The Evolution of Sculpture. 349 



The earliest stone sculptures of Greece are contemporary 

 with the earliest stone walls. And so it is everywhere : first 

 use, then art. 



I have said that the age of force and fear is succeeded by 

 the age of cunning. Our American use of that word, to mean 

 ' pretty,' shows how we feel the connection between cun- 

 ning and art. And cunning workmanship is a common bib- 

 lical phrase. We may further call attention to the word 

 " craft." Cunning applied to life means the subordination 

 of the members of society to a head the ordering and gov- 

 erning of the many by one. In a word, it is order estab- 

 lished from one point, in a sense from without. In art it 

 means that order and harmony which we call beauty. 

 Beauty is order, and order is the outcome of cunning. 



The process by which men passed from force to cunning 

 is a slow one, and involves a struggle between the two prin- 

 ciples. So in art, the struggle between the expression of 

 force and the expression of order between the monstrous 

 and the beautiful is a slow one. It generally appears as a 

 struggle of gods or men with monsters of the gods against 

 dragons or giants, or Titans ; of men against hydras or drag- 

 ons, or centaurs or minotaurs. Of course, the victory is al- 

 ways with the higher principle. If we examine the early 

 stone sculptures of Babylonia, or Egypt, or Greece, or Scan- 

 dinavia, we shall find the same subjects in all cunning and 

 order struggling with, and overcoming, brute force. And the 

 same thing is reflected in all early literature, even in the 

 Bible itself. Egypt, and Babylonia with its successive king- 

 doms, are the lands wherein this struggle is carried on for 

 all human history. In neither does beauty ever completely 

 conquer force. The sphinxes of Egypt and the winged, 

 human-headed horses of Assyria are compromises between 

 brute force and beauty. But, even where the human form 

 displaces the monster, made up of man and beast, it does not 

 attain to true beauty ; only to a kind of mathematical pro- 

 portion, which is the earliest form of order. The figures and 

 groups of the two river civilizations are all mathematical. 

 They have proportion but no life. They are purely conven- 

 tional. We do not know, I believe, the name of a single 

 artist belonging to these two countries, and this for the 

 reason that there is no life or originality in their art. It is 

 an interesting fact that in those countries sculpture never 

 gets disengaged from architecture, but always follows its 

 law, which is that of simple proportion. Egypt and Baby- 



