Yet even in saying this,
I tacitly make the admission that it is the Greeks who must furnish us
with our standard of comparison. Their stamp is upon all the allowed
measures and weights of aesthetic criticism. Nor does a consciousness of
this, nor a constant reference to it, in any sense reduce us to the mere
copying of a bygone excellence; for it is the test of excellence in any
department of art, that it can never be bygone, and it is not mere
difference from antique models, but the _way_ in which that difference is
shown, the direction it takes, that we are to consider in our judgment of
a modern work. The model is not there to be copied merely, but that the
study of it may lead us insensibly to the same processes of thought by
which its purity of outline and harmony of parts were attained, and
enable us to feel that strength is consistent with repose, that
multiplicity is not abundance, that grace is but a more refined form of
power, and that a thought is none the less profound that the limpidity of
its expression allows us to measure it at a glance. To be possessed with
this conviction gives us at least a determinate point of view, and
enables us to appeal a case of taste to a court of final judicature,
whose decisions are guided by immutable principles.
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