Premising this,
I now go on to a second matter, somewhat more delicate and inward
than that with which I began. Every one knows how well the Greek and
Latin races, with their direct sense for the visible, palpable world,
have succeeded in the plastic arts. The sheer German races, too,
with their honest love of fact, and their steady pursuit of it,--
their fidelity to nature, in short,--have attained a high degree of
success in these arts; few people will deny that Albert Durer and
Rubens, for example, are to be called masters in painting, and in the
high kind of painting. The Celtic races, on the other hand, have
shown a singular inaptitude for the plastic arts; the abstract,
severe character of the Druidical religion, its dealing with the eye
of the mind rather than the eye of the body, its having no elaborate
temples and beautiful idols, all point this way from the first; its
sentiment cannot satisfy itself, cannot even find a resting-place for
itself, in colour and form; it presses on to the impalpable, the
ideal. The forest of trees and the forest of rocks, not hewn timber
and carved stones, suit its aspirations for something not to be
bounded or expressed. With this tendency, the Celtic races have, as
I remarked before, been necessarily almost impotent in the higher
branches of the plastic arts.
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