TO SCIENCE AND MORALITY 107 



that subject-matter, art flourishes best where the free play of 

 personality is possible. 



Not then in vice and immorality (the weakness of the 

 Renaissance), but in unexampled many-sidedness of human 

 character (the strength of that epoch), must we seek the 

 solution of the problem offered by Italy in the sixteenth 

 century. 



In like manner, it was not from the corruption of Athens, 

 from slavery, paiderastia, hetaira-worship, venality, delation, 

 democratic insubordination, that the noble arts and letters 

 of Hellas, the sculpture of Pheidias, the tragedy of Sophocles, 

 the comedy of Aristophanes, the history of Thucydides, the 

 philosophy of Plato emerged. No ; but in spite of these 

 things, and regardless of them, from the living well-springs 

 of a highly specialised and powerfully vital human energy, 

 they sprang into imperishable existence. 



Let us not deceive ourselves. Art is indissolubly bound 

 up with man's spiritual forces. What we learn from the 

 Italian Renaissance or from the Athens of Socrates is this : 

 that art is able to assert man's moral nature at moments 

 when it seems in other spheres to have been paralysed or 

 vitiated. 





