If the artists of antiquity are the greatest of all it is because they
approached most closely to Nature.
They studied it with magnificent sincerity and copied it with all
their intelligence. They never wasted their time in trying to invent
something. To invent, to create, these are words that mean nothing. They
contented themselves with rendering the adorable model that enchanted
their eyes. This love and this respect for creation has never since
their time been surpassed. They did not copy literally what they saw;
to a certain degree they interpreted the character of forms. The aim of
art is not to copy literally. It consists in slightly exaggerating the
character of the model in order to make it salient; it consists also in
reassembling in a single expression the successive expressions given by
the same model. Art is the living synthesis.
This is what the ancients did, with what taste, what incomparable
science! From this science that respected unity their works derived
their calm, contained force, the sentiment of grand serenity, the
atmosphere of peace that envelops them. The ignorant and the professors
of esthetics who do not know the source of all this have named it Greek
idealism. This is nothing but a word that serves to conceal a want
of understanding. There is no idealism in the ancients; there is an
exercise of choice, a marvelous taste; but it is by the most realistic
means that they render human beauty.
[Illustration: THE TEMPEST.]
We others, we moderns, are carried away by the restlessness of the
epoch; we are superficial, we only regard things cursorily, and we have
concluded from this sublime simplicity that Greek art is cold. To us
indeed it seems very cold. It is really warm. To it alone belongs in
this respect the quality of life, reality in forms, and precision in
movement. It is through this that it attains perfect equilibrium. But
that is beyond our little spirit of detail. We seek nothing but detail;
the Greek, for his part, saw nothing but the whole; that is to say, the
equilibrium, the harmony.