mine, not statuary but painting. These
dramas affect colour, light, and shadow, background whether of town
or country, description of scenery where scenic machinery is
inadequate, all, in fact, which can blend the action and the actors
with the surrounding circumstances, without letting them altogether
melt into the circumstances; which can show them a part of the great
whole, by harmony or discord with the whole universe, down to the
flowers beneath their feet. This, too, had to be done: how it
became possible for even the genius of a Shakespeare to get it done,
I may with your leave hint to you hereafter. Why it was not given to
the Greeks to do it, I know not.

Let us at least thank them for what they did. One work was given
them, and that one they fulfilled as it had never been fulfilled
before; as it will never need to be fulfilled again; for the Greeks'
work was done not for themselves alone but for all races in all
times; and Greek Art is the heirloom of the whole human race; and
that work was to assert in drama, lyric, sculpture, music, gymnastic,
the dignity of man--the dignity of man which they perceived for the
most part with their intense aesthetic sense, through the beautiful
in man. Man with them was divine, inasmuch as he could perceive
beauty and be beautiful himself. Beauty might be physical,
aesthetic, intellectual, moral. But in proportion as a thing was
perfect it revealed its own perfection by its beauty. Goodness
itself was a form--though the highest form--of beauty. [Greek] meant
both the physically beautiful and the morally good; [Greek] both the
ugly and the bad.

Out of this root-idea sprang the whole of that Greek sculpture, which
is still, and perhaps ever will be, one of the unrivalled wonders of
the world.

Their first statues, remember, were statues of the gods. This is an
historic fact. Before B.C. 580 there were probably no statues in
Greece save those of deities. But of what form? We all know that
the usual tendency of man has been to represent his gods as more or
less monstrous. Their monstrosity may have been meant, as it was
certainly with the Mexican idols, and probably those of the Semitic
races of Syria and Palestine, to symbolise the ferocious passions
which they attributed to those objects of their dread, appeasable
alone by human sacrifice. Or the monstrosity, as with the hawk-
headed or cat-headed Egyptian idols, the winged bulls of Nineveh and
Babylon, th