And this is because it is not
always that the products of even exquisite tectonics can excite or
refine the aesthetic sense. Now it is probable that the objects of
oriental art, the imitations of it at home, in which for Homer this
actual world of art must have consisted, reached him in a quantity,
and with a novelty, just sufficient to warm and stimulate without
[200] surfeiting the imagination; it is an exotic thing of which he
sees just enough and not too much. The shield of Achilles, the house
of Alcinous, are like dreams indeed, but this sort of dreaming winds
continuously through the entire Iliad and Odyssey--a child's dream
after a day of real, fresh impressions from things themselves, in
which all those floating impressions re-set themselves. He is as
pleased in touching and looking at those objects as his own heroes;
their gleaming aspect brightens all he says, and has taken hold, one
might think, of his language, his very vocabulary becoming
chryselephantine. Homer's artistic descriptions, though enlarged by
fancy, are not wholly imaginary, and the extant remains of monuments
of the earliest historical age are like lingering relics of that
dream in a tamer but real world.
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