Even in the world of spiritual creation, he has
never, in spite of his admirable gifts of quick perception and warm
emotion, succeeded perfectly, because he never has had steadiness,
patience, sanity enough to comply with the conditions under which
alone can expression be perfectly given to the finest perceptions and
emotions. The Greek has the same perceptive, emotional temperament
as the Celt; but he adds to this temperament the sense of MEASURE;
hence his admirable success in the plastic arts, in which the Celtic
genius, with its chafing against the despotism of fact, its perpetual
straining after mere emotion, has accomplished nothing. In the
comparatively petty art of ornamentation, in rings, brooches,
crosiers, relic-cases, and so on, he has done just enough to show his
delicacy of taste, his happy temperament; but the grand difficulties
of painting and sculpture, the prolonged dealings of spirit with
matter, he has never had patience for. Take the more spiritual arts
of music and poetry. All that emotion alone can do in music the Celt
has done; the very soul of emotion breathes in the Scotch and Irish
airs; but with all this power of musical feeling, what has the Celt,
so eager for emotion that he has not patience for science, effected
in music, to be compared with what the less emotional German,
steadily developing his musical feeling with the science of a
Sebastian Bach or a Beethoven, has effected? In poetry, again,
poetry which the Celt has so passionately, so nobly loved; poetry
where emotion counts for so much, but where reason, too, reason,
measure, sanity, also count for so much,--the Celt has shown genius,
indeed, splendid genius; but even here his faults have clung to him,
and hindered him from producing great works, such as other nations
with a genius for poetry,--the Greeks, say, or the Italians,--have
produced.
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