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.
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.