DEVELOPMENT OF THE HISTORY OF ART 579 



intuition or imagination he would not have been writing art-history, 

 but arrant assumption. It was a mere conjecture and not a demon- 

 stration not a fact proved. But in this instance at least, he did not 

 stop there. He ran down the history of that head and found in it 

 confirmation. He compared the kind of stone, the exact measure- 

 ments, the treatment of frontal bone, flesh, and hair, the frown 

 of the brow and the protrusion of the lip, the passion, spirit, and 

 whole quality of the head with the Parthenon metopes. Finally he 

 took a cast of the head to London, fitted it on the shoulders of one 

 of the Lapiths in the British Museum, and had the satisfaction of 

 seeing that it fitted exactly even to the lines of the fracture in 

 the neck. That I should say was a proper exercise of the combining 

 imagination nay, more, a stroke of real genius. And that is art- 

 history properly constructed, authoritative, and final in its conclu- 

 sion. That chapter at least will not have to be rewritten in ten 

 years or in this century. 



But it is not such imagination as this that satisfies some of our more 

 advanced thinkers. They mean by "imagination" only too often the 

 ability to construct u a working hypothesis" a scheme of cause 

 and effect into which the facts can be somehow squeezed and made 

 to do service even though the machinery creaks a bit in the working. 

 Professor Furtwangler, for example, in his learned volume on the 

 Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture has no hesitation whatever in pointing 

 out to us the exact style of Phidias, something about which we had 

 Thought our information a trifle hazy. But Professor Furtwangler 

 explains it by supposing a case. He has an hypothesis and the hy- 

 pothesis is the thing. Whether it wrecks probability, or for that mat- 

 ter Phidias himself, is of small consequence. He tells us that there 

 were countless copies of Creek marbles made in Rome and for Rome, 

 and that the works of Phidias must certainly have been among the 

 copied. Assumption number one. All that is necessary then to under- 

 stand his style, method, and spirit is to read him in the Latin trans- 

 lation, study him in the Roman copies. Assumption number two. 

 resting upon assumption number one. Some people miii'ht have dif- 

 ficulty in picking out these copies, but Professor Furtwangler, who 

 kno\vs about copies, variants, and replicas, has no trouble in hiving 

 his hand upon these various marbles in European galleries. Assump- 

 tion numher three, or rather a substitution of Professor Furtwang- 

 ler's judgment for the fact. He begins with the Lemnian Venus and 

 ends with the coins and vases, and there you have the stvle of 

 Phidias, proved to an eye-lash. If you protest that this is a mere 

 hypothesis, that if one link in the chain is faulty or lacking, the whole 

 falls to the ground, and that no logical proof, not even hearsay 

 evidence, is offered, you arc somehow scouted as old fogey, and not 

 in sympathy with the modern movement. 



