THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 141 



civilization in the future, is expressed with remark- 

 able strength and consistency throughout all the 

 higher phases of Western Art. Every student 

 who has reached the last meanings of Greek Art 

 will have come in view sooner or later of the fact 

 that there was a clear conception of the Greek mind 

 ever seeking with great force to express itself 

 through Greek Art. He will have come to the con- 

 viction that it was in its representations of the 

 quality of the childlike in the human face that 

 Greek Art struggled to express its highest content. 

 In this effort of the Greek genius to reproduce the 

 content of the child mind in its ^presentations of 

 the human face, the beholder, in short, is witnessing 

 nothing less than the sustained attempt of this 

 surprisingly endowed Western people thus to utter 

 the soul of the world through the medium of its 

 art. 



It is the note of this struggle which re-echoes 

 throughout all Western art down to the present 

 time. The instinctive perception of the superiority 

 and of the supremacy of the child mind in civiliza- 

 tion is witnessed in all the higher phases of Western 

 literature. The conception that genius represents 

 or is closely allied to the childlike and that the 

 mark of both is their superior relationship to the 

 universal permeates all the literature of the West, 



