group; and such the lesson
which, unconsciously, vaguely, the child of our fairy tale must have
learned from its marble teachers in the Vatican: That the only intrinsic
perfection of art is the perfection of form, and that such perfection
is obtainable only by boldly altering, or even casting aside, the
subject with which this form is only imaginatively, most often
arbitrarily, connected; and by humbly considering and obeying the
inherent necessities of the material in which this form is made visible
or audible. That by such artistic laws they themselves had come into
existence, and that all other things which had come into existence
by the same laws, were their brethren, was the secret which those
statue-demons imparted to that child; the secret which enabled it to
understand those symphony notes of Mozart's, when they said: "we also,
the sounding ones, are the brethren of the statues; and all we who are
brethren, whether in stone, or sound or colour, shall to thee speak in
such a way that thou recognize us, and distinguish us from all others;
and thou shalt love and believe only in us and those of our kin; in
return we will give thee happiness." And this, as we have told you,
came to pass solely because the statues took the whim of bewitching
that child into falling in love with Rome.

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE.

THE LESSON OF A BAS-RELIEF.

No Greek myth has a greater charm for our mind than that of Orpheus and
Eurydice. In the first place, we are told by mythologists that it is a
myth of the dawn, one of those melancholy, subdued interpretations of
the eternal, hopeless separation of the beautiful light of dawn and the
beautiful light of day, which forms the constantly recurring tragedy of
nature, as the tremendous struggle between light and darkness forms
her never-ending epic, her Iliad and Nibelungenlied. There is more of
the purely artistic element in these myths of the dawn than in the
sun myths. Those earliest poets, primitive peoples, were interested
spectators of the great battle between day and night. The sun-hero was
truly their Achilles, their Siegfried. In fighting, he fought for them.
When he chained up the powers of darkness the whole earth was hopeful
and triumphant; when he sank down dead, a thousand dark, vague, hideous
monsters were let loose on the world, filling men's hearts with
sickening terror; the solar warfare was waged for and against men. The
case is quite different with respect to