The spiritual forces of the past, which
have prompted and informed the culture of a succeeding age, live, indeed,
within that culture, but with an absorbed, underground life. The Hellenic
element alone has not been so absorbed, or content with this underground
life; from time to time it has started to the surface; culture has been
drawn back to its sources to be clarified and corrected. 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 by means of the artistic products of
the previous generation, which in youth have excited, and at the same
time directed into a particular channel, his sense of beauty.
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