The Philosophy of Art Art in Greece Author:Hippolyte Taine Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IT. To do this ive have to look at the country once more and draw together our impression of the whole. It is a beautiful land, inspiring one with a joyous se... more »ntiment and tending to make man regard life as a holiday. Scarcely more than its skeleton exists to-day. Like our Provence, and still more than it, it has been shorn and despoiled, scraped, so to say; the ground has sunk away and vegetation is rare; bare, rugged rock, here and there spotted with meagre bushes, absorbs the expanse and occupies three-fourths of the horizon. You may, nevertheless, form an idea of what it was by following the still intact coasts of the Mediterranean from Toulon to Hyferes and from Naples to Sorrento and Amalfi, except that you must imagine a bluer sky, a more transparent atmosphere and more clearly defined and more harmonious mountain forms. It seems as if there was no winter in this country. Evergreen oaks, the olive, the orange, the lemon, and the cypress form, in the valleys and on the sides of 3 the gorges, an eternal summer landscape; they even extend down to the margin of the sea; in February, at certain places, oranges drop from their stems and fall into the water. There is no haze and but little rain; the atmosphere is balmy and the sun mild and beneficent. Man here is not obliged, as in our northern climates, to protect himself against inclemencies by complicated contrivances, and to employ gas, stoves, double, triple and quadruple garments, sidewalks, street-sweepers and the rest to render habitable the muddy and cold sewer through which, without his police and his energy, he would have to paddle. He has no need to invent spectacular halls and operatic scenery; he has only to look around him and find that nature furnishes more beautiful ones than any which his art could devise. At...« less