which he should some day feel. Or
could Proclus have been persuaded by Thyone and Daphne to help them
reconcile the hapless blind man to his hard fate?

Hermon's every movement betrayed the great anxiety which filled his mind,
and it by no means escaped Proclus's attention, but he attributed it to
the blinded sculptor's anguish in being prevented, after so great a
success, from pursuing his art further.

Sincerely touched, he laid his slender hand on the sufferer's muscular
arm, saying: "A more severe trial than yours, my young friend, can
scarcely be imposed upon the artist who has just attained the highest
goal, but three things warrant you to hope for recovery--your vigorous
youth, the skill of our Alexandrian leeches, and the favour of the
immortal gods. You shrug your shoulders? Yet I insist that you have won
this favour by your Demeter. True, you owe it less to yourself than to
yonder maiden. What pleasure it affords one whom, like myself, taste and
office bind to the arts, to perceive such a revolution in an artist's
course of creation, and trace it to its source! I indulged myself in it
and, if you will listen, I should like to show you the result."

"Speak," replied Hermon dully, bowing his head as if submitting to the
inevitable, while Proclus began:

"Hitherto your art imitated, not without success, what your eyes showed
you, and if this was filled with the warm breath of life, your work
succeeded. All respect to your Boy Eating Figs, in whose presence you
would feel the pleasure he himself enjoyed while consuming the sweet
fruit. Here, among the works of Egyptian antiquity, there is imminent
danger of falling under the tyranny of the canon of proportions which can
be expressed in figures, or merely even the demands of the style hallowed
by thousands of years, but in a subject like the 'Fig-eater' such a
reproach is not to be feared. He speaks his own intelligible language,
and whoever reproduces it without turning to the right or left has won,
for he has created a work whose value every true friend of art, no matter
to what school he belongs, prizes highly.

"To me personally such works of living reality are cordially welcome. Yet
art neither can nor will be satisfied with snatches of what is close at
hand; but you are late-born, sons of a time when the two great tendencies
of art have nearly reached the limits of what is attainable to them. You
were everywhere confronted with completed work, and you are