This leaves in every stage the possibility of taking up particular
branches of art study, whether historical, or technical, or practical,
and these will find their right place, not dissociated from their
antecedents and causes, not paramount but subordinate, and thus rightly
proportioned and true in their relation to the whole progress of mankind
in striving after beauty and the expression of it.
The history of art in connexion with the general history of the human
race is a complement to it, ministering to the understanding of what is
most intimate, stamping the expression of the dominant emotion on the
countenance of every succeeding age. This is what its art has left to
us, a more confidential record than its annals and chronicles, and more
accessible to the young, who can often understand feelings before they
can take account of facts in their historical importance. In any case
the facts are clothed in living forms there where belief and aspiration
and feeling have expressed themselves in works of art. If we value for
children the whole impression of the centuries, especially in European
history, more than the mere record of changes, the history of art will
allow them to apprehend it almost as the biographies of great persons
who have set their signature upon the age in which they lived.
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