om the first day on which I began to write, until now.

***

THE HERCULES OF CAMARINA.

ADDRESS TO THE STUDENTS OF THE ART SCHOOL OF SOUTH LAMBERT, MARCH 15,
1869.

161. Among the photographers of Greek coins which present so many
admirable subjects for your study, I must speak for the present of one
only: the Hercules of Camarina. You have, represented by a Greek
workman, in that coin, the face of a man and the skin of a lion's head.
And the man's face is like a man's face, but the lion's skin is not like
a lion's skin.

162. Now there are some people who will tell you that Greek art is fine,
because it is true; and because it carves men's faces as like men's as it
can.

And there are other people who will tell you that Greek art is fine,
because it is not true; and carves a lion's skin so as to look not at all
like a lion's skin.

And you fancy that one or the other of these sets of people must be
wrong, and are perhaps much puzzled to find out which you should believe.

But neither of them are wrong, and you will have eventually to believe,
or rather to understand and know, in reconciliation, the truths taught by
each; but for the present, the teachers of the first group are those you
must follow.

It is they who tell you the deepest and usefullest truth, which involves
all others in time. Greek art, and all other art, is fine when it makes
a man's face as like a man's face as it can. Hold to that. All kinds of
nonsense are talked to you, nowadays, ingeniously and irrelevantly about
art. Therefore, for the most part of the day, shut your ears, and keep
your eyes open: and understand primarily, what you may, I fancy, easily
understand, that the greatest masters of all greatest schools--Phidias,
Donatello, Titian, Velasquez, or Sir Joshua Reynolds--all tried to make
human creatures as like human creatures as they could; and that anything
less like humanity than their work, is not so good as theirs.

Get that well driven into your heads; and don't let it out again, at your
peril.

163. Having got it well in, you may then further understand, safely,
that three is a great deal of secondary work in pots, and pans, and
floors, and carpets, and shawls, and architectural ornament, which ought
essentially, to be unlike reality, and to depend for its charm on quite
other qualities than imitative ones. But all such art is inferior and
secondary--much of it more or less instinctive and animal, and a