No art is worth anything that does not embody an idea,--that is not
representative: otherwise, it is like a body without a soul, or the image
of some divinity that never had existence. Art needs, indeed, to be
individualized, to betray the characteristics of the artist, to be himself
infused into his work; but more than this, it needs to typify, to
illustrate the character of the age,--to be of a piece with other
expressions of the sentiment that animates other men at the time. It must
be one note in the concert, and that not discordant,--neither behind time
nor ahead of it,--neither in the wrong key nor the other mode: you don't
want Verdi in one of Beethoven's symphonies; you don't want Mozart in
Rossini's operas. No art ever has lived that was not the genuine product of
the era in which it appeared; no art ever can live that is not such a
product: it may, perchance, have a temporary or fictitious success, but it
can neither really and truly exert an influence at the moment of its
highest triumph, nor afterwards remain a power among men, unless it reflect
the spirit of the epoch, unless it show the very age and body of the time
his form and pressure.
All greatness consists in this: in being alive to what is going on around
one; in living actually; in giving voice to the thought of humanity; in
saying to one's fellows what they want to hear or need to hear at that
moment; in being the concretion, the result, of the influences of the
present world.
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