Pagina 145 di 1391

Whether or no, like some writers, he felt more than he expressed,

it is at any rate remarkable that the greatest perfection of the

fine arts should coincide with an almost entire silence about

them. In one very striking passage he tells us that a work of

art, like the State, is a whole; and this conception of a whole

and the love of the newly-born mathematical sciences may be

regarded, if not as the inspiring, at any rate as the regulating

principles of Greek art (Xen. Mem.; and Sophist).