Nowadays we patronize a little
the ideal. You may hear very intelligent critics in Paris--who in Paris
is not an intelligent critic?--speak disparagingly of the Greek want of
expression; of the lack of passion, of vivid interest, of significance
in a word, in Greek sculpture of the Periclean epoch. The conception of
absolute beauty having been discovered to be an abstraction, the
tradition of the purely ideal has gone with it. The caryatids of the
Erechtheum, the horsemen of the Parthenon frieze, the reliefs of the
Nike Apteros balustrade are admired certainly; but they are hardly
sympathetically admired; there is a tendency to relegate them to the
limbo of subjects for aesthetic lectures. And yet no one can have
carefully examined the brilliant productions of modern French sculpture
without being struck by this apparent paradox: that, whereas all its
canons are drawn from a study of the Renaissance, its chief
characteristic is, at bottom, a lack of expression, a carefulness for
the type. The explanation is this: in the course of time, which "at last
makes all things even," the individuality, the romanticism of the
Renaissance has itself become the type, is now itself become
"classical," and the modern attitude toward it, however sympathetic
compared with the modern attitude toward the antique, is to a noteworthy
degree factitious and artificial.
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