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
right when you refuse to sink to mere imitators of earlier works, and
therefore return to Nature, with which we Hellenes, and perhaps
the Egyptians also, began. The latter forgot her; the former--we
Greeks--continued to cling to her closely."

"Some few," Hermon eagerly interrupted the other, "still think it
worth the trouble to take from her what she alone can bestow. They
save themselves the toilsome search for the model which others so
successfully used before them, and bronze and marble still keep
wonderfully well. Bring out the old masterpieces. Take the head from
this one, the arm from that, etc. The pupil impresses the proportions on
his mind