instruments of brass to husband the faintest whisper in the leaves, was but a great consecration of that sense of a mysterious will, of which people still feel, or seem to feel, the expression, in the motions of the wind, as it comes and goes, and which makes it, indeed, seem almost more than a mere symbol of the spirit within us. For Zeus was, indeed, the god of the winds also; Aeolus, their so-called god, being only his mortal minister, as having come, by long study of them, through signs in the fire and the like, to have a certain communicable skill regarding them, in relation to practical uses. Now, suppose a Greek sculptor to have proposed to himself to present [32] to his worshippers the image of this Zeus of Dodona, who is in the trees and on the currents of the air. Then, if he had been a really imaginative sculptor, working as Pheidias worked, the very soul of those moving, sonorous creatures would have passed through his hand, into the eyes and hair of the image; as they can actually pass into the visible expression of those who have drunk deeply of them; as we may notice, sometimes, in our walks on mountain or shore.

Victory again—Nikι—associated so often with Zeus—on the top of his staff, on the foot of his throne, on the palm of his extended hand— meant originally, mythologic science tells us, only the great victory of the sky, the triumph of morning over darkness. But that physical morning of her origin has its ministry to the later aesthetic sense also. For if Nikι, when she appears in company with the mortal, and wholly fleshly hero, in whose chariot she stands to guide the horses, or whom she crowns with her garland of parsley or bay, or whose names she writes on a shield, is imaginatively conceived, it is because the old skyey influences are still not quite suppressed in her clear-set eyes, and the dew of the morning still clings to her wings and her floating hair.

The office of the imagination, then, in Greek sculpture, in its handling of divine persons, is thus to condense the impressions of natural things into human form; to retain that early mystical sense of water, or wind, or light, in the [33] moulding of eye and brow; to arrest it, or rather, perhaps, to set it free, there, as human expression. The body of man, indeed, was for the Greeks, still the genuine work of Prometheus; its connexion with earth and air asserted in many a legend, not shaded down, as with us, through innumerable stages of descent, but direct and immediate; in precise contrast to our physical theory of our life, which never seems to fade, dream over it as we will, out of the light of common day. The oracles with their messages to human intelligence from birds and springs of water, or vapours of the earth, were a witness to that connexion. Their story went back, as they believed, with unbroken continuity, and in the very places where their later life was lived, to a past, stretching beyond, yet continuous with, actual memory, in which heaven and earth mingled; to those who were sons and daughters of stars, and streams, and dew; to an ancestry of grander men and women, actually clothed in, or incorporate with, the qualities and influences of those objects; and we can hardly over-estimate the influence on the Greek imagination of this mythical connexion with the natural world, at not so remote a date, and of the solemnising power exercised thereby over their thoughts. In this intensely poetical situation, the historical Greeks, the Athenians of the age of Pericles, found themselves; it was as if the actual roads on which men daily walk, went up and on, into a visible wonderland.

[34] With such habitual impressions concerning the body, the physical nature of man, the Greek sculptor, in his later day, still free in imagination, through the lingering influence of those early dreams, may have more easily infused into human form the sense of sun, or lightning, or cloud, to which it was so closely akin, the spiritual flesh allying itself happily to mystical meanings, and readily expressing seemingly unspeakable qualities. But the human form is a limiting influence also; and in proportion as art impressed human form, in sculpture or in the drama, on the vaguer conceptions of the Greek mind, there was danger of an escape from them of the free spirit of air, and light, and sky. Hence, all through the history of Greek art, there is a struggle, a Streben, as the Germans say, between the palpable and limited human form, and the floating essence it is to contain. On the one hand, was the teeming, still fluid world, of old beliefs, as we see it reflected in the somewhat formless theogony of Hesiod; a world, the Titanic vastness of which is congruous with a certain sublimity of speech, when he has to speak, for instance, of motion or space; as the Greek language itself has a primitive copiousness and energy of words, for wind, fire, water, cold, sound—attesting a deep susceptibility to the impressions of those things—yet with edges, most often, melting into each other. On the other hand, there was that limiting, controlling tendency, [35] identified with the Dorian influence in the history of the Greek mind, the spirit of a severe and wholly self-conscious intelligence; bent on impressing everywhere, in the products of the imagination, the definite, perfectly conceivable human form, as the only worthy subject of art; less in sympathy with the mystical genealogies of Hesiod, than with the heroes of Homer, ending in the entirely humanised religion of Apollo, the clearly understood humanity of the old Greek warriors in the marbles of Aegina. The representation of man, as he is or might be, became the aim of sculpture, and the achievement of this the subject of its whole history; one early carver had opened the eyes, another the lips, a third had given motion to the feet; in various ways, in spite of the retention of archaic idols, the genuine human expression had come, with the truthfulness of life itself.

These two tendencies, then, met and struggled and were harmonised in the supreme imagination, of Pheidias, in sculpture—of Aeschylus, in the drama. Hence, a series of wondrous personalities, of which the Greek imagination became the dwelling-place; beautiful, perfectly understood human outlines, embodying a strange, delightful, lingering sense