The Legacy of Greece Part 22

Of course the more primitive and less conventional a society is, the easier it is for artists to be simple. In a complicated society simplicity and directness are apt to be confused with what is commonplace or even with the foolish. The simplicity of Wordsworth and of Tennyson does sometimes cross the line. The Greeks had the great advantage of coming before other cultivated peoples, so that there was no commonplace to avoid. They could be simple, as the wild rose and the primrose are simple. What could be more simple than the _Iliad_? The same simplicity marks Greek sculpture. It requires no great exercise of the intellect to understand it. It presents every figure in a clear and unsophisticated way.

As there is no more sure sign of a fine nature than the absence of self-consciousness, so there is no more sure sign of greatness in art than simplicity. The Greeks did not strive to be original, to make people stare, to do the unusual. One of the most usual subjects in Greek relief is a battle between male warriors and Amazons. Such battles adorn many temples. And in every case they are distinctive in style. One could not mistake a group from the temple at Phigaleia for a group from the Mausoleum. And there is no sameness: almost every group has some point or touch of its own, which makes it a variety on the usual theme. One Amazon is falling from her horse, one is asking for quarter, one is following up a retreating foe. But no group is insistent that the pa.s.ser-by should look at it. The relief was the decoration of a temple; and if its originality drew men's attention from the temple itself, or from the Deity seated enthroned within, it might justly be accused of impertinence, of exceeding due measure. The sculptor did his best; but he was careful to do nothing which was out of harmony with its surroundings. He sank himself in his work. And even when he was engaged on a more serious substantive work, what he most avoided was the incongruous and unbecoming. He so worked that the attention of the spectator was concentrated not on the character of the workmans.h.i.+p, but on the person or the subject portrayed. The idea which he tried to incorporate in marble or bronze was not his own thought about the subject, but the character which really belonged to it in the mind of the people.

This singleness of purpose is well ill.u.s.trated by a story about the painter Protogenes. He painted the figure of a Satyr, and beside it, as a trifle, he inserted a partridge. But when he found that admiration for the lifelikeness of the partridge tended to distract the attention of visitors from the main figure, he painted it out.

No doubt simplicity implies limitation. It is not easy in any age to strike the deepest note without some surrender of simplicity. The higher phases of the mental and spiritual life, mysticism, symbolism, and the like are not to be expressed with complete simplicity in any form of art. One cannot deny that the Greek view of life was limited; that the Greeks did not attempt to represent in art the highest aspirations of the soul. It was an entirely perverted ingenuity which sought a generation ago to find mystic meaning in the representations on Greek vases. Attempts to portray the Deities of the Mysteries scarcely count as works of art. Such figures as Sabazius, Isis, Mithras, only come into ancient art in its decadence. I would not maintain that the modern world, with its infinitely varied emotions, or the higher aspirations of religions like the Christian or the Buddhist, could be satisfied with such simple schemes as those of Greek sculpture, which appeal to human instinct and human intelligence rather than to the more recondite emotions. Such emotions, however, in my opinion, do not find any appropriate embodiment in the arts of which I am treating--the graphic and plastic arts. In poetry they have at all times found a n.o.ble expression; and in modern days a perhaps still completer expression in music, which was in pre-Christian days in a very rudimentary condition.

But painting is but ill suited to the rendering of these vague aspirations. And still more unsuited is sculpture, the most imitative and objective of all the arts. The attempts which have been made in recent years by some sculptors to give a mystic turn to their art seems to me doomed to failure by the essential nature of sculpture. A Western mind can have little sympathy with the art which has moved most on mystic lines, the art of India, which in such efforts has abandoned the search for beauty, and so given up the really artistic point of view.

Mere prettiness no doubt is an unsatisfying ideal: but a loftier beauty, in harmony with the world around us and the soul within us, is another thing.

In order that simplicity may be in the highest degree admirable, it must be combined with two other qualities--intense love of beauty, and the utmost patience in execution. It must not lead on the one side to a mere unideal copy of nature, nor on the other to a hasty and slovenly kind of work.

