s--Right. He rules over the arts
to this day, and will for ever, because he sought not first for beauty,
nor first for passion, or for invention, but for Rightness; striving to
display, neither himself nor his art, but the thing that he dealt with,
in its simplicity. That is his specific character as a Greek. Of course,
every nation's character is connected with that of others surrounding or
preceding it; and in the best Greek work you will find some things that
are still false, or fanciful; but whatever in it is false or fanciful,
is not the Greek part of it--it is the Phoenician, or Egyptian, or
Pelasgian part. The essential Hellenic stamp is veracity:--Eastern
nations drew their heroes with eight legs, but the Greeks drew them with
two;--Egyptians drew their deities with cats' heads, but the Greeks drew
them with men's; and out of all fallacy, disproportion, and
indefiniteness, they were, day by day, resolvedly withdrawing and
exalting themselves into restricted and demonstrable truth.

201. And now, having cut away the misconceptions which encumbered our
thoughts, I shall be able to put the Greek school into some clearness of
its position for you, with respect to the art of the world. That
relation is strangely duplicate; for on one side, Greek art is the root
of all simplicity; and on the other, of all complexity.

[Illustration: PLATE XX.--GREEK AND BARBARIAN SCULPTURE.]

On one side I say, it is the root of all simplicity. If you were for
some prolonged period to study Greek sculpture exclusively in the Elgin
Room of the British Museum, and were then suddenly transported to the
Hotel de Cluny, or any other museum of Gothic and barbarian workmanship,
you would imagine the Greeks were the masters of all that was grand,
simple, wise, and tenderly human, opposed to the pettiness of the toys
of the rest of mankind.

202. On one side of their work they are so. From all vain and mean
decoration--all weak and monstrous error, the Greeks rescue the forms of
man and beast, and sculpture them in the nakedness of their true flesh,
and with the fire of their living soul. Distinctively from other races,
as I have now, perhaps to your weariness, told you, this is the work of
the Greek, to give health to what was diseased, and chastisement to what
was untrue. So far as this is found in any other school, hereafter, it
belongs to them by inheritance from the Greeks, or invests them with the
brotherhood of the Greek. And this is