ous luxuries, but if he ever rolled and tumbled his tub about as
Rabelais says he did, it is clear that the victory of spirit over body
formed no part of his theory of things. Such an idea would have been
incomprehensible to a Greek in Plato's time. Their consciences were not
over active. They were not burdened with a sense of sinfulness. Their
aspirations were decidedly finite; and they believed in securing the
maximum completeness of this terrestrial life. Consequently they never
set the physical below the intellectual. To return to our author, they
never, in their statues, subordinated symmetry to expression, the body
to the head. They were interested not only in the prominence of the
brows, the width of the forehead, and the curvature of the lips, but
quite as much in the massiveness of the chest, the compactness of the
thighs, and the solidity of the arms and legs. Not only the face, but
the whole body, had for them its physiognomy. They left picturesqueness
to the painter, and dramatic fervour to the poet; and keeping strictly
before their eyes the narrow but exalted problem of representing the
beauty of symmetry, they filled their sanctuaries and public places with
those grand motionless people of brass, gold, ivory, copper, and marble,
in whom humanity recognizes its highest artistic types. Statuary was
the central art of Greece. No other art was so popular, or so completely
expressed the national life. The number of statues was enormous. In
later days, when Rome had spoiled the Greek world of its treasures, the
Imperial City possessed a population of statues almost equal in number
to its population of human beings. And at the present day, after all the
destructive accidents of so many intervening centuries, it is estimated
that more than sixty thousand statues have been obtained from Rome and
its suburbs alone.

In citing this admirable exposition as a specimen of M. Taine's method
of dealing with his subject, we have refrained from disturbing the
pellucid current of thought by criticisms of our own. We think the
foregoing explanation correct enough, so far as it goes, though it deals
with the merest rudiments of the subject, and really does nothing toward
elucidating the deeper mysteries of artistic production. For this there
is needed a profounder psychology than M. Taine's. But whether his
theory of art be adequate or not, there can be but one opinion as to the
brilliant eloquence with which it is set forth.