art 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 incumbered 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.

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.

[Illustration: XX.

GREEK AND BARBARIAN SCULPTURE.]

202. On one side of their work they are so. From all vain and mean
decoration--all wreak 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 the deep meaning of
the myth of Daedalus as the giver of motion to statues. The literal
change from the binding together of the feet to their separation, and
the other modifications of action which took place, either in
progressive skill, or often, as the mere consequence of the transition
from wood to stone, (a figure carved out of one wooden log must have
necessarily its feet near each other, and hands at its sides,) these
literal changes are as nothing, in the Greek fable, compared to the
bestowing of apparent life. The figures of monstrous gods