So, too, all thinkers, using the actual world in their
processes, are at a disadvantage. The figures of the geometer, the
quantities of the chemist, the measurements of the astronomer, are
inexact approximations to their equivalent in the mind. Art, as an
embodiment in mortal images, is subject to the conditions of mortality.
Hence arises its human history, the narrative of its rise, climax, and
decline in successive ages. The course of art is known; it has been run
many times; it is a simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensible
form being rudely controlled by the artist's hand; it becomes, in the
second stage, classical, the form being adequate to the thought, a
transparent expression; last, it is decadent, the form being more than
the thought, dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account. The
peculiar temptation of technique is always to elaboration of detail;
technique is at first a hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being a
caprice; and always as it goes on it loses sight of the general in its
rendering, and dwells with a near eye on the specific. Nor is this
attention to detail confined to the manner; the hand of the artist draws
the mind after it, and it is no longer the great types of manhood, the
important fates of life, the primary emotions in their normal course,
that are in the foreground of thought, but the individual is more and
more, the sensational in plot, the sentimental in feeling.
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