man. Still less this
nobler Apollo of Ionian Greece (Plate IX.), in which the incisions are
softened into a harmony like that of Correggio's painting. So that you
see the method itself,--the choice between black incision or fine
sculpture, and perhaps, presently, the choice between color or no color,
will depend on what you have to represent. Color may be expedient for a
glistening dolphin or a spotted fawn;--perhaps inexpedient for white
Poseidon, and gleaming Dian. So that, before defining the laws of
sculpture, I am compelled to ask you, _what you mean to carve_; and
that, little as you think it, is asking you how you mean to live, and
what the laws of your State are to be, for _they_ determine those of
your statue. You can only have this kind of face to study from, in the
sort of state that produced it. And you will find that sort of state
described in the beginning of the fourth book of the laws of Plato; as
founded, for one thing, on the conviction that of all the evils that can
happen to a state, quantity of money is the greatest! [Greek: meizon
kakon, hos epos eipein, polei ouden an gignoita, eis gennaion kai
dikaion ethon ktesin], "for, to speak shortly, no greater evil, matching
each against each, can possibly happen to a city, as adverse to its
forming just or generous character," than its being full of silver and
gold.

139. Of course the Greek notion may be wrong, and ours right,
only--[Greek: hos epos eipein]--you can have Greek sculpture only on
that Greek theory: shortly expressed by the words put into the mouth of
Poverty herself, in the Plutus of Aristophanes, "[Greek: Tou ploutou
parecho beltionas andras, kai ten gnomen, kai ten idean]," "I deliver to
you better men than the God of Money can, both in imagination and
feature." So, on the other hand, this ichthyoid, reptilian, or
monochondyloid ideal of the self-made man can only be reached,
universally, by a nation which holds that poverty, either of purse or
spirit,--but especially the spiritual character of being [Greek: ptochoi
to pneumati],--is the lowest of degradations; and which believes that
the desire of wealth is the first of manly and moral sentiments. As I
have been able to get the popular ideal represented by its own living
art, so I can give you this popular faith in its own living words; but
in words meant seriously, and not at all as caricature, from one of our
leading journals, professedly aesthetic also in its very name, the
_Spectat