The figure already mentioned, the Caryatid of the Erechtheum, is a model of perfect simplicity. For further ill.u.s.tration of the quality I have chosen the bronze charioteer from Delphi, and the Artemis from Gabii, now in the Louvre. The former (Fig. 4) is a youth of n.o.ble family, clad in the long dress necessary to protect from the wind a man driving a chariot. The latter (Fig. 5), a work of the school of Praxiteles, represents a young girl fastening her dress on her shoulder. Both are as free as they can be from any attempt at novelty or originality: yet no one with any taste could for a moment hesitate to p.r.o.nounce them admirable. The object of the artist was to make works as perfect as possible. And to that end he goes straight, without any complication, and without the least care that others may have done similar works, against which he must a.s.sert originality.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 4 CHARIOTEER of Delphi]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 5 ARTEMIS of Gabii]

Beside the two figures I have cited I place a more modern group (Fig.

6), also by a man of genius, Peter Vischer. It has the same simplicity and the same care in execution as the Greek works, but in beauty it will not compare with them; and one feels regret that so great an artist should have spent his powers on so unsuitable a subject as the rivets and plates of a suit of armour. The lady, though not without charm, seems artificial and affected beside the exquisite freshness of the girl of Praxiteles.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 6. KNIGHT AND LADY By Peter Vischer]

III

The third lamp of Greek art is _Balance and Measure_, the recognition of limit and law. This is most obvious in architecture, and especially in its most characteristic production, the temple. The form of the temple, when once established, remained fixed, within certain limits of variation, for all time. A most accomplished writer, M. Boutmy, has admirably shown how all the const.i.tuent parts of the temple are related one to the other, how a plan, a consistent rhythm, runs throughout it.

Each part has a definite function, which it accomplishes in the simplest and clearest way. The pillars are made simply to support, and their shape and slight decoration is in accordance with that purpose. Their form ensures a maximum of stability. The channeling or fluting carries the eye of the spectator upwards to the capital which swells outwards to support the heavy straight line of the cornice. Above the cornice, the grooves of the triglyphs carry on the lines of fluting from the columns towards the roof. The walls of the temple are not primarily intended to support, but to enclose the sacred cella, and are adorned only at their upper edge, as a curtain might be, with a decorative frieze. The whole building is thought out as a home for the statue of the deity which it encloses; and no part is allowed to adorn itself except in subordination to this general purpose. Like the sh.e.l.ls of molluscs or the hives of bees, it is the direct embodiment of an idea, a purpose, only a conscious and reflective, not a merely instinctive purpose.

The sculptural decoration, which is so striking a feature of the temple, is also carefully subordinated to purpose and idea. No part of the structure which bears a strain, if we except one or two early and unsatisfactory experiments, was decorated. The business of column and architrave was to bear weight; and if they were ornate they would seem less well adapted to that purpose. Only in parts of the building which were from the point of view of construction otiose, such as pediment and metope, was the art of the sculptor allowed to play; and even then it was bound to play appropriately to the nature of the deity within and the festivals of which the temple was to be the focus. There was no room for cross-purposes or disturbing thoughts.

This rigidity of form and subordination to reason is as characteristic of Attic tragedies as of temples. It would indeed be possible to work out a close parallel between the two forms of art. But we must return to our immediate subject, sculpture. Temple sculpture exhibits the qualities of balance and measure in the highest degree. In case of the pediment there is a central point, just under the apex, where the dominant figures of the scene portrayed are placed; and on either side of this central figure or group, figure balances figure, until we come to the corners, which are occupied by reclining forms, dying warriors, or river-G.o.ds or spectators. In case of the metope, the square field is filled with two or three figures balanced about a central line, a scheme self-contained and harmonious, which may be compared to a geometrical diagram, and carries simplicity to the farthest point.

Rhythm, balance, symmetry are the translation into sculpture of the spirit of discipline and self-control, which the Greeks learned by hard necessity. The civilization of the Ionians in Asia is a brilliant sunrise, an overflowing of the delight in life, in beauty, in the exercise of all the faculties, which for a time dominated Greece itself.

And their art was joyous and free. The artists of Ionia invaded Athens in the sixth century, visiting the luxurious court of Peisistratus, and inspiring Peloponnesus, even Sparta, as the excavations of the British School in Athens have abundantly shown. But the Ionians were trodden down under the heavy foot of Persia: excess of freedom and want of cohesion and discipline was their ruin. The Great King of Persia was determined to trample in a like manner on Greece Proper; and he would have succeeded but for the discipline and devotion of the Dorians. It was the Spartans, aided by the brilliant military talent of Miltiades and Themistocles, who saved Greece from slavery. A military caste, like the Templars and Hospitallers of mediaeval Europe, they furnished the backbone of the Greek army and dispersed the hordes of Asia as easily as did the hardy Macedonians of Alexander the Great a century and a half later.

