For you are not Greeks; but, for better or worse, English
creatures; and cannot do, even if it were a thousand times better worth
doing, anything well, except what your English hearts shall prompt, and
your English skies teach you. For all good art is the natural utterance
of its own people in its own day.
But also, your own art is a better and brighter one than ever this Greek
art was. Many motives, powers, and insights have been added to those
elder ones. The very corruptions into which we have fallen are signs of
a subtle life, higher than theirs was, and therefore more fearful in its
faults and death. Christianity has neither superceded, nor, by itself,
excelled heathenism; but it has added its own good, won also by many a
Nemean contest in dark valleys, to all that was good and noble in
heathenism; and our present thoughts and work, when they are right, are
nobler than the heathen's. And we are not reverent enough to them,
because we possess too much of them. That sketch of four cherub heads
from and English girl, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, at Kensington, is an
incomparably finer thing than ever the Greeks did.
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