ypes and crises
of fate--these are facts which pass too constantly through apperception
not to have a normal aethetic value. The artist who can catch that effect
in its fulness and simplicity accordingly does immortal work. This sort
of art immediately becomes popular; it passes into language and
convention so that its aesthetic charm is apparently worn down. The old
images after a while hardly stimulate unless they be presented in some
paradoxical way; but in that case attention will be diverted to the
accidental extravagance, and the chief classic effect will be missed. It
is the honourable fate or euthanasia of artistic successes that they
pass from the field of professional art altogether and become a portion
of human faculty. Every man learns to be to that extent an artist;
approved figures and maxims pass current like the words and idioms of a
mother-tongue, themselves once brilliant inventions. The lustre of such
successes is not really dimmed, however, when it becomes a part of man's
daily light; a retrogression from that habitual style or habitual
insight would at once prove, by the shock it caused, how precious those
ingrained apperceptions continued to be.

[Sidenote: or by reporting the ultimate.]

Universality may also be achieved, in a more heroic fashion, by art that
expresses ultimate truths, cosmic laws, great human ideals. Virgil and
Dante are classic poets in this sense, and a similar quality belongs to
Greek sculpture and architecture. They may not cause enthusiasm in
everybody; but in the end experience and reflection renew their charm;
and their greatness, like that of high mountains, grows more obvious
with distance. Such eminence is the reward of having accepted discipline
and made the mind a clear anagram of much experience. There is a great
difference between the depth of expression so gained and richness or
realism in details. A supreme work presupposes minute study, sympathy
with varied passions, many experiments in expression; but these
preliminary things are submerged in it and are not displayed side by
side with it, like the foot-notes to a learned work, so that the
ignorant may know they have existed.

Some persons, themselves inattentive, imagine, for instance, that Greek
sculpture is abstract, that it has left out all the detail and character
which they cannot find on the surface, as they might in a modern work.
In truth it contains those features, as it were, in solution and in the