their folds and plaits of drapery, have silently, slowly taught to a
child; and the statues themselves, who have never read Winckelmann,
nor Quatremere, nor Ottfried Mueller, do not know all these wondrous
classifications of schools of which (with their infinite advantage of
teaching us to admire only one or two schools, and abominate all the
others as barbarous, decaying, Graeculan, etc., without even looking at
them) we are so justly proud. Oh, yes, the statues which taught the
child were a very mixed company, such as the carefully-trained of our
day, who can endure only Phidias, and next to Phidias, only Clodion or
Carpeaux, would scarcely like to know at all. Not Phidian, all of them,
nor even, alas, Praxitelian; they were not the Elgin marbles nor the
Venus of Milo, sole objects of the feeble love of us good, learned folk;
they were those extremely harum-scarum statues of the Vatican: a few of
them copies of lost, irreproachable originals, like the Doryphoros, the
Minerva, the Amazon, the Satyr; a certain number of impostors of now
exploded reputation, the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Antinous, and a whole
host of quite despicable others, of every degree of lateness of epoch
and baseness of work. And what is still worse, the child was taught, not
merely by this multifarious company, but by heaven knows what dreadful
statues besides; things to shudder at, things, hewn stones (for the
right-minded cannot call them statues) out in gardens, noseless, armless
things under artificial ruined temples, in niches of clipped box, or
half-swathed up with ivy and creeping roses. All these said to that
child that, although some of them were quite artistic patricians and
princes, and others the merest ragtag and bobtail, nay, unspeakable
ruffians and outcasts, they yet belonged to the same stock, they all
being antique; and that all of them, according to their degree and
power, some in unspoken words perfect as any of Plato's, and others
in horrible, jumbled slang, malaprop gibberish, would teach him the
same lesson, if he would listen to them all: the lesson of their own
nature and kinship. And from all of them, insensibly, slowly, without
archaeologic or aesthetic formulae, in the simple manner in which children
learn all that is most important to know, this child learned. So
that, without desire for archaeologic and aesthetic answers, we now
ask, referring to this lesson learnt by the child--"What like
_are_ the statues?" What lik