ne has a history of fifteen years while the other has one of five
thousand. This is the thesis which we want to prove, and the first step
to it must be to ask: what is the aim of art if not the imitation of
reality?

But can the claim that art imitates nature or rather that imitation is
the essence of art be upheld if we seriously look over the field of
artistic creations? Would it not involve the expectation that the
artistic value would be the greater, the more the ideal of imitation is
approached? A perfect imitation which looks exactly like the original
would give us the highest art. Yet every page in the history of art
tells us the opposite. We admire the marble statue and we despise as
inartistic the colored wax figures. There is no difficulty in producing
colored wax figures which look so completely like real persons that the
visitor at an exhibit may easily be deceived and may ask information
from the wax man leaning over the railing. On the other hand what a
tremendous distance between reality and the marble statue with its
uniform white surface! It could never deceive us and as an imitation it
would certainly be a failure. Is it different with a painting? Here the
color may be quite similar to the original, but unlike the marble it has
lost its depth and shows us nature on a flat surface. Again we could
never be deceived, and it is not the painter's ambition to make us
believe for a moment that reality is before us. Moreover neither the
sculptor nor the painter gives us less valuable work when they offer us
a bust or a painted head only instead of the whole figure; and yet we
have never seen in reality a human body ending at the chest. We admire a
fine etching hardly less than a painting. Here we have neither the
plastic effect of the sculpture nor the color of the painting. The
essential features of the real model are left out. As an imitation it
would fail disastrously. What is imitated in a lyric poem? Through more
than two thousand years we have appreciated the works of the great
dramatists who had their personages speak in the rhythms of metrical
language. Every iambic verse is a deviation from reality. If they had
tried to imitate nature Antigone and Hamlet would have spoken the prose
of daily life. Does a beautiful arch or dome or tower of a building
imitate any part of reality? Is its architectural value dependent upon
the similarity to nature? Or does the melody or harmony in music offer
an imitation