The Athenians, with their quick wits, understood whence came their salvation, and in the early part of the fifth century the tide of Ionian influence was turned back, and Dorian manners, Dorian dress, Dorian art, became dominant from Thessaly to Laconia. It is precisely the Dorian ideas of discipline, of measure, of self-control, which entering into the art of Greece made it a n.o.ble and continuous development, instead of a mere brilliant flash. Plato was well aware of the dangers which beset the Athenians from their extreme versatility and want of reverence, and he foresaw how these qualities would in the end destroy the civilization which they had adorned. He so clearly saw this that he was inclined to prefer the conventional and monotonous art of Egypt to the brilliant Greek art of his own time. This is, of course, to carry ethical prejudice to the length of fanaticism, and to transgress the very law of moderation which inspired him. But it was only in his old age that he went thus far.

This careful balance and proportion may be observed, as has often been pointed out, in the designs of Greek vases, where the painted subject not only is in itself a balanced scheme, but is also planned in relation to the shape of the vases themselves. A group suitable to an amphora would look out of place on a drinking cup. And in the cup itself the outside requires a different treatment from the inside. The whole is planned not merely to give free scope to the artist, but to be appropriate, fitting, harmonious. Our first figure well ill.u.s.trates this thesis.

Even in the case of substantive sculpture, figures or groups made to stand by themselves in market-place or portico, the Greek love of harmony, or as they would have put it, of rhythm and symmetry prevails: ancient critics in those accounts of Greek sculpture, of which fragments have come down to us in the writings of Pliny and Quintilian, lay great stress on these features. They show us that whereas in early art a merely external and mechanical balance had prevailed, in the course of the fifth century this love of order and measure was taken into the very being of art. Pythagoras of Rhegium, whose works are unfortunately lost to us, made great progress in rhythm and symmetry. His contemporaries, Myron and Polycleitus, who carried the athletic art of Peloponnesus almost to its highest point, were celebrated, Myron for the rhythm in motion which he infused into his sculpture, Polycleitus for the careful balance of his athletes and the system of proportion which he embodied in their figures. Pheidias was more essentially ideal than either of these, as we shall presently see, but he also most diligently preserved in the Parthenon and other works a spirit of measure and reasonableness.

Measure and balance in art differ widely from mere convention. 'Order is Heaven's first law.' All fine character is formed, not by following random impulses as they arise, but by making them conform to reason and duty, disciplining them as wild horses are disciplined and taught to serve mankind. Horses indeed may be over-disciplined, and by cruelty all spirit may be taken out of them. And men may be over-disciplined, so that their impulses die away from inanition. The Spartans were over-disciplined; and through constant repression of natural tendencies they became mere machines, and before long died out. But reasonable restraint imposed on strong natural tendencies produces n.o.ble results in all spheres of activity.

The same thing is true in art. Measure and discipline do not of course make it easier to produce works of art; for in the nature of the case discipline is at first grievous and is felt as a barrier. But for the production of good and lasting works of art, discipline and law are necessary. Take as an example the art which is simplest, poetry. It is easier to write blank verse than to write sonnets. But it is far easier to write _good_ sonnets than good blank verse, simply because the constant restraint of the form stimulates thought and invention, prevents too great haste, exercises the ingenuity. In the same way the somewhat rigid laws of composition of pediment metope and frieze compelled the Greek artist to think out schemes suitable to those forms.

It would not be possible to find a better example of order and balance in reliefs than is furnished by the magnificent sarcophagus from Sidon (Fig. 7), on one side of which is represented one of the victories of Alexander the Great. At first sight it may seem a confused melee. But when we look closer we see careful arrangement underlying the apparent disorder. Alexander, charging from the left, is balanced by Parmenio charging from the right: the horseman in the middle between the leaders seems to come out of the background; and on either side of him is a fighting group, to the left a Macedonian foot soldier fighting a Persian on foot, to the right a light-armed Greek resisting a Persian horseman.

