men's minds which naturally flowed from the dignity of subject and skill in treatment exhibited by the Greek and mediaeval artists. In modern times, in fact, art has unconsciously shifted its basis. It no longer occupies the same ground. Art is now one of the pleasures and refinements of life; it was then part of life itself. It was once a necessity; it is now a luxury.

Thirdly: These two ancient schools were as rich in decorative or applied art as in the sphere of free creation. The beauty of the statue or picture reappeared in the ornamentation, not only of public buildings, but in the art of home. Common life, especially in Greece, was pervaded everywhere by forms of beauty. In this field the modern world practically lives only on their remains, imitating what no civilized race has now the power to originate. Decorative art of old was free, natural, and spontaneous; it is now artificial, mechanical, and eclectic.

Fourthly: Taking both classes of art together, despite the amazing numerical production of pictures in our age, the mere relics of antiquity, the treasures which still enrich every region where Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, or Roman, whilst under Hellenic influence, once lived, and the lost treasures which history assures us once existed, are an absolutely convincing proof to me that the fertility of fine art, in the creative sphere, has progressively diminished, at any rate in proportion to the area of the civilized world at each art-period.

This picture of one long decline, depressing and unpopular as it must be, whether true or false, yet in the main, I venture to contend, rests upon an historical survey of the course of art. It is an argument moving in a region above mere questions of preference, of taste, in the vulgar sense of the word. It is not as the fancy of an individual that I offer it. Still less is it a criticism upon the many able artists of our time, whose work I admire all the more from my strong sense of the unfavourable, the hostile conditions under which they produce it. Nor is the argument that art has no place, no function in the modern world; that its place is lower, its function smaller, is my conviction. It has transformed itself to suit the time; and the decline, in short, is only another exemplification of the favourite formula of the day; it is a case of necessary and invincible evolution.

I may illustrate this from the world of plants. Botanists tell us how the beautiful flowers, native to certain isolated regions, are dying out before more powerful immigrants, imported by man as he subdues and civilizes the wild places of the earth. The early Flora is dispossessed by the later. I think it is the same with the fine flowers of art. Yet what remains is here also that which is most suitable to the age; it is the survival, if not of the best, yet of the fittest.

If we now (asking once for all the reader's pardon for a dogmatism, inevitable to one who cannot produce more than a petty fraction

of his evidence)—if we now glance at those early races who were distinctly gifted with original power when civilization began, the Greeks have been so emphatically the creators of living and beautiful art of that art upon which all later work has been founded that I shall here pass very lightly over the earlier art of Egypt and Assyria. But I regret that my limited time compels this, because the evidence is very full and strong which proves that their intellectual, creative art did thoroughly express and embody the higher thoughts and aspirations of those two countries, and that its influence was even greater than it has ever been since over men's minds, from the fact that there was comparatively little in their literature and science to compete with it. And we know also that the decorative arts flourished. equally with the imaginative by Nile and Tigris and Euphrates, filling not only the temple and the palace, but the house, with things skilfully and beautifully designed; and that, in both kinds of art, the production was so large as to make it doubtful whether-if we consider the area of these kingdoms-their fertility was surpassed even in Hellas. The wealth of our Museums-mainly due to the zeal of Englishmen in the East-in relics of Egyptian and Assyrian art, is sufficient to prove my statement.

The Greeks, in their first youth, were in some degree indebted to the art of Egypt and Assyria. They are the archaic portals through which we pass to Hellas. Here, more than ever, am I hampered by the wealth of my subject. Hellas! that word calls up at once the race most gifted among men, if not in depth of feeling, in seriousness of morality, yet certainly the most gifted with intellectual life and penetrative versatility; the most gifted in art. With this latter alone we are here directly concerned. My argumentthat from the time when Greek invention lost its fresh vitality art began its decline-would be much strengthened could I here trace the history and analyse the schools of Greece. This, however, is impossible. All I can do is to reiterate a few commonplaces on the supremacy of the Greeks in art; noting at once that, though little of their painting remains, the evidence is held by good judges adequate to allow us to place this at least as near in excellence to their sculpture, the special art of Greece, as the Italian sculptors stand to the Italian painters. The Greeks then, rising above the efforts of earlier races, throwing aside their monstrous images of Deity, imaged their Gods in idealized human form; whilst when treating humanity itself, they aimed (to take Wordsworth's fine phrase) at representing 'men as they are men within themselves.' The Greeks were hence able to create the world's masterpieces of art in the great style; that art which unites most intellect with most feeling, is at once in the highest degree ideal and real, and at the same time the most perfect in technical qualities. The Greeks also, as I shall presently show, in the ornamental region of applied art,

displayed the most brilliant fertility. And to them, above all (it is hardly too much to say), the world mainly owes the creation of the Beautiful, that eternal necessity, that first and last word in all fine art.

If the Greeks were thus supreme in the province of invention, if their works express, or perhaps we should rather say symbolize, much of what was deepest and highest in the mind and heart of the race, our natural question is, Did this great art hold corresponding influence over the soul? All our evidence, I think, proves that it had this power. It was not indeed so definitely religious an influence as that of Egyptian art; for the religion of the Egyptians, if I understand recent investigations correctly, was much more closely entwined with morality than the Hellenic. Nor can it have been so engrossing an interest; the advance of the Greeks in literature, in philosophy, in the drama, already provided rivals for popular favour. Yet their art gained a compensating power over them through the supreme sensitiveness of the Hellenic race to Beauty. To men who instinctively rated the Beautiful as equivalent or convertible with the Good, fine art was a literal necessity of life. Compared with its place in the modern world, art was at once very far more imperatively demanded by the Greeks, and very far more subtly, vividly, and popularly enjoyed. It was a keener pleasure, as well as a more potent and pervading influence.

