34 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



22. cognition of natural as differing from artistic beauty : 



Nature and 



Art. or — if we like to put it in a different way which 



suggested itself very early — we may say, if beauty and 

 art are to be convertible terms, nature must be looked 

 upon as an artist and, vice versd, the artist must be 

 looked upon as producing his works after the same 

 fashion as Nature or the Creator has produced natural 

 things — viz., through a conscious or unconscious but 

 inevitable impulse. The second problem which pre- 

 ss, sented itself was the relation of the work of art to 



of the Artist, the personality of the artist and to the idea which 

 it had to express. It was recognised that modern, as 

 distinguished from ancient art, had a different function 

 to perform. To express this, Schiller had written the 

 last of his philosophical essays. In this he distinguished 

 ancient from modern art, the former being naive, the 

 latter suggestive. The former appeared in its greatest 

 models, such as those of Greek Sculpture (which 

 Winckelmann had studied) or the Epics of Homer (then 

 brought into prominence by Voss and F. A. Wolf), to 

 have attained to a complete harmony of form and 

 content. Such works were complete in themselves, 

 neither pointing to an ulterior purpose nor suggesting 

 glimpses into something beyond. On the other side, 

 modern works of art, of which the great poem of 

 Dante and the great works of the Italian painters may 

 be considered to be examples, pointed to a higher and 

 far-off world of ideas which they aimed at representing, 

 into which they opened out illimitable vistas or momen- 

 tary glimpses. Schiller expressed the difference by say- 

 ing that ancient classic art excelled through Limitation, 



