EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 31 



gravity from men as personalities to men as exponents of 

 their race and age, we gain a new interest in the history 

 of art, a new sense of the vitality and spiritual solidarity of 

 human thought in the most vigorous epochs. We learn to 

 appreciate the labours of those who in obscurity laid the first 

 foundations for some noble intellectual edifice. We deal more 

 equitably and more sympathetically with those who were 

 perforce obliged to carry art forward through its decadence to 

 final diminution and extinction. Nor, though the individual 

 seems to lessen, will this ultimately appear to be the case. 

 Pheidias and Shakespeare are not less than they were because 

 we know them as necessary to a series. Their eminence 

 remains their own. 



We have no means at present of stating precisely how or at 

 what moment the germ of a specific type of art is generated 

 in a nation. It often appears that the first impulse toward 

 creativeness is some deep and serious emotion, some religious 

 enthusiasm, or profound stirring of national consciousness. 

 To transmute this impulse into the sphere of art taxes the 

 energies of the first generation of artists, and the form appears 

 to emerge spontaneously from the spirit of the nation as a 

 whole. Unless we knew that nothing is accidental we should 

 be tempted to say that the form of the Attic drama in Greece, 

 the form of the Shakespearian drama in England, was settled 

 by chance. One thing, meanwhile, is certain. The germ, 

 however generated, is bound to expand ; the form, however 

 determined, controls the genius which seeks expression 

 through its medium. In the earliest stages of expansion the 

 artist becomes half a prophet, and 'sows with the whole 

 sack,' in the plenitude of superabundant inspiration. After 

 the original passion for the ideas to be embodied in art has 

 somewhat subsided, when the form is fixed, and its capacities 

 can be serenely measured, but before the glow and fire of 

 enthusiasm have faded out, there comes a second period. In 

 this period art is studied more for art's sake, but the generative 

 potency of the first founders is by no means exhausted. 

 For a while, at this moment, the artist is priest, prophet, 

 hierophant, and charmer all in one. More conscious of the 



