represented in that form in which it
was most easily observed and remembered. The development of
Greek sculpture furnishes a good example of the gradual
penetration of nature into the mind, of the slowly enriched
apperception of the object. The quasi-Egyptian stiffness melts
away, first from the bodies of the minor figures, afterwards of
those of the gods, and finally the face is varied, and the hieratic
smile almost disappears.[10]

But this progress has a near limit; once the most beautiful and
inclusive apperception reached, once the best form caught at its
best moment, the artist seems to have nothing more to do. To
reproduce the imperfections of individuals seems wrong, when
beauty, after all, is the thing desired. And the ideal, as caught by
the master's inspiration, is more beautiful than anything his pupils
can find for themselves in nature. From its summit, the art
therefore declines in one of two directions. It either becomes
academic, forsakes the study of nature, and degenerates into empty
convention, or else it becomes ignoble, forsakes beauty, and sinks
into a tasteless and unimaginative technique. The latter was the
course of sculpture in ancient times, the former, with moments of
reawakening, has been its dreadful fate among the moderns.

This reawakening has come whenever there has been a return to
nature, for a new form of apperception and a new ideal. Of this
return there is continual need in all the arts; without it our
apperceptions grow thin and worn, and subject to the sway of
tradition and fashion. We continue to judge about beauty, but we
give up looking for it. The remedy is to go back to the reality, to
study it patiently, to allow new aspects of it to work upon the mind,
sink into it, and beget there an imaginative offspring after their
own kind. Then a new art can appear, which, having the same
origin in admiration for nature which the old art had, may hope to
attain the same excellence in a new direction.

In fact, one of the dangers to which a modern artist is exposed is
the seduction of his predecessors. The gropings of our muse, the
distracted experiments of our architecture, often arise from the
attraction of some historical school; we cannot work out our own
style because we are hampered by the beauties of so many others.
The result is an eclecticism, which, in spite of its great historical
and psychological interest, is without aesthetic unity or permanent
power to please. Thus t