Excerpt from Aspasia, Vol. 1 of 2: A Romance of Art and Love in Ancient Hellas IF this romance, according to a much quoted saying of our time, seeks out as its work, a nation - the old Hellenic race - will not a shade of thought and pedantry seem to cling to the description of this kind of toil, since the universal labor of the Greek people was that of the artist, poet, and thinker? Will it not be infe rior in freshness of sensation, to scenes drawn from the spring of simple, vigorous life, whose poetry is not yet ...
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Excerpt from Aspasia, Vol. 1 of 2: A Romance of Art and Love in Ancient Hellas IF this romance, according to a much quoted saying of our time, seeks out as its work, a nation - the old Hellenic race - will not a shade of thought and pedantry seem to cling to the description of this kind of toil, since the universal labor of the Greek people was that of the artist, poet, and thinker? Will it not be infe rior in freshness of sensation, to scenes drawn from the spring of simple, vigorous life, whose poetry is not yet exhausted And, on the other hand, must not such an attempt also lack the charm of the cleverness - in the modern sense'of the word - piquant realism, and bright, vivid coloring of the literary productions of the present day? Ought Hellenic life to be represented otherwise than with Hellenic simplicity, and should its chronicler strive for any thing except to gain a breath of the Hellen ic spirit, the Hellenic grace? Is it not especially difficult to describe a vanished life P Minute painting of modem existence is praised as charmingly realistic; that of ancient times will produce on many the chilling impres sion of erudition. Indeed, whoever merely turns over Mr leaves of this book, noticing that the different por tions disclose views of the various sides of Hellenic life, will promptly form the opinion that he has a mere sketch book of loose sheets, or at most a historical romance, which according to the idea of most persons, is about the same thing as no romance at all. And yet - if the romance, as an artistic. Work, is dis tinguished by its internal and external form from bio graphy, history and mere narrative, if it is not only the expression of a life and destiny contained within itself, but also of a conflict which has a logical development and solution, what I relate here is a romance. It not merely contains, in a positive form, beautiful sensuality glorified by intellect, in its development, prime and decay; but the conflict between the aest/zez'z'c and moral ideal of existence arises and is decided in thelife of an individual, and the destiny of a nation. This parallelism between the fate of individuals and nations, individual and uni versal life, has always hovered before me as the art secret of epic poetry, its supreme principle, its peculiar model. Not, however, that the particulars related of in dividual life and those of national existence run side by side, one as it were an episode of the other, but both as far as possible, relate to. One and the same detail, and resemble an organic structure, closely interwoven and blended together. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at ... This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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