pictures is that the spectators learn and infer what each object is;
/this/, they say, /is so and so/; while if one has not seen the thing
before, the pleasure is produced not by the imitation,"--or by the
art, for he uses the two terms convertibly--"but by the execution, the
colour, or some such cause."[15] And Plato (though on this subject one
can never be quite sure that Plato is serious) talks of the graphic
art as three times removed from realities, being only employed to make
copies of semblances of the external objects which are themselves the
copies or shadows of the ideal truth of things.[16] So far does Greek
thought seem to be from the conception of an ideal art which is nearer
truth than nature is, which nature itself indeed tries with perpetual
striving, and ever incomplete success, to copy, which, as Aristotle
does in one often quoted passage admit with regard to poetry, has a
higher truth and a deeper seriousness than that of actual things.

But this must not be pressed too far. The critical faculty, even where
fully present, may be overpowered by the rhetorical impulse; and of
all forms of poetry the epigram has the greatest right to be fanciful.
"This is the Satyr of Diodorus; if you touch it, it will awake; the
silver is asleep,"[17]--obviously this play of fancy has nothing to do
with serious criticism. And of a really serious feeling about art
there is sufficient evidence, as in the pathos of the sculptured
Ariadne, happy in sleeping and being stone, and even more strongly in
the lines on the picture of the Faun, which have the very tone and
spirit of the /Ode on a Grecian Urn/.[18]

Two epigrams above all deserve special notice; one almost universally
known, that written by Callimachus on his dead friend, the poet
Heraclitus of Halicarnassus; the other, no less noble, though it has
not the piercing tenderness of the first, by Claudius Ptolemaeus, the