Two Persian archers balance one another. There are in the scene five Greeks to eight Persians, indicating the numerical superiority of the latter. And if we knew more about the battle we should probably find its princ.i.p.al phases hinted at in the groups. The relief tells us far more about the battle than would a naturalistic representation of one corner of the field. The Greek artist could not work without using his reason and his sense of order as well as his skilled hand.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 7. SARCOPHAGUS FROM SIDON]

IV

The fourth notable quality of Greek art is _Naturalism_. Painting and sculpture, being representative or mimetic arts, are dependent for their effects on the careful observation and loving study of nature. Probably this is not the feature in works of Greek sculpture which would be most conspicuous to a modern eye. And it cannot be doubted that the habit of exact observation produced by modern nature studies, our familiarity with such helps to sight as telescopes and magnifying gla.s.ses, our constant use of photography, have made most of us better acquainted with the phenomena of the world about us than were the Greeks. But compared with the works of preceding ages, Greek sculpture must have seemed amazingly naturalist. Even works of the archaic period, like the pediments from Aegina, show a knowledge of the human form infinitely more accurate than any to be found in a.s.syrian palaces or Egyptian temples. There is probably always a good deal of illusion in the minds of the schools which are constantly springing up, which profess to break away from all conventions and to go back to nature herself. To reach nature except through human senses and human combinations is quite impossible. And any artist who determines to give us nature merely as the photographic plate or the mechanical cast gives it to us simply wastes his powers, and produces a result of no interest whatever to any one. According to Pliny Lysippus professed to take nature alone for his teacher; but in fact the works of Lysippus, so far as we can recover or trace them, are full of most definite style. An artist has to look at nature through his own eyes, and those eyes give to what he sees a character based in part on his own personality. Everything he sees is refracted in the waters of his subjectivity, from which he cannot escape.

Nevertheless, the whole historic course of Greek sculpture is steeped in the study of nature; and we see as it proceeds more and more clearly the results of careful observation. The artist had in fact opportunities for the study of what he considered the one important group of phenomena, human bodies, such as a modern artist cannot hope to compa.s.s. In the baths and gymnasia where all young men of free birth spent part of their mornings in running, leaping, wrestling, or swimming, he could daily watch the beautiful bodies of athletes in every variety of pose and action. He knew them as a trainer knows horses, or a fancier knows dogs.

He would have little need of a special model; but would daily observe some fresh detail of muscles, some notable pose which he could add from memory to his conception of the human body.

But in the greatest periods of art naturalism is not predominant. Its constantly working tendency is kept in check by n.o.ble ideas and n.o.ble style. There is in the development of sculpture a constant approach to nature, but nothing of the nihilism which looks on all aspects of nature as equally fit subjects for art. The artists of the pediments of Aegina could not bring themselves to conceal the beautiful bodies of the fighting warriors by rigid armour like that copied in Vischer's group.

Thus we find the paradox of armed men in battle, but without armour. The utmost pains are taken with the nude limbs. In the wonderful bronze charioteer found at Delphi (Fig. 4), which dates from about 470 B. C., the garment necessary to protect the man from the rush of air is very simply treated; but the arms and feet, which the garment does not conceal, are wrought with marvellous accuracy and truth to nature. It seems almost as if the artist were compensating himself for the extremely simple work on the drapery by an almost excessively close study of nature where it was possible. The head, on the other hand, is typical and not individual; for in fact individual portraits were scarcely possible at the time.

This would be the place to speak of Greek portraits, if s.p.a.ce allowed it. I will only point out the erroneousness of the popular view, that Greek portraits were conventional and uninteresting; and that it was the Romans who introduced individuality into portraiture. It is strange that a view which is utterly false should have gained such currency. It is true that Greek portraits of the fifth and even the fourth century have in them much of the type, and individual traits are softened in accord with the strongly idealizing tendencies of the age. But from the third and second centuries we have a great number of portraits which are in the highest degree characteristic and individual, a wonderful gallery of philosophers and poets and statesmen which for lifelikeness cannot be surpa.s.sed. All the finest of the portraits of Romans were by Greek artists. I can give but one example of really fine Greek portraiture, a statue of Demosthenes of the third century B. C. (Fig. 8). It is a portrait indeed. The long lean arms and the pose are quite as individual and characteristic as the face with its melancholy expression and deep lines of anxiety. We have the man from head to foot; not as is so often the case in modern statues, a portrait head set on a conventional body.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 8. DEMOSTHENES By Polyeuctus]

For comparison with Demosthenes I set a statue of a great modern statesman, Abraham Lincoln, by Barnard (Fig. 9), not the best statue of him, but one which is approved by many. It aims at truth, but only attains caricature, by exaggerating Lincoln's awkwardness and angularity, the size of his hands and feet, and the anxiety in his face.

