In this way we quickest come to an understanding of its
originating idea, and sympathize with its feeling, tracing its
progress from infancy to maturity and decay, and comparing it as a
whole with corresponding or rival varieties of artistic development.
This systematized variety of one great unity is of the highest
importance in placing the spectator in affinity with art as a whole
and with its diversities of character, and in giving him sound
stand-points of comparison and criticism. In this way, as in the Louvre,
feeling and thought are readily transported from one epoch of
civilization to another, grasping the motives and execution of each
with pleasurable accuracy. We perceive that no conventional standard
of criticism, founded upon the opinions or fashions of one age, is
applicable to all. To rightly comprehend each, we must broadly survey
the entire ground of art, and make ourselves for the time members, as
it were, of the political and social conditions of life that give
origin to the objects of our investigations. This philosophical mode
of viewing art does not exclude an aesthetic point of view, but rather
heightens that and makes it more intelligible.
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