the product of the genius of those poets, who discovered by a process of free elaboration the true substantive form of these very gods and are consequently in fact become the creators of that mythology which awakes our admiration of Greek art. Yet for this reason the Homeric gods, in one aspect of them, are not to be taken as the result merely of the poetic phantasy, or nothing more than capricious invention. They have their roots in the genius and beliefs of the Greek folk and the religious basis of that nation. They are the absolute potencies and powers, the highest stretch of the Greek conception, the central point of the beautiful regarded universally, presented, so to speak, by the Muses themselves to the poet. In this free handling, then, the artist takes up an entirely different position from that he occupies in the East. The Hindoo poets and sages have also to begin with material ready to work upon, such as the elements of Nature, the heavens, animals, streams, and so forth, or the pure abstraction of the formless and contentless Brahman. Their enthusiasm, however, is a confusion of the ideal character[181] of the subjectivity which accepts the difficult task of elaborating such an external material to it, an enthusiasm which, in the unmeasured expansion of its imagination, which excludes every secure and absolute[182] direction, is unable to mould its creations conformably to genuine freedom of expression and beauty, and remains the slave of that material in uncontrolled and roving productive activity. It resembles, in fact, a master-builder who has no firm foundation beneath him. Ancient ruins of half dismantled walls, mounds, and projecting rocks fetter him, quite apart from the particular aims according to which he desires to construct his building; and he can only create a wild, inharmonious, and fantastical fabric. In other words, that which he produces is not the result of his imagination freely acting under its own plastic genius. Conversely the Hebrew poets present us with revelations which, it is said, they deliver as the Lord's voice, so that here again the creative source is an enthusiasm not fully self-conscious; it is separated, that is, and distinct from individuality and the productive genius of the artist, as in the wisdom of the Sublime generally it is the abstract and eternal, essentially in its relation to something other than it and external, which is consciously or imaginatively conceived. In classical art artists and poets are, it is true, also prophets and teachers, who declare and reveal to mankind the nature of the Absolute and Divine. But we must emphasize here the following distinctions: