62. You know I sometimes speak of these generally as the Gothic and Greek schools, sometimes as the colorist and chiaroscurist. All these oppositions are liable to infinite qualification and gradation, as between species of animals; and you must not be troubled, therefore, if sometimes momentary contradictions seem to arise in examining special points. Nay, the modes of opposition in the greatest men are inlaid and complex; difficult to explain, though in themselves clear. Thus you know in your study of sculpture we saw that the essential aim of the Greek art was tranquil action; the chief aim of Gothic art was passionate rest, a peace, an eternity of intense sentiment. As I go into detail, I shall continually therefore have to oppose Gothic passion to Greek temperance; yet Gothic rigidity, [Greek: stasis] of [Greek: ekstasis], to Greek action and [Greek: eleutheria]. You see how doubly, how intimately, opposed the ideas are; yet how difficult to explain without apparent contradiction.
63. Now, to-day, I must guard you carefully against a misapprehension of this kind. I have told you that the Greeks as Greeks made real and material what was before indefinite; they turned the clouds and the lightning of Mount Ithome into the human flesh and eagle upon the extended arm of the Messenian Zeus. And yet, being in all things set upon absolute veracity and realization, they perceive as they work and think forward that to see in all things truly is to see in all things dimly and through hiding of cloud and fire.
So that the schools of Crystal, visionary, passionate, and fantastic in purpose, are, in method, trenchantly formal and clear; and the schools of Clay, absolutely realistic, temperate, and simple in purpose, are, in method, mysterious and soft; sometimes licentious, sometimes terrific, and always obscure.
64. Look once more at this Greek dancing-girl, which is from a terra cotta, and therefore intensely of the school of Clay; look at her beside this Madonna of Filippo Lippi's: Greek motion against Gothic absolute quietness; Greek indifference--dancing careless--against Gothic passion, the mother's--what word can I use except frenzy of love; Greek fleshliness against hungry wasting of the self-forgetful body; Greek softness of diffused shadow and ductile curve, against Gothic lucidity of color and acuteness of angle; and Greek simplicity and cold veracity against Gothic rapture of trusted vision.