est. Of its early decline in the fifth century Phidias
is the second-rate Giotto; the copies of his famous contemporaries and
immediate predecessors are too loathsome to be at all just; Praxiteles,
in the fourth century, the age of accomplished prettiness, is the
Correggio, or whatever delightful trifler your feeling for art and
chronology may suggest. Fifth and fourth century architecture forbid us
to forget the greatness of the Greeks in the golden age of their
intellectual and political history. The descent from sensitive, though
always rather finikin, drawing through the tasteful and accomplished to
the feebly forcible may be followed in the pots and vases of the sixth,
fifth, fourth, and third centuries. In the long sands and flats of Roman
realism the stream of Greek inspiration is lost for ever.

Before the death of Marcus Aurelius, Europe was as weary of materialism
as England before the death of Victoria. But what power was to destroy a
machine that had enslaved men so completely that they dared not conceive
an alternative? The machine was grown so huge that man could no longer
peer over its side; man could see nothing but its cranks and levers,
could hear nothing but its humming, could mark the spinning fly-wheel
and fancy himself in contemplation of the revolving spheres.
Annihilation was the only escape for the Roman citizen from the Roman
Empire. Yet, while in the West Hadrian was raising the Imperial talent
for brutalisation to a system and a science, somewhere in the East, in
Egypt, or in Asia Minor, or, more probably in Syria, in Mesopotamia, or
even Persia, the new leaven was at work. That power which was to free
the world was in ferment. The religious spirit was again coming to
birth. Here and there, in face of the flat contradiction of
circumstances, one would arise and assert that man does not live by
bread alone. Orphism, Mythraism, Christianity, many forms of one spirit,
were beginning to mean something more than curious ritual and discreet
debauch. Very slowly a change was coming over the face of Europe.

There was change before the signs of it became apparent. The earliest
Christian paintings in the catacombs are purely classical. If the early
Christians felt anything new they could not express it. But before the
second century was out Coptic craftsmen had begun to weave into dead
Roman designs something vital. The academic patterns are queerly
distorted and flattened out into forms of a certain