But the arrest of interpretation, as that of
restoration, is never a definitely unsurmountable barrier; and the daily
discoveries of historical sources and of new methods of better
exploiting antiquity, which we may hope to see ever improving, link up
broken tradition.
We do not wish to deny that erroneous historical interpretation produces
at times what we may term _palimpsests_, new expressions imposed upon
the antique, artistic imaginings instead of historical reproductions.
The so-called fascination of the past depends in part upon these
expressions of ours, which we weave into historical expressions. Thus in
hellenic plastic art has been discovered the calm and serene intuition
of life of those peoples, who feel, nevertheless, so poignantly, the
universality of sorrow; thus has recently been discerned on the faces of
the Byzantine saints "the terror of the millennium," a terror which is
an equivoke, or an artificial legend invented by modern scholars. But
_historical criticism_ tends precisely to circumscribe _vain imaginings_
and to establish with exactitude the point of view from which we must
look.
Thus we live in communication with other men of the present and of the
past; and we must not conclude, because sometimes, and indeed often, we
find ourselves face to face with the unknown or the badly known, that
when we believe we are engaged in a dialogue, we are always speaking a
monologue; nor that we are unable even to repeat the monologue which, in
the past, we held with ourselves.
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