or imitation. For you are not Greeks; but, for better or worse, English
creatures; and cannot do, even if it were a thousand times better worth
doing, anything well, except what your English hearts shall prompt, and
your English skies teach you. For all good art is the natural utterance
of its own people in its own day.

But also, your own art is a better and brighter one than ever this Greek
art was. Many motives, powers, and insights have been added to those
elder ones. The very corruptions into which we have fallen are signs of
a subtle life, higher than theirs was, and therefore more fearful in its
faults and death. Christianity has neither superceded, nor, by itself,
excelled heathenism; but it has added its own good, won also by many a
Nemean contest in dark valleys, to all that was good and noble in
heathenism; and our present thoughts and work, when they are right, are
nobler than the heathen's. And we are not reverent enough to them,
because we possess too much of them. That sketch of four cherub heads
from and English girl, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, at Kensington, is an
incomparably finer thing than ever the Greeks did. Ineffably tender in
the touch, yet Herculean in power; innocent, yet exalted in feeling; pure
in color as a pearl; reserved and decisive in design, as this Lion crest,
--if it alone existed of such,--if it were a picture by Zeuxis, the only
one left in the world, and you build a shrine for it, and were allowed to
see it only seven days in a year, it alone would teach you all of art
that you ever needed to know. But you do not learn from this or any
other such work, because you have not reverence enough for them, and are
trying to learn from all at once, and from a hundred other masters
besides.

177. Here, then, is the practical advice which I would venture to deduce
from what I have tried to show you. Use Greek art as a first, not a
final, teacher. Learn to draw carefully from Greek work; above all, to
place forms correctly, and to use light and shade tenderly. Never allow
yourselves black shadows. It is easy to make things look round and
projecting; but the things to exercise yourselves in are the placing of
the masses, and the modelling of the lights. It is an admirable exercise
to take a pale wash of color for all the shadows, never reinforcing it
everywhere, but drawing the statue as if it were in far distance, making
all the darks one flat pale tint. Then model from those in