The Evolution of Sculpture. 353 



of all rational advance that, when the new is found, the old 

 is not thrown contemptuously away, but glorified in the 

 light of the new. So the Greeks, when they learned to make 

 statues of bronze and marble, did not cast aside their old 

 wooden xoana, to which so much religious feeling clung. 

 On the contrary, they worked up the xoana into something 

 of surpassing beauty. The truth is, the two most famous 

 statues of all the ancient world, the colossal Athena and 

 Zeus of Phidias, were merely improved xoana improved 

 with ivory and gold. And it is a matter of the deepest 

 interest that in these two statues Greece embodied her two 

 ideals, power and wisdom. Power is the father of wisdom. 

 The whole of Greece is in these two statues her strength 

 as well as her weakness. She has power and wisdom, but 

 she has no love. Ere that come, the world will have to be 

 turned upside down, and Greece will have to perish. The 

 age of Phidias marks the culmination of Greek sculpture, 

 which in him expresses all that Greece is and loves power 

 and wisdom. The next age, that of Scopas and Praxiteles, 

 exquisite as its works are, already shows signs of decay, or, 

 at any rate, of over-ripeness. What is even more interest- 

 ing is, love now comes in as a subject of representation. 

 This is not only the age of the great Aphrodites and Diony- 

 suses ; it is also the age of the Jsiobe Group, with its won- 

 derful conflict between power and love, and of the Hermes 

 of Praxiteles, with its pathetic human tenderness. With 

 love the pathetic enters into art. But Greek sculpture 

 never could embody love for want of a type. No such type 

 was given to it. The Greek can never separate the divine 

 love from the animal, and animal love can never be a sub- 

 ject for art. Scopas and Praxiteles do all that Greeks could 

 do to embody love. Their efforts are worthy of all respect 

 and admiration; but they never reach the true ideal. And 

 it was just for want of that ideal that Greece fell into decay. 

 The truth was that, when love did come, it set to work to 

 break down all natural limitations, and that too from its 

 very nature. 



The sculpture of Greece after Phidias and Praxiteles is 

 just what one might expect from a nation that had finished 

 its task, worked out into clear visibility its own inner 

 nature. Originality is henceforth impossible for it, and so 

 it goes on repeating old ideas in new and striking forms, 

 making up by technique what it lacks in content. Just as 

 previous to Phidias the content had been too much for the 



