This conflict is that of nature and spirit, and it is the law of the world. Under the historic form, it is the perfecting of human nature, the successive conquest of rights and property, the amelioration of laws and of the political constitution. In the religious representations, it is the triumph of the moral divinities over the powers of nature.
This combat is announced as the grandest catastrophe in the history of the world: moreover, this is not the subject of a particular myth; it is the principal, decisive fact, which constitutes the centre of this mythology.
The conclusion of all this in respect to the history of art and to the development of the ideal, is that art ought to act like mythology, and reject as unworthy all that is purely physical or animal, that which is confused, fantastic, or obscure, all gross mingling of the material and the spiritual. All these creations of an ill-regulated imagination find here no more place; they must flee before the light of the Soul. Art purifies itself of all caprice, fancy, or symbolic accessory, of every vague and confused idea.
In like manner, the new gods form an organized and established world. This unity affirms and perfects itself more in the later developments of plastic art and poetry.
Nevertheless, the old elements, driven back by the accession of moral forces, preserve a place at their side, or are combined with them. Such is, for example, the significance and the aim of the mysteries.
In the new divinities, who are ethical persons, there remains also an echo, a reflex of the powers of nature. They present, consequently, a combination of the physical and the ethical element, but the first is subordinate to the second. Thus, Neptune is the sea, but he is besides invoked as the god of navigation and the founder of cities; Apollo is the Sun, the god of light, but he is also the god of spiritual light, of science and of the oracles. In Jupiter, Diana, Hercules, and Venus, it is easy to discover the physical side combined with the moral sense.
Thus, in the new divinities, the elements of nature, after having been debased and degraded, reappear and are preserved. This is also true of the forms of the animal kingdom; but the symbolic sense is more and more lost. They figure no longer as accessories combined with the human form; but are reduced to mere emblems or attributes—indicating signs, as the eagle by the side of Jupiter, the peacock before Juno, the dove near Venus, where the principal myth is no more than an accidental fact, of little importance in the life of the god, and which, abandoned to the imagination of the poets, becomes the text of licentious histories.
2. After having considered the development of the ideal in Greek art, a development parallel to that of religion and mythology, we have to consider it in its principal characteristics, such as it has emanated from the creative activity or from the imagination of the poet and the artist.
This mythology has its origin in the previous religions, but its gods are the creation of Homer and Hesiod. Tradition furnished the materials; but the idea which each god ought to represent, and, besides, the form which expresses it in its purity and simplicity—this is what was not given. This ideal type the poets drew from their genius, discovering also the true form which befitted it. Thereby they were creators of that mythology which we admire in Greek art, and which is confounded with it.
The Greek gods have no less their origin in the spirit and the credences of the Greek people, and in the national belief; the poets were the interpreters of the general thought, of what there was most elevated in the imagination of the people. Henceforth, the artist, as we have seen above, takes a position wholly different from that which he held in the East. His inspiration is personal. His work is that of a free imagination, creating according to its own conceptions. The inspiration does not come from without; what they reveal is the ideas of the human spirit, what there is deepest in the heart of man. Also, the artists are truly poets; they fashion, according to their liking, the content and the form, in order to draw from them free and original figures. Tradition is shorn, in their hands, of all that is gross, symbolic, repulsive, and deformed; they eliminate the idea which they wish to illustrate, and individualize it under the human form. Such is the manner, free, though not arbitrary, in which the Greek artists proceed in the creation of their works.