We come to another point.  The Greek gods as we know them in classical sculpture are always imaged in human shape.  This was not of course always the case with other nations.  We have seen how among savages the totem, that is, the emblem of tribal unity, was usually an animal or a plant.  We have seen how the emotions of the Siberian tribe in Saghalien focussed on a bear.  The savage totem, the Saghalien Bear, is on the way to be, but is not quite, a god; he is not personal enough.  The Egyptians, and in part the Assyrians, halted half-way and made their gods into monstrous shapes, half-animal, half-man, which have their own mystical grandeur.  But since we are men ourselves, feeling human emotion, if our gods are in great part projected emotions, the natural form for them to take is human shape.

“Art imitates Nature,” says Aristotle, in a phrase that has been much misunderstood.  It has been taken to mean that art is a copy or reproduction of natural objects.  But by “Nature” Aristotle never means the outside world of created things, he means rather creative force, what produces, not what has been produced.  We might almost translate the Greek phrase, “Art, like Nature, creates things,” “Art acts like Nature in producing things.”  These things are, first and foremost, human things, human action.  The drama, with which Aristotle is so much concerned, invents human action like real, natural action.  Dancing “imitates character, emotion, action.”  Art is to Aristotle almost wholly bound by the limitations of human nature.

This is, of course, characteristically a Greek limitation.  “Man is the measure of all things,” said the old Greek sophist, but modern science has taught us another lesson.  Man may be in the foreground, but the drama of man’s life is acted out for us against a tremendous background of natural happenings:  a background that preceded man and will outlast him; and this background profoundly affects our imagination, and hence our art.  We moderns are in love with the background.  Our art is a landscape art.  The ancient landscape painter could not, or would not, trust the background to tell its own tale:  if he painted a mountain he set up a mountain-god to make it real; if he outlined a coast he set human coast-nymphs on its shore to make clear the meaning.

Contrast with this our modern landscape, from which bit by bit the nymph has been wholly banished.  It is the art of a stage, without actors, a scene which is all background, all suggestion.  It is an art given us by sheer recoil from science, which has dwarfed actual human life almost to imaginative extinction.

“Landscape, then, offered to the modern imagination a scene empty of definite actors, superhuman or human, that yielded to reverie without challenge all that is in a moral without a creed, tension or ambush of the dark, threat of ominous gloom, the relenting and tender return or overwhelming outburst of light, the pageantry of clouds above a world turned quaker, the monstrous weeds of trees outside the town, the sea that is obstinately epic still."[51]

It was to this world of backgrounds that men fled, hunted by the sense of their own insignificance.