Mr. Matthew Arnold has a fine remark, that for the creation of a master-work in literature two powers must concur-the power of the man, and the power of the moment.' The same is true of art. Nowhere have these happy conditions coincided so largely, so genially, or for so long a time as in Greece. was not less supreme in quantity. has painted the splendour of the glories of Rome, as he imagines them displayed to the Saviour from the Mountain of Temptation

Supreme in quality, their art Milton, in some sublime lines, great capitals of Asia, and the

This is a noble spectacle. But far outshone would it be, both in absolute beauty and in copiousness of display, could we with the eye of the body, or of the mind, see for ourselves the wealth of art in its two great divisions, art intellectual and art decorative, which glowed and glittered in every city and town and even village of

Greece-whether that land itself, or spread through the Hellenic colonies, from Gaul to Asia Minor. I quote a few figures, that I may not seem to speak at random. The German writer C. O. Müller dates the earliest school of art between about 600 and 450 B.C. This is in the early days of Greek expansion and influence-before any of the world-famous names occur, whether in sculpture or painting. Yet even here he is able, from the merely casual allusions contained in later authorities, to name more than fifty sculptors, almost all within the narrow limits of Greece itself. Pass now to the Roman conquest, when the harvest of Hellenic art was full. We find that some hundred thousand statues, bronze and marble, were gradually carried into Italy, prisoners after the conquest of Hellas. Years after, however, Nero could still adorn his palace with not less than five hundred works from Delphi alone.

If we think of the very small area of the Grecian mines of art, this summary would seem exhaustive. Yet in Vespasian's time it is stated that three thousand statues were counted in the island of Rhodes, and not fewer at Delphi, Olympia, and Athens. The impression which the notices of the traveller Pausanias give confirms these numbers. Thus, that there were many towns in which half and more of the population were the sculptors' handiwork, is no mere metaphor.3 All that remains in the museums of Europe, all that is even yet discovered, whenever we take the pains to search the soil which the Greeks fertilized with art, is but an infinitesimal fraction-a number low down in decimal figures-of what once existed there-in things which, in the familiar phrase, should have been 'joys for ever,' but are not. Even, however, as we have them, these fragments, as models for true treatment and grace, are yet confessedly the master-light of all our seeing.' These remarks bear only upon the intellectual art of Greece, their great art: 'high actions and high passions best describing,' and speaking through the eye to the soul. Beside it, on the decorative side, lies another infinity of inventive beauty in everything which they produced by way of mere ornament, or for the uses of common life-vases, lamps, armour, work in moulded clay, or stucco, or mosaic. All these we know but in scanty and imperfect relics, which I compare with that long series of fossil remains often spoken of as the geological record.' And as from that record-a bone here, a shell or a fruit there-the geologist securely reconstitutes a species, so from the bronzes of Herculaneum and Pompeii, the figures from Tanagra, or the vases sown everywhere in Hellenic tombs, or im

A dozen or more probable sites whence such treasures would even yet be recoverable could be named by the authorities of the British Museum to any liberalminded and wealthy man, who should be willing not only to add to the world's stores of beauty, but also by the same act to leave his own name in honour amongst his fellow-creatures.

ported for the Etruscan, we may safely infer that the world has never seen the like, no, nor near the like, for exquisite invention, grace, and that perfect appropriateness to the purpose of each work, which is always a sign that the artificers were thoroughly penetrated by their art. It is to the bronzes and the wall-paintings of a third-rate provincial city, and that not even half Hellenic, like Pompeii, that modern workmen look for their loveliest designs. No one, again, can imagine the varied beauty of the mosaics with which all buildings of any pretension were filled by Greek artists for Roman employers, who has not seen the fragments in the Museum at Naples, or those early Christian specimens at Ravenna, which-far unlike the dullcoloured mosaic work, between about A.D. 600 and 1100, in the Roman basilicas or St. Mark's at Venice-rival in brilliancy of tint and splendour of effect the early pictures of Venetian art. When, two years since, I visited Italy and saw in Rome the gigantic halls which had been once thus decorated, now bare masses of hideous brickwork, the lesson which I am trying to convey-how fine art has fallen away in quantity and in quality since that one gifted race of Hellas faded-that lesson was finally borne in upon me by what seemed irresistible evidence. It was but a small part, I then saw, of the Greek inheritance in inventive beauty which even the Italians of the great age had received. And since that time what have the civilized races lived on, in the whole vast sphere of decoration, but copies and variations of what Italy had inherited from Greece?

But we need not search Italy for a striking proof of my argument. Go to the British Museum and the new admirably arranged rooms in which the Greek vases-once ignorantly named Etruscan-are displayed. In variety of design, in grace of grouping, often in an indescribable exquisiteness of touch, these vases equal the finest drawings of the finest artists who have been the glory of the last five or six centuries. Yet we have no reason to rank them with the work of those men whom the Greeks themselves classed as eminent in this form of art. A hundred nameless potters have here rivalled our selectest draughtsmen: Leonardo, Dürer, or Flaxman. The very rank and file of Hellas stand equal with the best leaders of the modern army.

With the arts of Greece transferred to Rome our first period closes, and we now turn to the second period, that of Christian, Mediaeval, and Renaissance sculpture and painting. Here I have first to point out how closely and vitally mediaeval art, Italian especially, was founded on that later, ill-understood, and ignorantly depreciated phase of Greek genius and traditional skill, which survived from the fourth to the thirteenth centuries under the Byzantine empire. Through causes upon which I cannot here dwell, the great creative Hellenic impulse had, indeed, died out. But the gifted race could not part with all its power: the spark of life lingered