Poets ordained themselves to this vigil,
haunters of a desert church, prompters of an elemental theatre,
listeners in solitary places for intimations from a spirit in hiding;
and painters followed the impulse of Wordsworth."

We can only see the strength and weakness of Greek sculpture, feel the
emotion of which it was the utterance, if we realize clearly this modern
spirit of the background. All great modern, and perhaps even ancient,
poets are touched by it. Drama itself, as Nietzsche showed, "hankers
after dissolution into mystery. Shakespeare would occasionally knock the
back out of the stage with a window opening on the 'cloud-capp'd
towers.'" But Maeterlinck is the best example, because his genius is
less. He is the embodiment, almost the caricature, of a tendency.

"Maeterlinck sets us figures in the foreground only to launch us
into that limbus. The supers jabbering on the scene are there,
children of presentiment and fear, to make us aware of a third, the
mysterious one, whose name is not on the bills. They come to warn
us by the nervous check and hurry of their gossip of the approach
of that background power. Omen after omen announces him, the talk
starts and drops at his approach, a door shuts and the thrill of
his passage is the play."[52]

It is, perhaps, the temperaments that are most allured and terrified by
this art of the bogey and the background that most feel the need of and
best appreciate the calm and level, rational dignity of Greek naturalism
and especially the naturalism of Greek sculpture.

For it is naturalism, not realism, not imitation. By all manner of
renunciations Greek sculpture is what it is. The material, itself
marble, is utterly unlike life, it is perfectly cold and still, it has
neither the texture nor the colouring of life. The story of Pygmalion
who fell in love with the statue he had himself sculptured is as false
as it is tasteless. Greek sculpture is the last form of art to incite
physical reaction. It is remote almost to the point of chill
abstraction. The statue in the round renounces not only human life
itself, but all the natural background and setting of life. The statues
of the Greek gods are Olympian in spirit as well as subject. They are
like the gods of Epicurus, cut loose alike from the affairs of men, and
even the ordered ways of Nature. So Lucretius[53] pictures them:

"The divinity of the gods is revealed and their t