only their flashing out in bright edges and trenchant shadows; above, the
"infinite," "unspeakable" æther is torn open--but not the blue of it. He
has scarcely any abstract pleasure in blue, or green, or gold; but only
in their shade or flame.

I have yet to trace the causes of this (which will be a long task,
belonging to art questions, not to mythological ones); but it is, I
believe, much connected with the brooding of the shadow of death over
the Greeks without any clear hope of immortality. The restriction of
the color on their vases to dim red (or yellow) with black and white,
is greatly connected with their sepulchral use, and with all the
melancholy of Greek tragic thought; and in this gloom the failure of
color-perception is partly noble, partly base: noble, in its earnestness,
which raises the design of Greek vases as far above the designing of mere
colorist nations like the Chinese, as men's thoughts are above
children's; and yet it is partly base and earthly, and inherently
defective in one human faculty; and I believe it was one cause of the
perishing of their art so swiftly, for indeed there is no decline so
sudden, or down to such utter loss and ludicrous depravity, as the fall
of Greek design on its vases from the fifth to the third century B.C. On
the other hand, the pure colored-gift, when employed for pleasure only,
degrades in another direction; so that among the Indians, Chinese, and
Japanese, all intellectual progress in art has been for ages rendered
impossible by the prevalence of that faculty; and yet it is, as I have
said again and again, the spiritual power of art; and its true brightness
is the essential characteristic of all healthy schools.
** 'eremnen Aigida pasi'.--Il. iv. 166.


95. This, then, finally, was the perfect color-conception of Athena: the