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in the lines, they are rigid and unyielding. They are like the first lispings of 

 the child to speak ; the effort is great and the success imperfect, but you feel 

 that it is but lisping ; it is not the language the child will one day talk. As 

 time goes on the work improves ; the skeleton is filled in with flesh, the 

 detail is elaborated. The artist gets a more complete mastery over his subject, 

 but loses none of his truth ; for it is evident that he is still taking his inspira- 

 tion from Nature. Recollect, I am not speaking of the life of one artist, but 

 of the operation of many cycles of years. Each artist deals with the same type, 

 sacred to his city from its relation to its mythical traditions, but he does not 

 copy from his predecessors. He works in the studio of Nature, and owns no 

 other master. And so, at last, you have in some of these little silver coins, 

 no larger than a shilling, some of the most glorious works of Art which the 

 world has produced. 



It was this character of faithfulness and honesty to his Art and his subject, 

 which was the peculiarity of Greek, as it is of all truly great Art. Take, for 

 example, those marbles which stand unrivalled in the artistic efforts of 

 mankind — the groups from the Pediment of the Parthenon, now in the Elgin 

 Gallery of the British Museum. These statues stood more than forty feet 

 from the ground ; they were somewhat larger than life size ; and they stood, 

 of course, against the wall of the pediment, so that one side only could be seen, 

 and that from a distance. And yet you find that, not only in front but 

 behind, the same wonderfully elaborate and detailed work has been devoted 

 with the most lavish and ungrudging honesty. The hard and brittle material 

 vanishes from sight as you gaze ; now melting into softest flesh, which seems 

 as if it would yield to the pressure of the hand ; now ossifying into bone ; here 

 quivering in a muscle, there palpitating in a vein. If we be inclined to say — 

 why waste so much labour on a work, so much of which was never to be 

 seen 1 I reply, the man who had failed so to work for the unseen, would have 

 been incapable of producing what was seen ; for the true artist works, not for 

 gain or for applause, for vanity or for fame, but in a pure, unselfish, and 

 absorbing love of his Art, and in reverend adoration of the spirit of beauty 

 which he worships. And in Ancient Greece this passion for Art was no 

 doubt elevated and intensified by the feeling of religion. It was not in 

 painting portraits of one another's faces, and chronicling imperfections, but in 

 striving to realise forms fit to impersonate the gods, that Art attained its 

 highest perfection. 



If we turn now from the period of growth and culmination, to that of 

 decadence, we find the picture reversed. The lines are no longer wrong through 

 unsuccessful effort, but through careless neglect. The artist, instead of going 

 to Nature for his inspiration, is evidently only copying from his predecessor, 

 and his expression becomes wavering and indistinct. The outlines are slurred, 

 and the faults of the past repeated and exaggerated. The character of the 

 work becomes sensuous as the feeling becomes superficial. The sacred type 

 has changed from a faith to a fashion ; and so the artist's right hand loses its 

 cunning, and can no longer grasp the idea, when the soul of the idea itself is 

 passing away. There is one most remarkable instance of this history of 

 decadence in the barbaric imitations of the coins of Macedon. The common 

 type upon the coins of Philip and Alexander was the head of some deity 

 personifying the King, or leather the head of the King in the character of the 

 god, bound with a fillet of laurel leaves. Barbarous races seem to have copied 

 this type from one to the other, until at last the original type became so 

 indistinct that it was lost. There are ancient British coins, in which the head 

 consists of nothing more than some rude lines and dots ; and it is only by seeing 

 a whole series of these coins at once, and tracing the deterioration down from 

 one to the other, that you can believe that a head is*intended at all. Amidst 