This exaggeration has been proved by a comparison with many photographs of Lincoln, which show that he was careful in dress and by no means wanting in dignity. The statue of Demosthenes is marvellous for truth; but it adds a touch of pathos; the statue of Lincoln misses the truth, through exaggerating the least pleasing features of the subject.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 9. ABRAHAM LINCOLN By Barnard]

When we want to ascertain how close Greek sculpture could come to actual fact, we turn from the great ideal age to the h.e.l.lenistic period.

Lysistratus, the brother of Lysippus, began to take moulds in plaster from individual faces. At the great medical school of Alexandria the anatomy of the human frame, from which earlier ages in a spirit of piety had shrunk, became usual: some of the great physicians, such as Herophilus and Erasistratus, being noted for the completeness of their study of anatomy. In the art of the third century B. C. we see the inevitable result of such studies in a more precise and learned rendering of the muscles and the skin. And artists no longer hesitated to represent bodies wasted with toil and exposure to the weather, or emaciated with fasting. There are many such figures in our museums, showing a marvellously close study of the forms of peasants and old women and children. I figure one of these, preserved in the museum of the Conservatori of the Capitol at Rome, an aged shepherdess carrying a lamb (Fig. 10). But it will be observed that close as this form is to the facts of common life, there is yet in it nothing repulsive. It is in a sense a type rather than an individual, a poem of nature rather than a portrait. It is parallel to the pastorals of Theocritus. It strongly contrasts with such loathsome figures as some modern sculptors in their exaggerated love of fact, even if repulsive, have inflicted upon us, such as the Vieille Heaulmiere of Rodin (Fig. 11), a figure of an aged and decayed prost.i.tute. I know, of course, that some critics would defend the last-mentioned work on ethical grounds, as showing how hideous the decay of sensual beauty may become; but I venture to doubt whether sculpture is an appropriate vehicle for a moral lesson of that kind, because it can only represent and cannot explain.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 10 AGED SHEPHERDESS Alexandrian]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 11 LA VIEILLE HeAULMIeRE By Rodin]

V

So we come to the fifth lamp of Greek art, _Ideality_. It is in the idealism of their rendering of the body of man that the Greeks have surpa.s.sed all other peoples and left an imperishable record. The history of Greek art is the history of a search for beauty, for poetry, for whatever can charm and delight.

In the earliest sculptural works of Greece, as Lange the Dane was the first to point out, we find not a direct imitation of the facts of the visible world, but impressions taken from that world, stored in the memory, and put together in accordance with subjective purpose rather than objective law. It is indeed thus that clever children work, when in the picture-writing of their sketch books they violate the laws of perspective by combining separate aspects and memories of an object into an inconsistent whole. They will not omit any peculiarity of a person which happens to have struck them, even when in the profile which they sketch it would be invisible. They think of a face as turned towards them, of legs as walking past them. Every face must have two eyes, every body two arms, whether they would be visible under the natural conditions or not. In early Greek reliefs it is common to find the body down to the waist full-face, the body below the waist in profile, with no transition between the two. The well-known metopes from Selinus in Sicily are good examples. It is a kind of procedure common to the early art of all peoples. But the Greeks differ from other nations in this; that when they improved away these early crudities they retained the predominance of thought over things, of man over nature, in a word of the ideal element in art. They regarded the body of man not, as the materialists do, as man himself, but as a sh.e.l.l produced by the inner working of the spirit, to be seen by the eyes of thought and imagination, as well as by the bodily eyes. Hence they were always aspiring from that which exists in appearance to that which lies behind the mere phenomenon. They realized that nature, when she produces an individual, never wholly succeeds, she falls short of the idea. And the artist by a loving sympathy with the creative Spirit, may venture to improve what she has made, to carry out her intentions more fully, to incorporate more completely the idea. The Greek artist, appreciating and venerating the body, tries to raise it to a higher and more perfect level. A simple kind of idealism may be found in athletic art. In their practice of athletics the Greeks did not, like the moderns, think only of the number of feet an athlete could leap, or the s.p.a.ce of time he would take to run a distance. They thought also of his _form_, of the rhythmic and harmonious character of his action. If an athlete showed ugly form, they would hiss him, as they would an incompetent actor. Most of their exercises were done to the accompaniment of the flute. In all the statues of athletes which have come down to us, not one shows an inharmonious development, powerful chest and weak legs, or muscular legs and poor arms. It is more than probable that as the features of Alexander the Great influenced the portraits of his officers and followers, so the specially beautiful forms of some of the athletes who were most admired, tended to create a type, something of which appears in all the athlete figures of the time.

