“Listen! There never was an artistic period.”
“There never was an art-loving nation.”
And he pointed out how the man who, “differing from the rest,” who “stayed by the tents with the women and traced strange devices with a burnt stick upon a gourd, ... who took no joy in the ways of his brethren, ... who perceived in nature about him curious curvings, as faces are seen in the fire, this dreamer apart, was the first artist.”
“And presently there came to this man another—and, in time, others—of like nature, chosen by the gods; and so they worked together; and soon they fashioned, from the moistened earth, forms resembling the gourd. And with the power of creation, the heirloom of the artist, presently they went beyond the slovenly suggestion of nature, and the first vase was born, in beautiful proportion.”
And the toilers and the heroes were athirst, “and all drank alike from the artist’s goblets, fashioned cunningly, taking no note the while of the craftsman’s pride, and understanding not his glory in his work; drinking at the cup, not from choice, not from a consciousness that it was beautiful, but because, forsooth, there was no other!”
“And the people questioned not, and had nothing to say in the matter.”
“So Greece was in its splendor, and art reigned supreme,—by force of fact, not by election,—and there was no meddling by the outsider.”
Again he says:
“The master stands in no relation to the moment at which he occurs a monument of isolation, hinting at sadness, having no part in the progress of his fellow-men.”
Those are the propositions which called out the reply—positive and intemperate—from Swinburne,[6] and so estranged the two, and which to this day have proved huge stumbling-blocks in the paths of those who try to understand Whistler.