ypothesis. There is in the history of every art (and for brevity's
sake, I include in this term every distinct category, say, renaissance
sculpture as distinguished from antique, of the same art) a moment when,
for one reason or other, that art begins to come to the fore, to bestir
itself. The circumstances of the nation and time make this art materially
advantageous or spiritually attractive; the opening up of quarries, the
discovery of metallic alloys, the necessity of roofing larger spaces,
the demand for a sedentary amusement, for music to dance to in new social
gatherings--any such humble reason, besides many others, can cause one
art to issue more particularly out of the limbo of the undeveloped, or
out of the lumber-room of the unused.

It is during this historic moment--a moment which may last years or
scores of years--that, as it seems to me, an art can really be deeply
affected by its surrounding civilisation. For is it not called forth by
that civilisation's requirements, material or spiritual; and is it not,
by the very fact of being thus new, or at all events nascent, devoid
of all conditioning factors, save those which the civilisation and
its requirements impose from without? An art, like everything vital,
takes shape not merely by pressure from without, but much more by the
necessities inherent in its own constitution, the almost mechanical
necessities by which all variable things _can_ vary only in certain
fashions. All the natural selection, all the outer pressure in the
world, cannot make a stone become larger by cutting, cannot make colour
less complex by mixing, cannot make the ear perceive a dissonance more
easily than a consonance, cannot make the human mind turn back from
problems once opened up, or revert instantaneously to effects it is sick
of; and a number of such immutable necessities constitute what we call
the organism of an art, which can therefore respond only in one way and
not another to the influences of surrounding civilisation. Given the
sculpture of the AEgina period, it is impossible we should not arrive at
the sculpture of the time of Alexander: the very constitution of clay
and bronze, of marble, chisel and mallet, let alone that of the human
mind, makes it inevitable; and you would have it inevitably if you could
invert history, and put Chaeronea in the place of Salamis. But there
is no reason why you should eventually get Lysippian and Praxitelean
sculpture instead of Egyptian