onic. And he who, blending the
province of the arts, calling them all with vagueness "art," exalts and
demands the same factor first in all of them, must be detrimental, no
matter how great his sincerity and his knowledge.
Before weighing any contemporary thing in the balance let us mark out in
the past some standards of comparison. For it is useless to speculate
upon theoretical methods if we can discover the actual methods employed
by those whose art, if not ideally perfect, is yet so far beyond our
present power as to be quite perfectly ideal. It needs no discussion to
prove that to find the utmost that has been actually accomplished by
human endeavor we must turn in sculpture and in language to Greece, in
music to Germany, in architecture to Greece or to mediaeval Europe as our
taste may pull, and in painting to the Italians.
The primary conception of art in its productive energy is as a certain
inspiration. How did that inspiration work in those whom we acknowledge
to have received it in fullest measure? If we think a moment we shall
say, "Involuntarily"--by a sort of _possession_ rather than a voluntary
intellectual effort. The sculpture of the Greeks, their tragedies and
their temples, were all wrought simply, without effort, without
conscious travailing, by a natural evolution, not by a potent
egg-hatching process of instructive criticism and morbid self-inspection
and consulting of previous models, native and foreign. Architectural
motives were gathered from Egypt and the East, from Phoenicia and
Anatolia, but they were worked in as material, not copied as patterns;
and the architecture is as original as if no one had ever built before.
Phidias and Praxiteles and the rest shaped and chiselled, aiming at
perfection no doubt, trying to do their best, but without troubling
themselves as to what that best "ought" to be. Criticism was rife in
Athens of all places, but it was a criticism of things existing, not of
things problematically desirable. Statue and temple-front were
criticised, not sculptor and architect--surely not sculpture and
architecture in the abstract. Not sculptors and architects, that is,
when the question was of their works. The men came in for their share of
criticism, but on a different count. Theseus and Athene were judged as
works of art, not as lame though interesting revelations of Phidias's
soul. And be sure no faintest sin of the chisel was excused on the plea
that Phidias meant more th
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