The
artist must receive into his mind, or engender in his mind's native
richness, conceptions of what is most high, most perfect, most
beautiful in shape or sound, in thought or feeling; and producing it
before his fellow-men, appeal to their sensibility to the beautiful,
to their deepest sympathies, to their capacity of being moved by the
grandest and the noblest there is in man and nature. Truly, a mighty
part is that of the artist.
Artists are the educators of humanity. Tutors and professors instruct
princes and kings, but poets (and all genuine artists are poets)
educate nations. Take from Greece Homer and Phidias, and Sophocles and
Scopas, and the planner of the Parthenon, and you efface Greece from
history. Wanting them, she would not have been the great Greece that
we know; she would not have had the vigor of sap, the nervous
vitality, to have continued to live in a remote posterity, immortal in
the culture, the memories, and the gratitude of men.
So great, so far-stretching, so undying is the power of this exalted
class of men, that it were hardly too much to say that had Homer and
Phidias never lived, we should not be here today.
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