Greek art is thus, almost from the first, essentially distinguished
from the art of Egypt, by an energetic striving after truth in
organic form. In representing the human figure, Egyptian art had
held by mathematical or mechanical proportions exclusively. The
Greek apprehends of it, as the main truth, that it is a living
organism, with freedom of movement, and hence the infinite
possibilities of motion, and of expression by motion, with which the
imagination credits the higher sort of Greek sculpture; while the
figures of Egyptian art, graceful as they often are, seem absolutely
incapable of any motion or gesture, other than the one actually
designed. The work of the Greek sculptor, together with its more
real anatomy, becomes full also of human soul.
That old, primitive, mystical, first period of Greek religion, with
its profound, though half-conscious, intuitions of spiritual powers
in the natural world, attaching itself not to the worship of visible
human forms, but to relics, to natural or half-natural objects--the
roughly hewn tree, the unwrought stone, the pillar, the holy cone of
Aphrodite in her dimly-lighted cell at Paphos--had passed away.
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