Note 37 — Part II

T. G. Tucker, in his Life in Ancient Greece, does his best to reconcile the realism of Greek art with the "ideal," and helps himself out of the difficulty by reasserting Schelling's claim in The Philosophy of Art (see note to p. 91 in this book). Mr. Tucker says, p. 186: "Many people imagine that Greek sculpture—to take that salient province again—deliberately avoided truth to Nature, and aimed at some utterly conventional thing called the ideal. Nothing could be more mistaken. The whole aim of Greek sculpture was to reproduce the living man or woman, and the sublime of its execution was attained only when the carving seemed instinct with life—a life not merely of the limbs, but a life of the soul, which informed the countenance, and was felt to be controlling every limb. A Greek sculptor like Praxiteles studied long and lovingly.... To anatomy he is as true as an artist need wish to be. But are not his figures ideal? Doubtless, but what does 'ideal' mean? That they are abstract, conventional, or frankly superhuman? Anything but that. It means simply that he carves figures which, while entirely true to strict anatomy, entirely lifelike in all their delicate modelling ... are examples of nature in happiest circumstances...."