90 ESSAYS IN NATIONAL IDEALISM.

the veil from the face of super-woman than to combine-
visible perfections by a process of intellectual selection..
The result would be a work suggesting, more or less per-
fectly in accordance with his keenness of inner vision and
technical capacity for its material embodiment, the real
Helen as she lived in the national consciousness, a Helen
more real than she who in the flesh brought death and
sorrow to the Greek and Trojan heroes.

The Greek, indeed, was above the " aesthetic nihilism""
(to borrow a phrase from Professor Gardner) which sees
the aim of art in the faithful reproduction of nature ;
but he made an intellectual selection from natural forms,
instead of seeking the highest truth where alone it is to be-
found, in one's inner consciousness. It is true that Greek
art was to an extent religious ; but it failed in the greatest
qualities, because the religion expressed in it was in no-
sense transcendental, and this is the explanation of the
humanism, almost the "bourgeois character, one might say,,
of the Greek gods. There are, for instance, many Apollos,.
of which it is said that there are equally good grounds for
regarding them as representations, or even portraits, of'
athletes.*

Hinduism, like Christianity, knew that life could not
be an end in itself, but that the true end of our existence
transcends it. But the Greeks and Bomans placed this,
end absolutely in life itself. This limitation could not fail
to find expression as much in their art as their religion.
" The Greeks ", says Burne- Jones, " give you the godlike-
beauty, strength, majesty. They suggest that wisdom is
Godlike. They nowhere suggest the mystery of life."t

In all these respects Greek literature is immeasur—

* Walters w The Art of the Greeks" (p. 73).
t E. B. J. Life (p. 263).