But that generality or breadth has nothing in common with the lax
observation, the unlearned thought, the flaccid execution, which have
sometimes claimed superiority in art, on the plea of being "broad" or
"general." Hellenic breadth and generality come of a culture minute,
severe, constantly renewed, rectifying and concentrating its impressions
into certain pregnant types. The base of all artistic genius is the power
of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a
happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common
days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of
refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits,
according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this
power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.
The range of characters or persons open to them is as various as life
itself; no character, however trivial, misshapen, or unlovely, can resist
their magic. That is because those arts can accomplish their function in
the choice and development of some special situation, which lifts or
glorifies a character, in itself not poetical.
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