No doubt any one who is well acquainted with Greek types and with the forms of modern athletes will observe that the Greek physical build is not identical with that of our days. The equable climate and the unstrained life of the young men produced something more rounded and fleshy than we see in the north. Our athletes are less harmoniously built, with more prominent sinews, more harsh and wiry in type. An American trainer who is also a sculptor, Dr. Tait McKenzie, working as some of the Greek sculptors worked, from the average measurements of a number of young men, has produced types of strength and beauty, by no means exactly like the statues of Greece, but in their way almost equally beautiful. I instance the beautiful fifth-century figures of Greek boxers, softened by idealism, but admirable for strength and symmetry; and the Apoxyomenos, a man sc.r.a.ping himself with a strigil, as was the custom in the baths (Fig. 12). This is a work of the third century, after the artists had imported their knowledge of anatomy into their works, which had effects both good and bad. And beside the Apoxyomenos I place an athlete by Tait McKenzie, produced from the careful comparison and measurements of hundreds of young athletes of Harvard and Philadelphia (Fig. 13). This is a work of modern idealism produced by similar processes to those to which we owe the excellence of Greek athletic sculpture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 12 ATHLETE WITH STRIGIL]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 13 ATHLETE, by Tait McKenzie]

The types of female beauty come into Greek sculpture later than the types of male beauty. In Ionian and early Attic sculpture women appear closely wrapped up in drapery. Pheidias and his contemporaries did not venture to represent undraped women. They showed the beauties of the female form not apart from, but by the help of, drapery. It was reserved for the age of Praxiteles and Scopas to represent the G.o.ddess of Love in the guise of a nude woman; and Praxiteles made an apology for the innovation by introducing the motive of bathing as an explanation and a palliation. And even the Aphrodite of Praxiteles is remarkably free from all attempt at sensuous attraction, or self-consciousness. Solid, n.o.ble, and stately in form, she is a type or model rather than an individual. Later sculptors, it is true, departed from this line of simple harmoniousness, and tried to make the figure more attractive to the average man. But it does not become weak, and it does not become vulgar. The n.o.ble Aphrodites of the fourth century have fixed the type of female beauty in school after school of artists down to our own time.

This ideal is perhaps for us best incorporated in the Aphrodite of Melos in the Louvre, a work of the h.e.l.lenistic age, combining with the great fourth-century tradition a perfection of detail and an informing life which belong to a later time. But while most people of taste profess a devotion to her, that devotion is usually untinged by knowledge or real appreciation; for there could hardly be a greater contrast than that between the bodily forms of the G.o.ddess of Melos and those of the women who are most admired in our days. I was almost disposed to figure side by side the G.o.ddess and the bodily forms which figure in our fas.h.i.+on plates. The fas.h.i.+on plates do not represent women as they are, but as they would like to be; they represent not the actual, but the modern ideal. And what an ideal!

Some readers may smile at the notion of taking seriously these ephemeral productions. But no one would take them lightly who was familiar with the facts of psychology. We well know that when certain types of women are set constantly before the rising generation as beautiful and to be imitated they will necessarily exercise a great influence on the future of the race. Young men will look out for such types to admire and to court: young women will try to resemble them. The hideous mistake in aesthetics will exercise a constant dragging power, pulling the young away from the light and the air of heaven towards the caves of evil spirits.

Few more charming representations of young womanhood in Greece exist than the Artemis from Gabii already cited (Fig. 5). One must confess that the divine element in it is but slight. But what could be fresher, simpler, more exquisitely natural?

No doubt as in the case of men, so in the case of women, we must make allowance for race and climate. A full and rotund development of physique is far rarer in northern than in southern Europe. The English race is taller, less solidly built, slighter than the ancient Greek.