EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 43 



conditions under which the epic, the drama, and the lyric 

 were cultivated rendered these species (as is almost invariably 

 the case with literary hybrids) stationary. They served to 

 exhibit the culture of refined students, to embody personal 

 emotions, to express the sentiment of patriotism, and to 

 preserve some traits of manners, without having in them 

 evolutionary energy. In Sculpture, the Greek strain almost 

 entirely dominated, so that the best statues of the age of 

 Hadrian may be regarded as a kind of after-blossom which 

 reminds us of the age of Alexander. The most characteristic 

 works of Roman statuary are those bas-reliefs on columns, 

 monumental effigies, and sepulchral portraits, in which the 

 archaic Etruscan style survives. Roman architecture, lastly, 

 although it displays no specifically Latin qualities, remains 

 a genuine manifestation of the masterful imperial race. 

 Roughly speaking, it consists of an amalgam of Etruscan 

 and Greek elements ; Etruria supplying the arch and the 

 vault, which were unknown to Greece, Hellas yielding the 

 superficial decoration of her orders, friezes, fluted columns, 

 metopes, and other details of external structure. The 

 Romans employed these twofold elements in a way peculiarly 

 their own with superb indifference to taste, but with the 

 colossal strength and barbaric fancy of Titan builders. Con- 

 sequently, this hybrid exactly expresses the genius of the 

 nation, itself composite, which succeeded in subduing the 

 world. Without having essential elements of originality, it is 

 original in its ideal and actual correspondence to the Roman 

 domination ; and, in its later phase, in the age of Diocletian, 

 it developed a new principle, which was destined to exercise 

 wide influence over the future. This principle, to put it 

 briefly, was the superposition of the arch to the column, a 

 structural detail which determined Romanesque and Gothic 

 architecture. 



VI 



Roman art, for the reasons I have assigned, does not help 

 us to establish the law of evolutionary progress. But it forms 

 an important basis for the next instance, which furnishes, in 



