Hellenism is not merely an absorbed element in our
intellectual life; it is a conscious tradition in it.
Again, individual genius works ever under conditions of time and
place: its products are coloured by the varying aspects of nature,
and type of human form, and outward manners of life. There is
thus an element of change in art; criticism must never for a
moment forget that "the artist is the child of his time." But
besides these conditions of time and place, and independent of
them, there is also an element of permanence, a standard of taste,
which genius confesses. This standard is maintained in a purely
intellectual tradition. It acts upon the artist, not as one of the
influences of his own age, but through those artistic products of
the previous generation which first excited, while they directed
into a particular channel, his sense of beauty. The supreme
artistic products of succeeding generations thus form a series of
elevated points, taking each from each the reflection of a strange
light, the source of which is not in the atmosphere around and
above them, but in a stage of society remote from ours. The
standard of taste, then, was fixed in Greece, at a definite
historical period. A tradition for all succeeding generations, it
originates in a spontaneous [200] growth out of the influences of
Greek society. What were the conditions under which this ideal,
this standard of artistic orthodoxy, was generated? How was
Greece enabled to force its thought upon Europe?
Greek art, when we first catch sight of it, is entangled with Greek
religion.
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