That is to say—As the Apollo exalts our idea of possible beauty, in form, so the moral ideal of man or woman exalts our idea of possible virtue, provided it be consistent as a whole. If we gave the Apollo a god-like head and face and left a part of his frame below perfection, the elevating effect of the whole would be immediately destroyed, though the figure might be more according to the standard of actual nature.
126.
“In Dante, as in Shakespeare, every man selects by instinct that which assimilates with the course of his own previous occupations and interests.” (Merivale.) True, not of Dante and Shakespeare only, but of all books worth reading; and not merely of books and authors, but of all productions of mind in whatever form which speak to mind; all works of art, from which we imbibe, as it were, what is sympathetic with our individuality. The more universal the sympathies of the writer or the artist, the more of such individualities will be included in his domain of power.
127.
The distinction so cleverly and beautifully drawn by the Germans (by Lessing first I believe) between “Bildende” and “Redende Kunst” is not to be rendered into English without a lengthy paraphrase. It places in immediate contradistinction the art which is evolved in words, and the art which is evolved in forms.
128.
Venus, or rather the Greek Aphrodite, in the sublime fragment of Eschylus (the Danaïdes) is a grand, severe, and pure conception; the principle eternal of beauty, of love, and of fecundity—or the law of the continuation of being through beauty and through love. Such a conception is no more like the Ovidean Roman Venus than the Venus of Milo is like the Venus de Medicis.