r creative force,
what produces, not what has been produced. We might almost translate the
Greek phrase, "Art, like Nature, creates things," "Art acts like Nature
in producing things." These things are, first and foremost, human
things, human action. The drama, with which Aristotle is so much
concerned, invents human action like real, _natural_ action. Dancing
"imitates character, emotion, action." Art is to Aristotle almost wholly
bound by the limitations of _human_ nature.

This is, of course, characteristically a Greek limitation. "Man is the
measure of all things," said the old Greek sophist, but modern science
has taught us another lesson. Man may be in the foreground, but the
drama of man's life is acted out for us against a tremendous background
of natural happenings: a background that preceded man and will outlast
him; and this background profoundly affects our imagination, and hence
our art. We moderns are in love with the background. Our art is a
landscape art. The ancient landscape painter could not, or would not,
trust the background to tell its own tale: if he painted a mountain he
set up a mountain-god to make it real; if he outlined a coast he set
human coast-nymphs on its shore to make clear the meaning.

Contrast with this our modern landscape, from which bit by bit the nymph
has been wholly banished. It is the art of a stage, without actors, a
scene which is all background, all suggestion. It is an art given us by
sheer recoil from science, which has dwarfed actual human life almost to
imaginative extinction.

"Landscape, then, offered to the modern imagination a scene empty
of definite actors, superhuman or human, that yielded to reverie
without challenge all that is in a moral without a creed, tension
or ambush of the dark, threat of ominous gloom, the relenting and
tender return or overwhelming outburst of light, the pageantry of
clouds above a world turned quaker, the monstrous weeds of trees
outside the town, the sea that is obstinately epic still."[51]

It was to this world of backgrounds that men fled, hunted by the sense
of their own insignificance.

"Minds the most strictly bound in their acts by civil life, in their
fancy by the shrivelled look of destiny under scientific speculation,
felt on solitary hill or shore those tides of the blood stir again that
are ruled by the sun and the moon and travelled as if to tryst where an
apparition might take form.